The Child as a Thinker

Editor

IN a recent number of Nature there appeared an article by G. B. Mudge, in which the writer protests against some of our modern educational methods and theories. He argues that the child naturally possesses the power to think and reason logically, and that true education retains and develops the thinking powers the child naturally possesses.

We make the following most suggestive and helpful excerpt from the article:—

"Are we not on the wrong track when we talk of 'making thinkers' or of 'training men to think'? Remembering the nature of the child, it rather seems to me that we should be nearer a successful issue if we turned our energies in the direction of retaining and developing the thinking powers it naturally possesses. Any one who chooses to observe the development of a child's mind will, if he does not suppress its natural bent, convince himself that a child from three to five years of age possesses thinking powers of greater capacity than we are in the habit of crediting to it. One of the external evidences of a thoughtful mind is the asking of questions which bear definite and logical relations to each other; and this is precisely what an average child of that age, when talking to a person in sympathy with it, is persistently doing. It is not content with a flimsy and evasive answer, and how strong is its intellectual craving is manifested its evident disappointment or display temper when its ignorant parents impatiently curb its curiosity. It is very seldom that one finds a mother who has endeavored to retain her child's thinking capacities.

"I was once present when the little four-year-old daughter of such a mother was making inquiries about the planet Venus, and after she had been informed that both Venus and the earth traveled round the sun and were illuminated by it, she put the query, 'Then if there were people on Venus our earth would look to them as Venus looks to us?' This question demonstrates that a child possesses thinking powers sufficiently vigorous to enable it to see the logical relationships of bodies to each other, that would certainly do credit to many of its superiors in point of years. This is not an isolated instance, and my impression, derived from observation and from conversation with observant persons, is that the average child, if not suppressed, is capable of a quality of thinking that leads its elders, when they try to follow it, into an intellectual quagmire of inconsistency and absurdity from which they beat an inglorious retreat by bidding it not to 'ask silly questions.' If they bade themselves not to give silly answers, the request would be just."

If what our writer says is true in the material world, how much more so is it true as pertains to the world of Spirit? The child's ready acceptance and application of spiritual truth often causes one to marvel and exclaim, "How can these things be?" The child is naturally disposes to apply what it knows, for it has not learned to regard things merely from a theoretical standpoint. Spiritual truth appears to him to be as practical as anything with which he has to do in the world of sense. May it not be that it was this pure and practical sense on the part of the child that caused the Master to say, "Except ye become as a little child"?

It must be admitted that much of what is called material education leads mortals away from God rather than to Him, or at least causes them to leave Him out of the affairs of daily life. Jesus called the world back to the simple, natural sense of life which recognizes God in all things. The child possesses this sense, and his education should be of such a character as will cause his faith and trust in God to develop in a natural way.

Many of us who are "older grown" have time and again felt the force of the Scriptural statement, "and a little child shall lead them." The simple and natural reasoning of the child has led to a clearer perception and acceptance of Truth. We fully realize that the world greatly needs that childlike faith and trust in God which takes Him at His word, and trusts all things to His keeping.

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