Man's Supreme Inheritance by F.M.Alexander

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realities of our childish experience. And we grew with the
exercise. We had our little responsibilities and we taught
ourselves not only how to play but how presently to adapt our
play to the great business of social life. But what equipment
is furnished to the child who never has an independent moment
throughout its nursery career ? How can such a child hope to
succeed in life, should the fortune it hopes to inherit from its
parents be suddenly lost or diverted? Every one knows the
answer. We can see the results in any great city of modern
civilization, in London slums and in the Bowery of New York.
A few generations of such teaching as this and, we should have
had a differentiated race as helpless as the slave-keeping ants.
But although this petrifying method of teaching and super-
vision is still practised, the reaction against it has already set
in both in England and America. Unhappily that reaction has
been too violent, as such reactions commonly are. From one
extreme of permitting the child no opportunity of the exercise
of independent thought and action, we have flown to the other
in adopting the principle which is now known as " Free Ex-
pression " a principle which I can show to be no less harmful
than over-supervision. In fact, so far as the physical expres-
sion of a child is concerned, the methods of Free Expression are
even more dangerous than those of the opposite school.
In England, this movement towards " Free Expression "
has not so far been crystallized into a definite propaganda,
nevertheless a number of thoughtful but unhappily inexpert
parents are trying to adopt the principle in their own homes.
Mr. Shaw's Preface to his Misalliance puts the theory of the
method in a very clear and convincing, argument. His main
assumption is as follows : " What is a child ? An experiment.
A fresh attempt to produce the first man made perfect; that is,
to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment
if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy
74 Race Culture and the Training of the Children
figure of our own. . . . " That represents, of course, an
idealist attitude, and every idealistically minded parent in
Great Britain who reads that Preface of Mr. Shaw's on " Parents
and Children " at once attempts to put the theory into practice.
The results, if the theory is persisted in, will be disastrous;
and although in many cases the parents realize their error by
practical experience before the child reaches the age of seven
or so, certain cases I have seen demonstrate all too clearly that
much mischief is being done even at the age of seven; faults
and bad habits have become so far established that it is some-
times very hard to eradicate them.
And in America the mischief is going farther still. So-
called " free " schools have been instituted which, although they
may differ in the detail of their methods, are based on the same
underlying principles. As far as I have examined the theory
and practice of these schools their purposes are :
(1) To free the child as far as possible from outside
interference and restraint.
(2) To place him in the right environment and then to
give him materials and allow him activities through which
he may " freely express himself."
Now this presupposes, firstly, that the child if left to himself
has the power of expressing himself adequately and freely;
secondly, that through this expression he can educate himself.
How far both these suppositions are fallacies will be understood
by any one who has followed my argument and my citations
of actual cases even up to this point; but the matter is so im-
portant that I do not hesitate to bring forward further evidence
to establish my objection to this new and dangerous method.
I will begin by drawing attention to the practical side of two
of the channels for self-expression, which are specially insisted
upon in schools where the new mode is being practised, namely;
dancing and drawing. A friend of mine always refers to them
as the two D's, a phrase that refers very explicitly to these two [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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