How is a child educated at home?

On the 8th I participated in Vic in the inauguration of the school year and, taking advantage of the trip, I got lost for a while in Costa Llibreter, the second-hand bookstore on Carrer de Sant Sadurní that has given me so many joys. In its back room I found the 5 volumes of Teatro histórico-crítico de la elocuencia española by Antoni Capmany (1756) or L'art de pensar, by Alfred Opisso (1919), which begins like this: “Among all the needs inherent to human life, none is more peremptory than the distinction between the true and the false, and this not only when dealing with the sciences, but with common existence, which demands the supremacy of the understanding for the guidance of our acts”.

This time I left the bookstore with a small manual in my pocket, titled Com s'educa un infant en la llar, written by a person very well informed of the pedagogical debates of his time, the botanist Francesc Masclans i Girvés (1905-1999). It was edited in 1930 by Publicacions de l’Orfeó de Sants and carries a prologue by Alexandre Galí.

“De te fabula narratur”, said Kierkegaard, that contradictory and brilliant Dane, dandy, philosopher, corrupter of bodies and savior of souls, who read the works of others as he would like to be read: with the conviction that the text is about the reader. Literature that does not deal with our own existence and does not contribute to the understanding of ourselves is merely an exercise in putting letters together. If a book from the past can speak of us, then something of ours lives in a continuous present. Good books show us anthropological permanences.

Galí begins by saying that while one cannot doubt the love of parents for their children, the important thing “is to know how to manage this love”, because “there is nothing more pitiful than the trinket child”. The child, he continues, “is not ours; at the very least we must consider that he is not for us, because it happens precisely that when the child will yield, by law of nature, we will no longer be here. The child must yield for others and for himself”. Our grandparents knew this, who, even though they were unaware of modern pedagogy, “carried out this administration of love in a vigorous manner”. There are many things that need to be changed in education, but also many that must be preserved, because “the external crumbling of a part of the old educational building has caused the whole building to be torn down, and certain central norms that should have been inviolable have fallen down on us”. We have renounced “classic procedures” without “counting on principles to replace the destroyed institutions”. Galí concludes his prologue trusting that this book “may provoke the restorative current of educational norms that the Catalan community today needs in an almost urgent way”.

Masclans makes a firm defense of children's play, "a true means of expression for the child and a wonderful language." It is necessary for the child to play, but "it is also necessary for them to play with fewer limitations than those often imposed on them." Certainly, play can be dangerous, "but the dangers of play are nothing more or less than those of all life's activities. Many mothers, with an enormously hyperbolic spirit, try to repress possible harm with a methodical abstention that leads to raising the child like a hothouse flower." Let us underline the word hothouse.

At the end of the 1980s, the Biosphere 2 project locked a team of scientists in a self-sufficient miniature world. Its goal was to test whether a closed system could sustain human life and serve as a model for survival on Mars. But the designers encountered a surprising phenomenon: once the trees inside the dome reached a certain height, they simply fell over like Dalí's soft watches. The scientists discovered that they lacked "stress-resistant wood," a crucial characteristic that develops only when a tree is exposed to wind resistance.

This same principle applies to education: if students never face the resistance generated by mistakes, they do not develop the resilience necessary to achieve great growth. Mistakes are the “wind” that helps them strengthen their thinking and prepares them to face the complex problems of the real world.

I am sure that a botanist like Masclans would have liked this analogy. To finish, I yield the floor to him: “Neither abandon, neglecting all care, nor over-pamper [...]. A freedom with the collective interest as a limit, good manners as a form”.