The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of a Child, by Pierre Loti

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Title: The Story of a Child

Author: Pierre Loti

Translator: Caroline F. Smith

Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #6664]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE STORY OF A CHILD

By Pierre Loti

Translated by Caroline F. Smith

PREFACE

There is to-day a widely spread new interest in child life, a desire to
get nearer to children and understand them. To be sure child study is
not new; every wise parent and every sympathetic teacher has ever been
a student of children; but there is now an effort to do more consciously
and systematically what has always been done in some way.

In the few years since this modern movement began much has been
accomplished, yet there is among many thoughtful people a strong
reaction from the hopes awakened by the enthusiastic heralding of the
newer aspects of psychology. It had been supposed that our science would
soon revolutionize education; indeed, taking the wish for the fact, we
began to talk about the new and the old education (both mythical) and
boast of our millennium. I would not underrate the real progress, the
expansion of educational activities, the enormous gains made in many
ways; but the millennium! The same old errors meet us in new forms, the
old problems are yet unsolved, the waste is so vast that we sometimes
feel thankful that we cannot do as much as we would, and that Nature
protects children from our worst mistakes.

What is the source of this disappointment? Is it not that education,
like all other aspects of life, can never be reduced to mere science? We
need science, it must be increasingly the basis of all life; but exact
science develops very slowly, and meantime we must live. Doubtless the
time will come when our study of mind will have advanced so far that we
can lay down certain great principles as tested laws, and thus clarify
many questions. Even then the solution of the problem will not be in the
enunciation of the theoretic principle, but will lie in its application
to practice; an