# Labour and Childhood/The Hygiene of Instruction

CHAPTER IX
THE HYGIENE OF INSTRUCTION
THAT there is a hygiene of instruction we have learned mainly through having given instruction that made children ill.
In some cases the children were ill already. Then the instruction was not stopped. On the contrary, it went on all the same, and ended usually in a breakdown.
The school grant did not always fail in these cases. It was found at last that 52 per cent of all the children in one city had swollen tonsils; but they all sang after a fashion and read aloud.
There is a hygiene of instruction for drawing as well as singing, for drawing, like other subjects, is a matter depending on nerves, muscles, and a brain. But this fact became clear only when children began to have great difficulty in doing very simple work, and even got ill as the result of such work.
That there is a hygiene of instruction in mathematics we know, because children have been injured ​physically by learning in the wrong way, and strengthened physically and morally by learning in the right one. Moreover, they "hated" the wrong movement, just as they would hate having their fingers twisted backward, but they enjoyed the right one, just as they enjoy walking and jumping.
Strangely enough, Britain, though tardy in going forward, has already sent out the school doctors who have more than others flung themselves into this higher order of work. They have begun to study the hygiene of instruction—a subject hardly mentioned by Continental doctors yet—and they are carrying it on with a good deal of ardour. And the teachers have not only helped them, but without the teachers' help it would have been impossible for the doctor to have attempted it.
It is common nowadays to map the brain off into three different levels, though there are, of course, no separate "levels" in fact. Still it is found convenient to speak of the "lower level," the "middle level," and the "higher level." In recent days even every one of these has suffered as the result of "schooling." The higher level is, as already stated, even to-day an unexplored country, more or less; but a good deal can be learned about it through the study of the lower and middle regions.
​The lower level includes, of course, all the spinal system, whose branches, flung wide and lying deep, have to do with the movements and life of the big organs— the heart, the lungs, the viscera. Strong and stubborn is the grip of life in these underground regions, and in infancy and early childhood the tides of life seem to toss and boil there just as water does in a cavern ere it has forced a way between the cliffs. But until the school doctor arrived this gathering together of energy was discouraged. It was drained off—that energy—in little wearing tasks. This misfortune happened to a generation—but not to many generations, else one cannot tell what would have been the result. For education is openly, almost grossly physical, in its early stages. Young, vigorous races, and especially the great men of these, appear to be subject to great shocks and upheavals of every organ, and to be more conscious than are later generations of the intensity of the life fermenting in them. Thus, for example, the Psalmist in his outpourings speaks of his heart, of the viscera, of the bones even, continually, and, as it seems, of necessity. In less primitive people the response of the organism is much less violent and general; and perhaps this is why teachers, for centuries and in every land, have been in such haste to ​make short cuts to the higher brain. But it is pretty well established now that this haste does not advance things—that to reach the higher levels too quickly is to arrive there with nothing of any value—with nothing to be worked up in the crucible of the higher centres. The great and deep channels of the sympathetic system—the system of nerves that run to all the great organs of the trunk—must have filled and must reverberate with all the swelling tides of life, in order to pour at last into new channels and feed the higher brain centres from their abundance.
So it was found that the formal school lesson is, for infants, not only a waste of time, but an unhygienic exercise—that it prevented the full exercise of regions that should be, early in the life history, in full functional activity. "How few young children are allowed to remain with wandering mind on the knees of their good mothers, touching, dreaming in peace … and coming forth from this baptism of emotion thinkers, discoverers, poets, saviours. …" Thus wrote Séguin many years ago.
The French word "égarer," which I have translated as "wandering mind," indicates here surely, not mind astray, but mind in the making.
To turn now to the middle brain. A little while ago it was an unknown land. But of late years a ​great many explorers have been busy with it, and a search-light has been thrown into some of its dark places. Thanks to them we have learned that this is the great storehouse of the brain—the place where things are kept for future use. It has many storage-places, and they are very elastic. They grow with the demand on their resources, and perfectly new chambers are built in when the demand for them exists. The eye, the ear, the nose, the skin, all have their own storerooms here, and what comes in through these senses is piled up in its own place as memories—reminiscences laid away, not on wooden shelves, however, but in rafts of living cells, and capable at any moment of being launched with great éclat into the vortex of the higher brain life. Here is the home of the subconscious mind. It can be readily seen why it is not well to examine too much, to interfere when a child is thoughtful or absorbed, or at play, or even idling.
In later ages,as we have seen, perfectly new memory chambers have been formed in the brain—centres for word-sounds, for example, and for written symbols. And some probably that were once wide are now shrinking a little, for it would seem that neglected brain-shelves tend to disappear. (Mrs. Boole says that the children of ancient Greece had an instinct ​for geometry, that they had accumulated a store of memories, unconsciously, that made Euclid an easy book comparatively for them, but that our children do not gather such memories of space and place always in the open, so they have less instinct for geometry, and are not prepared to learn it out of books.) Many people are not yet well furnished with brain chambers for various kinds of memory. For example, the place for word-memories must be still small in the labourer's brain. He does not need many words. Still he needs more now than formerly, and his brain is modified in consequence. Then his fingers were once too stiff to hold a pen, but now he can write, however stiffly or slowly. In short, many doors which were fast locked before are now being opened. There is probably no brain that is equally well developed in every part. In every one there are empty and shrunken chambers, and even gaps or rooms entirely missing, and sometimes a room may be crowded out altogether, as happens in the case of people who specialize too much or too early.
But, as we have seen, the middle brain is not a mere granary—or place where needful things are stored. It is a laboratory—the place in which at last what was mere vibration of air or ether is ​changed into something new and strange. Here are united the tumultuous life from the lower centres, and the mysterious life above. The middle brain is the outposts of the realm of intellect, of judgment, of all the highest activities. Within its depths the impressions of every special sense are quickened, condensed, worked up, and launched forward to the higher centres. Where this laboratory is richly furnished, the mental life is apt to be rich also and fertile. Where it is scanty there is barrenness. The poor suffer much from hunger, from want of bread, but also from lack of stimulus. Monotony is starvation of the cerebrum. Monotony of work is a kind of privation. The majority to-day have, as we have seen, too small a range of work, of interest, and emotion. The winds of life do not reach the strings of the human instrument freely enough, and nature draws back the gift she was on the point of offering.
The middle brain is the motor brain. We could have guessed as much from the restlessness of childhood. But science has now put the matter beyond dispute. We might have guessed almost that here is the capital of the higher and finer movements—the movements that are willed, and learned. For it is a matter of common observation that there is a ​time in life when one can learn languages easily, and can manage to learn to play instruments well, and when, moreover, we are very restless, and on the look out for new kinds of movement; a time when a workshop is entered eagerly; and this period is childhood and early boyhood or girlhood. In elementary school children the middle brain is having its spring-tide. The spring-tide is short, and it does not return.
And yet this middle brain—the great centre of movement is also the Mecca of the indolent. When some kind of movement or activity has been perfectly learned the upper brain ceases to pay any more attention to it, and is free for other tasks. But if the power of attention is not kept alive, and given a new task, education proper ceases. "The absence of training of attention," says Dr. Kerr, "means almost automatic reading, writing, or speaking of a comparatively useless character educationally, as it is done without effort and scarcely rises above the threshold of consciousness." In such exercises the middle brain is working like a machine. A great deal of the school work of the present day is of this kind.
The tendency of State education is to make the middle brain its goal.
​But what is that goal beyond—that higher level for which all the rest of the human system seems to labour and travail. What are those vast, silent areas, whose work is carried on in a darkness which has not been penetrated, and which seem to hold fast locked in their open yet silent hearts the mystery of our moral and mental life. Some things we know of them, that their action for example is largely one of restraint, of inhibition—that, in part at least, they act like the brakes on a machine, powerful brakes that can arrest the headlong course of primitive impulse.
Arresting power is here, and transforming power is also here, a new power of elaboration, and its exercise is seen in qualities that are more and more dominating the advancing race. And here too there is, almost certainly the same order of provision, the same kind of mechanical arrangements that determine progress of a less inspiring order. Just as there are word-storage places that make possible the development of speech and writing, so there is a storage of memories that makes possible the birth of a moral sense. Where are these memories, relating to conduct and feeling, stored? "We cannot localize them," says one of the latest and ablest specialists on this subject. "They are a very late ​evolution. But we are pretty certain that for them also there is a receiving station—a storage place." In short, the whole body is laid under contribution, and the nervous system specially designed, for a life so great and wonderful that we have not even begun to appreciate it. And in every child born there is the desire to achieve that life. In every child that desire struggles on, glancing through all his impulses, interests, and affinities. It may be balked in myriads, it is balked in myriads. It is arrested, turned back; but it persists while life lasts, so that even the diseased make haste to seize life, to enjoy and advance, and the defective are roused at times and press forward. Yes! the great army advances boldly, and what we begin to say in the modern school is briefly this: "They are to be suffered to advance. They are not to be turned back."
It is a great admission. For ages their path was made difficult. The scholasticism of the Middle Ages fell like a weight on the youth of the age. Its iron hand is not yet quite withdrawn. But now it is to be removed we hope, and what is more, the obstruction in the organism itself is to be searched out and removed if possible. The gates are to be lifted up, that the glory of life may enter. …
​And the school doctor is here to hold us to that. He is to diagnose, not only disease, but faculty, and to discover the terrible secrets of success and failure where alone they are hidden—that is to say, in the organism.