3.8.1 The Teachers’ Obligation To Know Parents

So far we simply have made the point that individuals differ. We are concerned in this chapter in knowing how these differences affect the teaching process.

Fully to appreciate their significance we must know not only that they exist, and the degree of their variation, but also the forces that produce them. On the side of heredity, race, family, and sex, are the great modifying factors.

Practically, of course, we are concerned very little as teachers with problems of race. We are all so nearly one in that regard that a discussion of racial differences would contribute but little to the solution of our teaching problem.

The matter of family heritage is a problem of very much more immediate concern. Someone has happily said: “Really to know a boy one must know fully his father and his mother.” “Yes,” says a commentator, “and he ought to know a deal about the grandfather and grandmother.” The significance of parentage is made to stand out with clearness in the following paragraph from Norsworthy and Whitley, The Psychology of Childhood:

“Just as good eyesight and longevity are family characteristics, so also color blindness, left-handedness, some slight peculiarity of structure such as an extra finger or toe, or the Hapsburg lip, sense defects such as deafness or blindness, tendencies to certain diseases, especially those of the nervous system,—all these run in families.

Certain mental traits likewise are obviously handed down from parents to child, such as strong will, memory for faces, musical imagination, abilities in mathematics or the languages, artistic talent.

In these ways and many others children resemble their parents. The same general law holds of likes and dislikes, of temperamental qualities such as quick temper, vivacity, lovableness, moodiness. In all traits, characteristics, features, powers both physical and mental and to some extent moral also, children’s original nature, their stock in trade, is determined by their immediate ancestry.

‘We inherit our parents’ tempers, our parents’ conscientiousness, shyness and ability, as we inherit their stature, forearm and span,’ says Pearson.”

The teacher who would really appreciate the feelings and responses of a boy in his class must be aware, therefore, that the boy is not merely one of a dozen type individuals—he is a product of a particular parentage, acting as he does largely because “he was born that way.”

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