Early Children's Literature and Education (by Cecilia Acosta)

According to the debate that had taken place during the classes of L&C III, I thought it would be interesting to expand the main ideas of the beginnings of Early Children's Literature and Education.

 

“Early Children’s Literature”

 

First, it is necessary to define the term “Children”. According to the “Britannia Dictionary,” “All potential or actual young literates, from the instant they can with joy leaf through a picture book or listen to a story read aloud, to the age of perhaps 14 or 15, may be called children. Thus “children” includes “young people.””

 

“The Discovery of the Child”

 

In the mid-18^th century what may be defined as children’s literature was at last developing. The proper subject matter of children’s literature, apart from informational or didactic works, is children. More broadly, it embraces the whole content of the child’s imaginative world and that of his daily environment, as well as certain ideas and sentiments characteristic of it. The population of this world is made up not only of children themselves but of animated objects, plants, even grammatical and mathematical abstractions; toys, dolls, and puppets; real, chimerical, and invented animals; miniature or magnified humans; spirits or grotesques of wood, water, air, fire, and space; supernatural and fantasy creatures; figures of fairy tale, myth, and legend.

 

Almost at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, children’s literature remained recessive. The chief, though not the only, reason is improbably simple: the child himself, though there, was not seen, that is, as a child. Though he may be nurtured in all tenderness, he is thought of not as himself but as a pre-adult, which is but one of his many forms. His importance lay not in himself but in what Aristotle would have called his final cause: the potential citizen-warrior. A girl child was a seedbed of future citizen-warriors. Hence classical literature either does not see the child at all or misconstrues him. Astyanax and Ascanius, as well as Medea’s two children, are not persons. They are stage props.

 

Sometimes children were even regarded as infrahuman -for Montaigne, they had “neither mental activities nor recognizable body shape.” The year 1658 is a turning point. In that year a Moravian educator, Comenius, published Orbis Sensualium Pictus, a teaching device that was also the first picture book for children. It embodied a novel insight: children’s reading should be of a special order because children are not scaled-down adults. But the conscious, systematic, and successful exploitation of this insight was to wait for almost a century.

 

It is generally felt that, both as a person worthy of special regard and as an idea worthy of serious contemplation, the child began to come into his own in the second half of the 18^th century. His emergence, as well as that of a literature suited to his needs, is linked to many historical forces, among them the development of Enlightenment thought (Rousseau and, before him, John Locke); the rise of the middle class; the beginnings of the emancipation of women (children’s literature, unlike that for grown-ups, is in large measure a distaff product) and Romanticism, with its minor strands of the cult of the child (Wordsworth and others) and of genres making a special appeal to the young (folktales and fairy tales, myths, ballads). Yet, with all these forces working for the child, he still might not have emerged had it not been for a few unpredictable geniuses: William Blake, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Collodi, Hans Christian Andersen.

 

“Early Children’s Education.”

 

If you ask yourself what a school is, many different answers may arise. In one of them, you can include the teacher’s classroom, or the playground, in others the headmaster or even the janitor. But it is almost sure that in all of the answers an irreplaceable element will appear as the nucleus: the classroom.

 

However, the classroom as we see it nowadays must not be taken as something “natural.” It is more that probable that if a traveller of the 15^th Century comes to see our current classrooms, he will not understand what is happening. The following pictures show different classrooms at different time:

 

P 2. A classroom of the actual Germany, as it appears on an engraving published in 1575.

P 3. Engraving of 1592, probably a Latin school, where a teacher and his collaborators can be seen.

P 4. A Lancaster School. It shows 365 students, with monitors standing next to them, in 1831.

P 6. Punishment at schools, 1860.

P 7. School in London, probably a kindergarten in 1906.

 

 “The Global Method,” by Jan Amos Comenius.

 

Comenius (1592- 1670) was a clergyman worried about the universalization of the divine message and the reading of the Bible.

 

Comenius’ central thesis was based on nature. He formulated axioms or principles showing how the role of nature interferes in people’s actions. In this case, a tree grows when its roots are strong and well-built. In the same way, teachers must encourage and give confidence to students basing their foundations on respect and obedience. These are the roots of the learning- teaching process. He supported the notion that the laws of the divine creation may reach their excellence only through the imitation of nature. Comenius’ vision was opposed to the idea of children being punished and he also suggested classrooms should be spacious, attractive and full of life, with coloured pictures hung on the wall, as we see them nowadays.

 

Principles Comenius Observed in Nature Applicable to Education

 

1. Nature observes a suitable time.

2. Nature prepares the material before she begins to give it form.

3. Nature chooses a fit subject to act upon, or first submits one to a suitable treatment in order to make it fit.

4. Nature is not confused in its operations, but in its forward progress advances distinctly from one point to another.

5. In all the operations of nature, development is from within.

6. Nature, in its formative processes, begins with the universal and ends with the particular.

7. Nature makes no leaps, but proceeds step by step.

8. If nature commences anything, it does not leave off until the operation is completed.

9. Nature carefully avoids obstacles and things likely to cause hurt.

 

Bibliography

• Dussel, Inés y Caruso, Marcelo (1999) La Invención del Aula. Santillana.
  
• Britannica Online 
  
• Comenius’ principles