THE CULT OF THE CHILD

To find and develop the hidden gifts of childhood is the purpose of modern creative education, according to Hughes Mearns, Professor of Education at New York University. Education, he feels, should preserve and enrich the original endowments of the child, rather than crushing these innate talents under the heavy weight of adult philistinism. Mr. Mearns criticism of present education is really an indictment of modern society as a whole. In attacking the unimaginative and conventional in teaching, he is aiming at the same quality in American civilization in general. As the New Humanists would have it, Mr. Mearns is opposing dry reality with the nult of the child, in the orthodox Romantic manner.

But just as there was a real foundation for the attacks of the early primitivists against the neo-classicism of eighteenth century France, so there is a great deal of truth in Professor Mearns' criticism of modern pedagogy. He points out that it is instinctive for the child to tell the truth, which is often so embarrassing to the adult, and that the grownup tries to stifle this natural virtue in order to conform to social conventions. As a poet, too, Mr. Mearns believes that the child has possibilities which if encouraged would produce far greater poetry than that which he is made to write in order to accord with the traditional in literature.

It is true, without doubt, that in many cases education stifles rather than develops, and that in conforming to conventions much that is fine is lost; but silly as conventions often are, they usually express some natural law necessary to the maintenance of a complicated society. It is an understanding of these laws and the ability to work in accord with them that must govern true greatness. For certainly a man who preserves or returns to the simplicity of childhood, in spite of a worldly knowledge is greater than the child who knows nothing of the ways of the world.

There have been many schools, such as the Lincoln School in New York City where Mr. Mearns once taught, founded on the principle of individual freedom and a faith in original genius. They have proved the fundamental soundness of the ideas of creative education, but they have also found in the course of time, that creative education is unbalanced unless tempered by the normal laws and conventions governing society.