Going to School? The Second Five Years
Maintenance of Mental Heal :Author: MARY DINGWALL, M.A.
Senior Psychologist, National Association for Mental Health Everyone agrees that going to school is an important occasion in a child’s intellectual life, but not everyone yet realizes that it is an equally important emotional occasion?that, mdeed, it may be considered a final stage in the process of weaning about which Miss Hay-Shaw wrote in the August issue of Mental Health. The young child has to learn that he may not depend upon his mother for all his Physical sustenance and gradually to learn that she will not always be there to gratify immediately all his psychological needs. With growing independence he looks to others?his father, his brothers and sisters?for love and interest, and so his little world changes. But during the first five years his world is a home world? composed at most of family and intimate friends and regularly recurring acquaintances like the milkman, the postman and the neighbours.
At five the child goes to school and finds that he has to leave behind, for several hours a day, the whole of his known environment. He steps mto a world quite outside his home, and the success and ease with which he takes this step will depend not only on the way in which he is feceived in the Infant School, but quite as much, not more, upon the way in which he has surmounted the emotional difficulties of his early years. The more secure a child feels in the affection of his mother and father, the more cosily he will slip into the wider world of school. He will welcome school joyously as a new mterest for which he is ready. But if the child ls insecure, not feeling in his heart that home will always be there for him, then going to school may be a serious traumatic experience. He may feel that he is being cast off, may cling weeping to his mother and refuse to be parted from her. Or he may come to school without an.y apparent fuss and then sit there quietly miserable, indulging in fantasies that he is still at home, still with his mother, still the only baby. That way lies great danger, for the child is retreating from the actual life around him into a life of fantasy. When that happens intellectual and emotional development are both retarded.
All good Infant teachers today pay very great attention to the way in which a five-yearold is admitted to school. Not one of them would arbitrarily separate a young child from the big sister, the toy, the book or the penny that he clutches on his first arrival at school. For the big sister or the toy represent to him the family world he has known and is leaving behind. He can only be expected to leave his known environment behind when he is assured that the new one is both pleasant and interesting. Recent changes in Infant School methods represent not only new theories about learning in young children, but also the realization on the part of educationists that there should be no awkward gap to be bridged between the home and the school. The Infant School should have the atmosphere of a bigger family and all the activities which go on in it should arise from the child’s natural interest. The interests of five-year-olds vary, of course, with different individuals, and they vary according to the intellectual and emotional development of each child. But broadly speaking, certain interests of children between five and seven can be noted. They are individuals, each still desiring to be the centre of attention: they love to do things and make things: and they have an absorbing interest in human relationships.
If you go into a good Infant School where great freedom of activity is allowed to the children, you will probably be surprised to notice how grown up the little girls are. They are busy shopping, house-keeping, putting the children to bed, painting pictures of people and houses and doing it all in a very competent and motherly way. They are, in fact, modelling themselves on mother, and her occupational interests become the little girls’ spontaneous play. If you observe the little girls closely and note their running commentary on all the situations they meet with in their real-life play, you may find yourself wondering at the wit and wisdom of children in Infant Schools.
Listening to little girls between five and six, 1 am often amazed at their social competence and wonder sometimes whether they will ever again be so wise and sound in their human judgments. They often seem to have an emotional maturity which they may not show again until they are experienced elderly women. Little boys of the same age seem, by comparison, much younger and less socially competent, but they, too, are interested in adult activities. If the five-year-old girl copies mother, the five-year-old boy copies father and often consciously aims to be what father is. Watching the play activities of children during their first year at school, you can see a number of very interesting things happening. For example, when he first goes to school, a child tends to play by himself and only occasionally and momentarily to join in with another child or a group of children. But as the months go on, he comes more and more to play with other children and in a group. At five he will play very happily by himself. At six he will be distressed because ” there is no one to play with ” or he has been temporarily shut out of some group activity.
This increasing interest in playing together should be put to good educational use. Now, when the child shows a real interest in playing with other children (as opposed to playing by himself in the company of other children), is the time to begin reading. All the experts on the teaching of reading seem to be agreed that a child is not ready to learn to read until he has a mental age of at least six years. He has to be six, not only intellectually, but emotionally. Reading is fundamentally a means of communication and a child is not emotionally ready to learn to read until he shows, by his behaviour, a spontaneous and urgent desire to share in the activities of other children, to play as part of a group. In a healthy wellbalanced child of average ability, this desire to play in groups usually begins to show itself at about six years of age, and that is one reason why children are not nowadays given formal instruction in reading immediately they go to school. Better, quicker, happier and more lasting learning can be got by waiting until the child is ” ready for reading “.
As he goes on into his seventh year a healthy child tends to play more and more in groups until, about the time he goes into the Junior School, the gang spirit may be said to arrive. When they enter the Infant School children are individuals, each unique. By the time they have been six months in the Junior School it is sometimes rather difficult to notice the individuals in the compact group, with common interests and aims, and apparently only a community life, which the class has become. The change happens by degrees, but parents are apt to notice suddenly that John, who used to have such an interesting way of expressing himself and a personality all his own, now behaves and talks exactly like James next door and Robert over the way. Sometimes the school is blamed for ” killing individuality Actually the change is one which happens in the course of normal development.
Somewhere about seven years of age the child changes over from an interest in individuals (both child and adult) to an interest in his own age group. The emphasis is put upon society and it is as a member of a society that he values himself. He must conform to the rules of his society. He must in no way differ. At the same time he changes over from a subjective interest in persons to an objective, unemotional, interest in things.
From seven to eleven is a scientific age. The child is concerned with the objective universe and with the collection and classification of facts about it. It is the great age of collection, for the Junior School child will , collect anything?names of engines, numbers of cars, facts, useful and useless, about this and that?with astonishing concentration and rapidity. Because of this, now is the time for laying the foundations of all the factual subjects at school. Taught with imagination, and making use of the Junior’s love of ritual and repetition, arithmetical tables are not dull. Many other things which, to the adult, are uninteresting are full of interest for the child at this age. If his interest in the factual is not exploited to the full in the Junior School, it is sometimes rather difficult to fill in the gaps at a later age?e.g. adolescence?when interest tends again to become subjective rather than objective. Freud has described this stage from 7-11 (roughly) as the latency period. It is true that, among healthy children, there is less sign of emotional disturbance, and indeed a generally less emotional attitude to life, than there is either in early childhood or adolescence. But if a child has not surmounted all the difficulties of early childhood, he may carry over into the so-called latency period the emotional attitudes and behaviour characteristics of an earlier stage of development.
To say that, in general, children in the Junior School are unemotional, matter of fact People, with a very scientific outlook on life, a love of organized games, of repetitive ritual, ?f going about in groups and following an elected leader, is true. Yet there are always exceptions and some of the exceptions are children who, although they are ten, are still emotionally under five. They need help, and the earlier the help is given the more likely they are to grow up into mature well-balanced individuals.
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