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Parents and Their Problems: Ideals of child-training
Parents and Their Problems Ideals of childtraining Author:Mary Harmon Weeks Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: KOUSSEAU AND EDUCATION ACCORDING TO NATURE M. V. O'SHEA Professor of the Science and Art of Education In the University of Wisconsin |N our day te... more »achers are constantly told that they must follow nature in all their teachings. Much of our study of education has for its purpose to determine the natural order in the development of the child's abilities. We apparently feel that if we could conform to the plan of nature in all of our work, we would be able to teach our children more economically and effectively than most of us now do. One may hear it said repeatedly at every educational meeting he attends that much of the waste in teaching, and most of the difficulties and tragedies in discipline, are due to our ignorance of the child's natural tendencies, which, many people interpret to be his needs. Present-day educational literature is full of the thought that the life of the home and the school-room would be much pleasanter for parent, teacher, and children if the work could be made to harmonize with the native tendencies of the young. Rousseau was the first writer on education to exalt nature, and to attempt to elaborate an educational scheme based wholly upon the child's natural tendencies. The saying, "Education according to nature," is due more to Rousseau, probably, than to any other educationist, partly on account of the supreme importance which he attached to natural training. He himself did not make clear exactly what he meant by "natural" training; but it is very evident as one reads his educational work, "Emile," that Rousseau had a consciousness that the methods in vogue in his day were artificial, and hostile to the vital needs of the child. In contrast to adult made methods and points of view, Rousseau commends the methods which are suggested by th...« less