ABSTRACT
W E saw in the last chapter that the family is the natural school of early childhood. It also enjoys an historical priority in the work of education. Animals and birds learn their way about life from their parents, mainly, it would seem, through imitation : we have probably all witnessed the fascinating spectacle of a swallow giving its young their first lessons in flight. There is no doubt that the young of the humati species learn much of the art of living in the same way-how much, we can never say : for our essentially imitative actions often pass unnoticed by ourselves, and it is always difficult to distinguish, even when we are conscious of them, between those which are solely imitative and those which are in any degree original or based on some process of reason. But we emerge from the
region of instinctive imitation when we consider man as a "tool-using animal"—according to Thomas Carlyle one of his distinctive characteristics. For the use of a tool is not learnt by imitation : it, has to be taught, and as the tools increase in complexity, so the teaching increases in extent. We may picture our primitive ancestors far back in the dim abysm of time giving such instruction to their sons and daughters : . and if those sons and daughters served a kind of apprenticeship for life through imitation, as soon as their father began to explain their first tool to them and show them how it worked, they became the first pupils in a technical school : technical education had in fact begun.
