Love, the Law of Life

It was not until I went into the slums to live that I came to know the essence of education, and discovered concretely the effect of environment upon the people. My fundamentals of social reconstruction are based upon the thinking I did in the slums, and my principles of education also are synthesized from the essential points which I saw and reflected upon there. These principles which, after mature thinking, I came to see clearly, were formed upon the conception of education asanart. Therefore, I would avoid absolutely having the feeling that I must teach or must be taught.

A child’s heart is like marble, and the teacher is the sculptor who carves it. The artist first selects his materials. He must also, in order to prevent injury to the materials, perfect a plan for their preservation. Therefore, the child’s nutrition and his psychical states as well, have to be studied. If there are physiological and psychological deficiencies, the training of the child is impossible. I have in consequence become tremendously concerned about the problem of children’s nutrition.

We cannot force education upon weak, sickly children. They are not fit for sculpturing. The character of the children’s nutrition until the fifth year of age affects them even up to adult life. I have studied the faces of the slum children and compared them with thoses of Imperial University students, and have been astonished at the vast difference due to nutrition. Since practically all of the students were well nourished in their early childhood, their skin shows a fine elastic- ity. In the faces of the slum children, however, the skin at the borders of the hair is dark brown in color, a result of malnutrition, and the spots on their faces are evidence of poor circulation of the blood. Hence, I _.never scold a bad boy who is undernourished. I first try to find out what elements of nourishment are lacking, and give him something to eat instead of scolding him. If it is absolutely necessary to scold a boy, I never do it during his meal.

If the child is given nourishing food, growth becomes apparent, and the bad character resulting from malnutrition gradually improves. I have had not a little experience of such cases. The children who were vicious when young but became better as they grew older, were the undernourished children; and just in proportion as they were given the proper nourishment their characters improved.

The manner in which insufficient nutrition affected the progress of children in school became evident from _ studies which I made of the poor children in one of the ~ gpecial elementary schools in Osaka. I prepared a table of the physical records of these children during the sixyear course and compared them with the averages of the 150,000 children from all sections of the country, as shown in the investigation made by the Department of Education. The average height of the poor boys, I discovered, was 1.2 inches less, and that of the girls 1.8 inches less, than the all-Japan averages; and their weights I found to be, for every age, about eight pounds less in the case of the boys, and more than twelve pounds less for the girls. With such a condition of undernourishment it followed, as the records showed, that failures among the girls were more numerous, while the records of the boys too were very low—far lower than are ever seen in the ordinary elementary schools. The nourishment of school children is receiving much attention in Western countries, in many of them the government assuming the expenses of the children’s food. In England and in America some cities, Philadelphia, for example, provide by law for the nourishment of the children.

But even when children are well nourished, they cannot be well trained if they do not sleep sufficiently. I endeavor, in cases of this kind, to provide some means for them to get undisturbed rest. After considering the physical side I take up the psychological relations. I inquire about the lineage of the parents and grandparents and the circumstances of the relatives. I endeavor also to ascertain if there is a criminal strain in the family, if any suicides, any insanity, any abnormal person, or any genius. The matter of lineage is something incontestable, and generally fits in with the laws of heredity. There are many investigators who inquire only regarding the parents’ descent, but that is insufficient: it is absolutely necessary to learn the circumstances of the relatives.

It seems to be true that illegitimate children are inferior to legitimate. This is probably due to bad stock, but the influences of nutrition and of moral relations also are operative. Statistics of Western coun- tries as well as of Japan show the inferiority of illegitimate children. In particular, we must without fail take into consideration the psychological effects of drinking alcoholic beverages, of syphilis, tuberculosis, ete. And after classifying the idiots and the weak-minded children, we must examine further into the children’s psychological states.

Today various forms of mental tests are employed, but the majority of these tests confine themselves to the sphere of cognition. I regret that tests of the emotions and the will have not as yet been devised. In the measurement of cognition the Binet-Simon tests are relatively good, yet in the spheres of the feelings and the will they are quite worthless. Wherefore, a superior child entering the kindergarten, if tested under the forms now employed, will in all probability fail to pass the test. I believe that if a child is well developed emotionally and volitionally, there is no reason at all for disappointment if he is somewhat retarded on the cognitive side.

My method of testing a child’s mentality is ordinarily by means of his spoken words and his conversation. The child who speaks distinctly is usually superior mentally, and is proportionally well developed on the side of the will. Furthermore, by conversation with the child I test his mentality. The method does not differ at all from the psychoanalysis by which a specialist in mental diseases studies the personality of his patient. I consider that the methods of psychoanalysis are making a large contribution to education.

But the thing that gives me dreadful concern, as I consider the child physically, is the fact that before the art of life which we term education is completed, most of the material—the child’s delicate nature—is demolished. To one who has lived in the slums as I have done, it is easy to understand the marked psychological influence of environment.

In the slums, where there are more scandals in a single day than there are in a whole year in some remote village, matters are forever in confusion. There are, for instance, the prostitutes walking about unabashed; there are the murders, the gambling, the family quarrels, the drunkenness, the doings of the pickpockets and the thieves—these sordid events of the neighborhood, which are every day repeatedly indented upon the brain of the child. Unless the child is exceptional, his soul is inevitably scarred by the psychological impressions from such surroundings. In psychoanalysis these are termed psychic traumata, or soul scars, and once etched upon the urn of the child’s soul, they are there for life; and the child, as long as these psychic scars from the environment remain, cannot be made into a good child. The treatment for removing the soul scars I term soul hygiene. And just as physical hygiene is impossible in the slums, so the hygiene of the heart is impossible in these rookeries, these slums of the soul. On becoming a father, I feared both the physical and the spiritual insanitation of the slums.

Only a short time before this I had had my brother’s child with me in the slum for a short time. A vagabond carried the little one, then only two years old, into a wine shop and, meaning to be kind, gave him sake to drink. As a result my little nephew learned the taste of sake, and in the following New Year holidays distressed his parents by asking for a drink of sake. He even began to use rude language, imitating the villains who used to come tomy home. He is now in Dalny and I have no anxiety about him, but I fear lest it prove impossible to wipe away the heart scars which through my carelessness he received in the slum.

From the difficulties encountered in the first stage of education to the problems of actually attempting soul sculpture, I have been compelled to consider a variety of subjects.

When I teach children, I approach the task as an artist, and when standing before children I concentrate all my powers. Teaching is my act of creation. I never do my teaching with any feeling of distaste. When I play with children, I must not impose my way of playing upon them. Never must I forget that, however charming they are, the children are themselves central, and I cannot use them as I would use utensils, for myself. The child is my creation. Therefore, the task of teaching absorbs me completely. ~

Feeling thus, it appears to me when I observe teachers at their work, that there are multitudes of them who fail to have any consciousness of the artistry of teaching. They accordingly lack earnestness. People even take positions temporarily in schools as teachers. I fear that the teaching they do injures the children’s minds. I cannot help hoping that the teachers in the elementary schools will follow their profession with somewhat more of the creative feeling.

In the next place, I would not, when teaching, have the children who are to be my creations regard me as their model. I put every ounce of my energy into my teaching. But when I sculpture a child, since he is to be my creation, I desire to produce something superior to my present self. Heretofore, in our education we have felt quite satisfied if the pupil became like the teacher, but in education as creation it does not do to fit the child into a certain mould. I must endeavor to find something in the child’s soul which as yet has not been discovered. That is what creation means. It is just like digging a mine: men employ various devices until they reach the vein of ore. After that it becomes a process of getting out the ore. It is here that the difference between medieval and modern educational methods appears..

Froebel taught children, using philosophical symbols, while Madame Montessori, from the anthropological standpoint, endeavored to induce sense perception and thus to approach the soul of the child. In my view, however, it is necessary to employ, in addition to their methods, every possible device for bringing about the unfolding of the child’s whole nature. While Jesus said, “Tt is enough that the disciple become as his master,” he also declared, “‘He who believes in me will do the very deeds I do, and still greater deeds than these,’ and we shall do well if we meditate upon this word of the Son of God. In other words, Jesus hints that as the result of the teaching process the pupil may become ereater than his teacher.

Education has heretofore tended to be merely a process of ladling the facts that the teacher has acquired into the child’s mind. The child was compelled to absorb a vast number of unnecessary facts, which had no relation whatever to his own life, with the result that the child began to exhibit tendencies which were actually pathological. Secondary education in Japan stands as the most notorious example. The schools are organized on military models, and in consequence the whole learning process is regimentalized. The khaki-colored lessons have indeed little in them that appeals to the mind of the boy. The result is that the graduates of the middle schools are not fitted to do anything useful.

I do not have much confidence in the kind of education given in the schools of the present, and the more I come into contact with workingmen the deeper my feeling becomes. The various crafts which the workingmen are taught in their apprenticeship are of course of the nature of an education, but the men for the most part learn naturally, and there is no coercion. They come to know all about their machines. In fact, they know them nearly as well as if they were parts of their own bodies. All that they acquire is real knowledge, and since their knowledge is acquired in a natural manner, it comes to pass that among workingmen a great ‘many inventors are developed. I call this process the natural development of machines.

Unless the education of the schools too can actually train the instincts of the children, it cannot be called genuine education. In other words, the school training of the present is too superficial, and the result is that the life of feeling and will and the absorption of knowledge do not proceed interrelatedly. It is for this reason largely that our college graduates are quite unable to go into a factory and do a workingman’s job. They know the theory, but their theory is not vitalized. It remains undigested, and is in consequence rapidly forgotten. Moreover, their knowledge is not knowledge which they really seek for; it is poured into unwilling minds, and therefore, according to psychological law, with the passing of time it is completely forgotten.

I would have our schools give the children the knowledge that they keenly wish to get. William James declared that knowledge develops where it is sought for, and Cohen, the German philosopher, says that knowledge is a product. Therefore, we must select the kind of training which will lead the children to produce knowledge.

The school training of today is not production but consumption. For the children it is as little possible of digestion as stones are. In contrast to it, the knowl- edge which workingmen acquire is experiential, is produced naturally. Hence, they take huge satisfaction in acquiring it. I believe that in order to secure a reconstruction of our education into this type it is imperative that we scrap our present regimentalized system. We must transform it into a freer type, a training which has more of the atmosphere of industry. The present system of entrance examinations is ridiculous. If we will equip the schools to give the children the training that they wish to have, the need for entrance examinations will vanish. Then, after the children have been given a definite course of training their qualities will be indicated by the character of the work that they produce. It is, therefore, a most gratifying trend in education in Japan that recently self-motivated education and free education have been introduced in - some schools.