Child Psychology for Parents

Abstract

WE have received a copy of an address delivered recently to the parents' association of a school well known for its pioneer work in the field of organized practical training for citizenship. The address is noteworthy if only as a too rare example of effort towards parent-teacher co-operation. The author, Dr. Oswald Schwarz, sought to demonstrate what he described as one of the greatest discoveries of modern psychology-that the foundations of happiness in later life as well as of all troubles, difficulties, problems and abnormalities, are almost invariably laid in the first few years of our childhood. The only real problem in education is, he holds, the problem of an aim in life and its solution is to be sought in evoking and fostering an attitude of respect, or “the appreciation of the inherent value of everything existing just because it exists”. He shares, apparently, with Whitehead the notion of actuality as in its essence a process, involving, on the mental side a weaving of reception and anticipation into an end to which its indwelling Eros urges the soul as to the realization of ideal perfection. To the objection that such philosophical ideas do not work with children he answers that he knows “from fairly wide personal experience that most boys from the age of sixteen years onwards are not only able to conceive these ideas but that they grasp them eagerly as if they had long waited for them” ; which accords with Whitehead's “youth is peculiarly liable to the vision of that Peace which is the harmony of the soul's activities with ideal aims that lie beyond any personal satisfaction”.