ABSTRACT
So far we have been considering what parents and teachers can do themselves towards creating the right kind of character in a child. But there is a great deal that cannot possibly be done without the help of other children. This becomes increasingly true as the child gets older; indeed, contemporaries are never more important than at the university. In the first year of life other children are not important at all in the earlier months, and only a slight advantage in the last three months. At that stage it is slightly older children that are useful. The first child in a family is usually slower in learning to walk and talk than subsequent children, because grown-ups are so perfect in these accomplishments that they are difficult to imitate. A child of three years old is a better model for a child one year old, both because the things it does are more what the younger child would wish to do, and because its powers do not seem so super-human. Children feel that other children are more akin to them than adults are, and therefore their ambition is more stimulated by
what other children do. Only the family provides the opportunity for this education by older children. Most children who have a choice wish to play with children rather older than themselves, because then they feel ‘grand’; but these older children wish to play with still older children, and so on. The consequence is that, in a school, or in the streets of a slum, or anywhere else where a large choice is possible, children play almost entirely with their contemporaries, because the older ones will not play with the younger ones. In this way it comes about that what is to be learnt from older children must be learnt mainly in the home. This has the drawback that in every family there must be one oldest child, who fails to get the benefits of the method. And as families grow smaller the percentage of oldest children grows larger, so that the drawback is an increasing one. Small families are in some ways a disadvantage to children, unless supplemented by nursery schools. But nursery schools will form the subject of a later chapter.
