book by G. Stanley Hall
some topics in the book include:
The era of recapitulating the stages of primitive human development; Life close to nature; The natural development of the drawing instinct in the child; The genesis of crime - the lie, its classes and relations to imagination; Originality; Froebel and the naive;
fragments:
"Everything, in short, suggests that this period may represent in the individual what was once for a very protracted and relatively stationary period an age of maturity in the remote ancestors of our race, when the young of our species, who were perhaps pygmoid, shifts for themselves independently of further parental aid. [...] Thus the boy is father of the man in a new sense, in that his qualities are indefinitely older and existed, well compacted, untold ages before the more distinctly human attributes were developed.[...]
Rousseau would leave prepubescent years to nature and to these primal hereditary impulsions and allow the fundamental traits of savagery their fling till twelve. [...] The child revels in savagery; and if its tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organised and directed as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than all that the best modern school can provide. [...]
These inborn and more or less savage instincts can and should be allowed some scope. The deep and strong cravings in the individual for those primitive experiences and occupations in which his ancestors became skilful though the pressure of necessity should not be ignored, but can and should be, at least partially, satisfied in a vicarious way, by tales from literature, history, and tradition which present the crude and primitive virtues of the heroes of the world's childhood. In this way, aided by his vivid visual imagination, the child may enter upon his heritage from the past, live out each stage of life to its fullest and realise in himself all its manifold tendencies. [...] So, too, in our urbanised hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its time, we must teach nature, although the very phrase is ominous. But we must not, in so doing, wean still more from, but perpetually incite to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, the true homes of childhood in this wild, undomesticated stage from which modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him. Books and readings are distasteful, for the very soul and body cry out for a more active, objective life, and to know nature and man at first hand. These two staples, stories and nature, by these informal methods of the home and the environment, constitute fundamental education.
But now another remove from nature seems to be made necessary by the manifold knowledges and skills of our highly complex civilisation. [...] We must shut nature and open books. (...) for he is not only a product of nature, but a candidate for a highly developed humanity" (pp. 1, 2, 3, 4)
"At the age of four or five, when they can do little more than scribble, children's chief interest in pictures is as finished products; but in the second period, Which Lange calls that of artistic illusion, the child sees in his own work not merely what it represents, but an image of fancy back of it. This, then, is the golden period for the development of power to create artistically. The child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly in the act, and he cares little for the finished picture. He draws out of his own head, and not copy from his eye. Anything and everything is attested in bold lines in this golden age of drawing. If he followed the teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he would be bashed at his production. Indians, conflagrations, games, brownies, trains, pageants, battles - everything is graphically portrayed; but only the little artist himself sees the full meaning of his lines. Criticism or drawing strictly after nature breaks this charm, since it gives place to mechanical reproduction in which the child has little interest. This awakens him from his dream to a realisation that he can not draw, and from ten to fifteen his power of perceiving things steadily increases and he makes almost no progress in drawing. Adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire and ability to draw are checked and decline after thirteen or fourteen." (p. 48)
"Most creative painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in literature or turning points in history, representations of the loftiest truths, embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. None who deserve the name of artist copy anything now, and least of all with objective fidelity to nature; and the teacher that represses or criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not pardon the grave faults of technique inevitable at this age when ambition ought to be too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic Philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other fields. [...] Just as the child of six or seven should be encouraged in his strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of his daily life, so now the inner life should find graphic utterance in all its intricacy up to the full limit of unrepresented courage. For the great majority, on the other hand, who only appreciate and will never create, the mind, if it have its rights, will be stores with the best images and sentiments of art" (p. 51)
"It is often a well-marked epoch when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made, while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination. More commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors, ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hera. Idealizing temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four suddenly to assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a cherry-tree, and other Munchausen wonders, which really means merely that they have had a new mental combination independently of experience. Sometimes their fancy is almost visualisation and develops into a kind of mythopoeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer asserts of all mental activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is imagination. Its control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of crass facts is what should be sought in the interest of the highest truthfulness and of the evolution of thought as something above reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature." (p. 127)
"Again with children as with savages, truth depends largely upon personal likes and dislikes. Truth is for friends, and lies are felt to be quite right for enemies. The young often see no wrong in lies their friends wish told, but may collapse and confess when asked if they have told their mother thus." (p. 128)