



Produced by Dagny; John Bickers





THE STORY OF A CHILD

By Pierre Loti


Translated by Caroline F. Smith




PREFACE



There is to-day a widely spread new interest in child life, a desire to
get nearer to children and understand them. To be sure child study is
not new; every wise parent and every sympathetic teacher has ever been
a student of children; but there is now an effort to do more consciously
and systematically what has always been done in some way.

In the few years since this modern movement began much has been
accomplished, yet there is among many thoughtful people a strong
reaction from the hopes awakened by the enthusiastic heralding of the
newer aspects of psychology. It had been supposed that our science would
soon revolutionize education; indeed, taking the wish for the fact, we
began to talk about the new and the old education (both mythical) and
boast of our millennium. I would not underrate the real progress, the
expansion of educational activities, the enormous gains made in many
ways; but the millennium! The same old errors meet us in new forms, the
old problems are yet unsolved, the waste is so vast that we sometimes
feel thankful that we cannot do as much as we would, and that Nature
protects children from our worst mistakes.

What is the source of this disappointment? Is it not that education,
like all other aspects of life, can never be reduced to mere science? We
need science, it must be increasingly the basis of all life; but exact
science develops very slowly, and meantime we must live. Doubtless the
time will come when our study of mind will have advanced so far that we
can lay down certain great principles as tested laws, and thus clarify
many questions. Even then the solution of the problem will not be in the
enunciation of the theoretic principle, but will lie in its application
to practice; and that application must always depend upon instinct,
tact, appreciation, as well as upon the scientific law. Even the aid
that science can contribute is given slowly; meanwhile we must work with
these children and lift them to the largest life.

It is in relation to this practical work of education that our effort to
study children gets its human value. There are always two points of
view possible with reference to life. From the standpoint of nature
and science, individuals count for little. Nature can waste a thousand
acorns to raise one oak, hundreds of children may be sacrificed that
a truth may be seen. But from the ethical and human point of view the
meaning of all life is in each individual. That one child should be lost
is a kind of ruin to the universe.

It is this second point of view which every parent and every teacher
must take; and the great practical value of our new study of children
is that it brings us into personal relation with the child world, and so
aids in that subtle touch of life upon life which is the very heart of
education.

It is therefore that certain phases of the study of child life have
a high worth without giving definite scientific results. Peculiarly
significant among these is the study of the autobiographies of
childhood. The door to the great universe is always to the personal
world. Each of us appreciates child life through his own childhood,
and though the children with whom it is his blessed fortune to be
associated. If then it is possible for him to know intimately another
child through autobiography, one more window has been opened into the
child world--one more interpretative unit is given him through which to
read the lesson of the whole.

It is true, autobiographies written later in life cannot give us the
absolute truth of childhood. We see our early experiences through the
mists, golden or gray, of the years that lie between. It is poetry as
well as truth, as Goethe recognized in the title of his own self-study.
Nevertheless the individual who has lived the life can best bring us
into touch with it, and the very poetry is as true as the fact because
interpretative of the spirit.

It is peculiarly necessary that teachers harassed with the routine of
their work, and parents distracted with the multitude of details of
daily existence, should have such windows opened through which they may
look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood.
The result is not theories of child life but appreciation of children.
How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her
girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot
see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories
in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal
discipline without an awakening of the heart and soul. Goethe's great
study of his childhood and youth must give a new hold upon life to any
one who will appreciatively respond to it.

A better illustration of the subtle worth of such literature, in
developing appreciation of those inner deeps of child life that escape
definition and evaporate from the figures of the statistician, could
scarcely be found than Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child." There is hardly
a fact in the book. It