Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School / Board of Education.
- Great Britain. Board of Education. Consultative Committee
- Date:
- 1938
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School / Board of Education. Source: Wellcome Collection.
312/336 (page 274)
![and the child is said to be advancing towards the stage of the pastoral nomads. I fancy that the statistical increase in truancy and wandering at this stage is due mainly to the fact that, after the boy leaves the infants’ school, the mother no longer considers it necessary to escort him to and from school or to shut him up indoors. Undoubtedly, however, the child now seeks .to explore his concrete environment further afield. Hence he will be interested in the topography of his own immediate neighbourhood ; and love expeditions to places of interest. If geography were treated as a kind of imaginary tour undertaken by the child himself, and if emphasis were laid not only on the strange peoples that he would meet but also upon the strange plants and fruits and animals, then the geography lesson, instead of being one of the most unpopular, might become, at any rate with the boys, almost the favourite. (i) The Junior Child’s Interests as shown by his Spontaneous Hand- work, These new interests are largely reflected in the special con- structive activities to which the child takes at this period. As shown by the pastimes of the country child, much that the boy, left to himself, would make at this period would consist of tools and weapons to aid him in his hunting enterprises and games of combat—bows and arrows, popguns, catapults, fishing-tackle, and the like. The town boy makes a wooden sword and defends his dug-out in the sandpit, or constructs a wigwam out of sacking and plays Indians and cowboys—the details all borrowed from the local cinema; or else he goes off to the nearest canal with a home-made butterfly net and a jam-jar to catch minnows. But even in the earliest years of this period the constructive ten- dencies exist for their own satisfaction as well as to satisfy these more aggressive interests. To some extent this interest in making things emerges first of all as a result of the development of the child’s finer - muscularcontrol. He is now able to handle small tools—a pocket-knife, or hammer and nails, and later the needle and the brush or pencil. But even so, occupations of this sort are something more than mere manual activity. An emotiona] zest accompanies them. The interest is not yet centred in the acquirement or the display of delicate skill: that arrives later; and to expect it now is a common mistake of the junior school. The child’s present satisfaction comes definitely from being a maker and creator of something new, something which is his own. The favourite materials are modelling-clay at the beginning of the period (or, failing that, simple sand or mud), and later cardboard, scissors, wood, tintacks, and presently, if he can procure it, a saw. - At the outset he is still a little too restless to concentrate on lengthy constructions ; but at nine or ten many will spend whole winter evenings and long rainy days in building churches with toy-bricks or constructing cranes with meccano sets. The value of handwork as such is now sufficiently realized ; but teachers are still prone to impose upon the child a logically graded syllabus whereby the junior is expected to begin by learning the qualities of materials and a technical dexterity with tools. Thus the child is required to make humble but useful domestic articles—mats, brackets, soapboxes, or trays—things which appeal more to his parents than to himself and in which the great aim is accuracy and finish on an unam- bitious scale. I would suggest, on the contrary, that the selection of work should be guided far more by what the child wants to make than](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32178323_0312.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
