The tools of learning are indeed many, but those which will concern your child most aside from you, his parents, are: (1) Time, (2) Books, and (3) Teachers. Indeed, without the proper understanding and use of the tools the whole process of learning is drudgery, characterized by disinterest and delay.

The time and effort your child will spend in school is awesome to look upon, and however much we try to hide reality, the fact remains that if your child attends college, approximately one third of his or her allotted "three score years and ten" will have been spent by the time of graduation, either accomplishing the hard job of study, or being exposed as a slave to it, lashed always by the lack of accomplishment. There is an attempt to break the total years of formal learning into segments rather than present the whole picture. We speak of eight years of elementary school (and commencement speakers have done irreparable harm by telling children what a great goal they have reached!). Then there are four years of high school, and finally we delude our young with a picture of four years of college nicely blended for work and play, but which today is work only and which is rapidly becoming a fading picture for all save the very strong.

Your child will spend in elementary school for class and study about 10,000 hours, in high school about 6,000, and in college a minimum of 6,000. These hours can become a yoke of discontentment and grim disillusionment unless there have been put into practice skills and habits which have made study a constructive and dedicated force, aimed at the ultimate fulfillment of one's individual talents. Life will be filled with tasks which will be as hard and less rewarding than study in school, but after school success will be measured largely by one's ability to study and solve the problems of life and living —whether they involve the future of a nation or the importance of an extra loaf of bread for hungry mouths.

Your child can be made conscious of the great time element involved in his or her education, for time is indeed the first tool of education after parents. He can be taught to use that time wisely. Time is one of the great responsibilities that life places before us, and it is the most limited blessing that we have on earth. In life we meet few people, indeed, who have learned the value of time. People fail to finish allotted tasks, they are late for appointments, they wait for tomorrow, and all because they have developed little or no appreciation of earth's blessing which if lost can never be regained.

In school work, as in sports, business ventures, and military campaigns, it is essential to have a plan of action. The student who develops system and regularity in study habits, budgets his time properly, and then adheres closely to his system and schedule will double the effectiveness of his work and eliminate worry and anxious anticipation of failure from the most formative and important part of his or her life. A schedule that is steadily followed soon becomes the easy and natural routine of the day, for constant repetition makes a good habit as easily as it makes a bad one. By following a carefully planned study schedule your child can acquire that most precious of all knowledge—the power to work.

In order to form good study habits your child must know what he or she is going to study and when it is to be studied. From the modest beginning of the twenty minute story-time, the child can be trained to respect schedule and regularity in study. Perhaps not until about fifth grade level can there be a definite allotted time for different studies—Arithmetic 5:00-5:30, Spelling, 5:30-6:00, Reading 7:00-7:30. It is important to have the child write out the schedule and put it on his desk. As the work increases the study-time should be scheduled accordingly. Doing the work at the designated time is the important thing. If the arithmetic takes only ten minutes, it should still be started at 5:00. From this modest beginning the habit of schedule grows until at tenth grade level one finds the following schedule pasted neatly inside the front cover of a notebook. Notice how wisely the study periods at school are used. Notice also that preparations are so planned as to be done always far in advance—how much better than the frenzied disorder which accompanies trying to prepare homework in four subjects after the favorite TV program is over. What really surprises most parents is to discover that children love to make schedules and follow them.

The schedule here illustrated is only one of many possibilities. Schedules can be made in more detail. For example, one student included a fifteen minute period for studying Latin vocabulary while walking to school: 8:35-8:50—Review ten Latin words. Regular plan books with the week divided into periods are available at book stores and school supply companies. They are very satisfactory because they provide space for writing assignments. Be that as it may, the important thing is for the parent to direct the child toward a "beginning" for the proper and regular use of time.

Orderliness in respect to the use of time usually influences other areas. In this the parent should take care that desired conditions for study exist. A well-lighted desk is important, and enough direction to make that one place the place to study. An easy chair in the living room with arms and legs spread to all the points of the compass is not an atmosphere for study. And the child who convinces his parents that he can study better with the radio on, or sprawled on the floor in front of the TV set, is wise beyond his years and has already outwitted his elders. Later, when he is no longer so wise, he will blame them for not having made him work.

The child who is taught to follow a planned schedule of study at the fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth grade level comes to follow it as naturally as he or she responds to the recess bell. Susie will break off a twenty minute telephone conversation with the remark, "I must go study my English," and Johnny will come in from baseball to study his arithmetic with the same punctuality that brings him home early Friday afternoon to mow the lawn for a dollar. Older students find it harder to conform, but the great majority will transform their old habits of "in a little while" into habits of routine and order. Parents have even glowingly admitted that Johnny's study schedule has in a sense brought order and an appreciation of time to the whole household—one mother boasts that she cut the time spent in her kitchen in half by adopting such a schedule.

A study schedule must not begin too heroically or too rigidly. It must be planned for work and play upon tangible and intangible factors. The individual's capabilities must be weighed: What are the limitations? What are the strengths? What are the desires? What are the aims? With the aid of your child's teachers these can be reasonably determined; and having once started, your child will determine for himself the value of system and schedule, an appreciation of the value of time; yes, and even a sound understanding of the best way to attack assignments, and he or she will realize the reward from time properly spent.

A scheduled time for play is just as important as the schedule for work. In our desire to make everything pleasant and easy for our children, we sometimes do just the opposite. The freedom of wild horses becomes a drag and a bore to a child. Playtime is enjoyed much more if it is going to end at exactly 4:30. More has to be done, the game has to be faster, something has to be finished. The child who lives without rules for the regulation of time is the child whose grieved complaint is always, "But what can I do now?" Because "now" is an endless period which the child in bored irresponsibility has come to fear.

System and schedule in study are not frightening words to conjure up visions of complicated and burden-some schemes. They merely mean a sensible routine, and sensible routine means nothing more than order. Order presupposes, however, that all-important quality of wanting to do something well, and order will help your child want to be a good student and do his work well. The secret of how to study is locked up in the desire to do a better job—a desire to learn. Good students are not "born students," they are not people born with an extra abundance of aptitudes. Good students are made by constant and deliberate practice of good study habits, and the first of these habits is the proper use of time.

Education is a long, hard job, and time is the most important tool for the job. A carefully worked out study schedule is essential to good study habits. Without an efficient schedule more time is spent getting ready to study than is spent in actual study. Who has not witnessed the unorganized beginning of one book and then another being opened and closed, a table pushed this way and that, one chair tried for three ill-postured arrangements and another chair tried for six, a flight into dreams through the window, and finally time and energy being exhausted—a halfhearted start of study. There will be, naturally, some of this after the study schedule is introduced. It cannot be followed the first week and forgotten if it is expected to help. It will be helpful in direct proportion to the thought and effort put into it. If followed daily, weekly, and monthly it becomes a natural part of routine, and will not only improve your child's school record, but will affect an orderly approach to all elements of his or her life.

The people who always astound us by how much they accomplish and how much they seem to enjoy living, are the people who have learned to make time serve them, instead of their being slaves to time. Invariably their work habits show a well-designed pattern or schedule, and in a real sense such a schedule is one of the great responsibilities that life places upon us. The person who fails in this responsibility so often becomes a hanger-on, a liability; and most tragic of all, he sometimes becomes an unbearable burden to himself.

The first tool of education (time) will be spent largely with the second tool of education—books. Books, as we have seen, are the memory of mankind. They are one of the several important things without which our race would not be what we call "human," as distinguished from what we call "animal." This tool of education, this memory of mankind, this great legacy, this lever which has helped lift us out of savagery—this enables us to find ourselves. In books we become a part of the great drama which we call life. Here the aims of education and its purposes are made clear by the hopes, aspirations, conflicts, experiences, successes, and failures of people who are like us.

It will probably be from your child's experience with books that will come the awakening within him of that most fundamental and glorious element necessary to education—the desire to learn. If your child is to desire more from his education than an expensive automobile, membership in the right club, and a long low pile of bricks or cinder blocks in the suburbs with a circular driveway in front, that desire will somehow bring him to know that education's articulate spirit is found in great books, and from this tool of education his life can become aspiration rather than survival. He will learn the truth of what a wise man long ago wrote: "For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning."

There is only the remotest possibility that your child would ever glimpse the great children's classics during his lower years in school except under the parent's guidance at home, but reading on the study schedule will soon reflect itself on the child's record at school. Such a program between child and parent can also lead to a better understanding of what textbooks are and how they can be more profitably used. Since the textbook is viewed with more disgust and resentment than any other element of school life, and since it is, however poorly arranged, the greatest single source of information upon which your child will be tested and graded, it seems reasonable that time spent in putting your child on speaking terms with his books would not be spent in vain. What is a textbook? Whether it aims at the outline of a subject or the working principles of a subject, it is in a real sense a function—and that function is "beginning." The textbook is a springboard from which your child dives into the world of learning and thought.

We do not enter upon many ventures in life without first making a survey. So it should be with the books that are issued each September. After several months with a particular text we might be surprised to learn that the most Johnny knows about his history book is that it has a picture of an oil derrick, a train, and an airplane on the cover. Consequently, the time used in making a survey of Johnny's new books with him could prove most profitable. Look over the table of contents, see what the author says about the book in the preface or introduction; and if the text merits the name, it might come as a great awakening to your child to learn that the author spent thousands of hours on this particular work for no other purpose than making it possible for people to learn. Encourage your child to make a "preliminary survey" of each assignment as the first and most important step in finding what he is to learn. Having made a "preliminary survey," which has probably taken not more than five or ten minutes, your child will know more about what is to be learned than if he had started with the first sentence and waded laboriously through the whole assignment, with little more achievement than being able to say, "I read it." The "preliminary survey" is a great time-saver, it acquaints the student with what he is to study and why he is to study it, and bypasses the eternal "pitfall" of becoming smothered in details, unable to see how they are related to each other, or how related to what has been studied before.

How simple this all sounds, but it is unlikely that anyone has told your child that a good textbook is arranged as a series of stepping stones, whereby he moves from one important point of interest to the next, that these mental stepping stones are directed toward heights of information and knowledge. Does your child know that the rules, the definitions, and the notes all have bearing upon the next step? And does he know that if he ignores them he cannot write the exercise, solve the problem, or convert the detailed information into knowledge. Probably the greatest source of information available to the majority of students is the textbook, and the most practiced classroom activity is the elaboration of, or test on, material from the textbook. It is the common ground where student and teacher meet, and since more hours of the student's time are spent in studying textbooks than in any other form of study, those hours can be used to improve the individual's school record, and the textbook become a helpful tool rather than a burdensome and puzzling one.

While the nature of textbooks varies greatly in different subjects, the fundamental and common sense practices for the successful use of texts are basically the same. If your child can be led into accepting the following suggestions, he will quickly show a new self-confidence in his ability to master a subject, and inevitably improved achievement will be noticeable on the next report card: (1) Accept your basic obligation toward the textbook to be interested in what it contains. (2) Be ever conscious of the fact that here is a tool which is going to be used for many hours and weeks. (3) Study the textbook and get an over-all picture of the plan of organization, arrangement of topics, and sequence of material. (4) Make a preliminary survey of each assignment, and study topics rather than pages. (5) Make each assignment a question —"What am I supposed to learn?"—then answer that question by using the 3R formula—Read, Recite, and Review. (6) Make your textbook a personal thing, mark important sections with marginal notes, underline details and facts to be learned. The child who follows these suggestions will soon demand of his or her parents an encyclopedia, for the textbook will no longer satisfy the thirst. Surely, this will be one expense in which father will glory.

The third tool of education is the teacher. Aside from the parents, the child will probably receive some of the most lasting influences of his or her life from teachers or a teacher. No group or profession has so borne the world's most caustic and celebrated sneers, and at the same time the world's unbounded hero worship. Who has been scorned as much? Who has been revered more? "Oh my God! what miseries and mockeries did I then experience, when obedience to my teachers was set before me as proper to my boyhood," cried St. Augustine in his "Confessions." And Henry Adams wrote: "The teacher's influence reaches eternity, no one ever knows where it stops." "Power in the street: has received the world's hurrahs and applause, but when we speak of tolerant understanding, human dignity, awe for wisdom, love for truth, faith in the 'Unmoved Mover's' design which we call Creation, all of which have been the products of power in the classroom, the world has listened, and the significance of power in the street appears shrunken and mean when compared to power in the classroom," writes Sir Richard Livingston in Some Tasks for Education, Oxford University Press, 1956. Surely, no limit can be set on the teacher's power: "The clay with which he or she works is the human soul." But tragically, the teacher's power can produce adverse results, and no career can so nearly approach zero in effort. Make your child keenly aware of the fact that although mass education and overcrowded school conditions, plus a doctrine of education that things must be made easy for the child, have opened the doors for ineffective teachers, and have turned some effective teachers into file clerks, home room custodians, baby sitters, and hallway policemen, there are still teachers who know that lights lit long ago are still burning, and will ever search the darkness of the mind and heart to drive out all that is wrong in thought, reasoning, motive, and feeling. There are still teachers who will ceaselessly contend for truth and right, revolutionize a human soul, and within limits, determine a human destiny. Hope that your child will recognize such a teacher when he meets him or her in the classroom.

It is not too much to tell your child that he and his teachers are partners, along with his parents, in the greatest enterprise of his life—his education. So often students speak of studying English for Miss Jones, preparing a map for Mr. Smith, taking a test for Mrs. Hall, or writing a history paper for Mr. Kelly. Help your child to understand that all these things he is doing for himself. The great enterprise is his, he is in business for himself, and everything he does is for his own improvement.

However, the teacher is a minor partner in the enterprise. The teacher can open windows of vision and point to horizons beyond, but the horizons belong to the child. The teacher can be "as the shadow of a mighty rock in a weary land," but only the child can find shelter from sun, wind, and sand in the shadow of the mighty rock. The teacher is the guidepost for the journey, but the journey is for the child. The teacher can light the lantern and put it in your child's hand, but your child must walk into the dark. If you can instill these ancient (trite-sounding) and time-polished (but not worn) truths about teachers in your child's mind, what do you think his year's record will be, what comments will make his report card a joy to receive? . . . that is, of course, if the school issues report cards.

There is yet more than you can tell your child about his relationship with his teachers. Teaching and learning are inseparable; your child and his teachers will learn much from each other. The teachers will learn with joy or sorrow what your child's hopes and aspirations are, and to what extent he is willing to expend his precious energies to realize them. Your child will learn from that teacher or teachers with whom he strikes a chord of harmony and understanding that they are selfless in their efforts as minor partners to help him achieve the best possible returns from his greatest endeavor and enterprise— his education. He, being keenly aware of his great responsibility, must realize that it is not the teacher's function to thrust something upon him which he does not want, that the teacher had nothing to do with creating, nor can the teacher develop, without great help from your child, the mind, the will, the heart.

As already noted, look, listen, and learn may well be called the three precepts for the effective use of teachers. Write these words inside the cover of each of your child's books. Your child should also know that teachers are impressed by good classroom manners (there's an old word, long since made obsolete by the phrase "social adjustment"), and that there are good classroom manners just as there are good afternoon tea manners. The way books are carried, the way a classroom is entered, posture and expression in class, a willingness to be seen and not heard until called upon, the way a student leaves a classroom—all these little actions and impressions reveal much to your child's teachers. To look interested, to listen eagerly, and to learn willingly, add up to classroom efficiency, and there is such a thing as classroom efficiency. A little observation can convince your child that the good students are those who maintain a very high standard of classroom efficiency, that they are the students who have come to know that their education is truly, however heavy the burden of responsibility, their business primarily.

A child naturally likes to be told what to do, for having been told and having done what it was told to do —there comes a feeling of accomplishment for which there is no substitute, even in the world of the child. Victims of self-discipline are to be pitied. Self-discipline is no discipline, and discipline itself is far more than a set of rules given to induce a pattern of behavior. Discipline grows out of beliefs and standards, hope and faith in some purpose, desire and respect for the individual. These beliefs and standards cannot be written down as rules and numbered one, two, three, and four. They grow up with the child from the seeds planted at home, at church, and at school. If there are no seeds planted, nothing grows. The hope and faith in some purpose, or lack of it, reflects the whole nature of a society. The desire and will of the teacher, the parent, the neighbor down the street, and the child across the aisle, affect the desire and will of every child. Discipline is more than its by-product, conduct. It is enthusiasm, sensitivity, insight, faith and love—and all these for a choice—choice between good and bad, choice between spirit and appetite, choice between what-to-do and how-to-do, choice between the permanent and the passing, choice between the moment and eternity, choice between light and dark.

Only eternal vigilance achieves discipline, but indifference and effortless motivation can in a short time (by the time a child is in the fifth grade) produce such an emptiness for lack of it that it may never fill up again. Without a sense of direction and ability to choose, we turn upon ourselves and in confusion, envy, maliciousness, and greed, gnaw upon our own souls like a trapped animal gnaws for freedom. What then of the child who yearns for a sense of direction, flounders, and is confused in the most formative years of its life?

How can all this be—what sense does it make to write about a child's responsibility to be interested in school subjects? How can we say that study is hard work, when junior's books carry such titles as Fun with Arithmetic, Spelling Made Easy, Fun with Dick and Jane in Reading, Learn and Like It, and a score of other such titles? How can work and order and respect for authority have to do with education? Why such axiomatic and trite terms as—time, life's most limited blessing; books—the memory of mankind; teachers—the tenders of the light for your child's future—which can scarcely be read without a snicker? Surely this must be written for some far-off, silent planet where dawn has not quite broken.

Somehow the questions which men ask regarding education—What should be learned? How can learning be made easy? What are the aims of education?— seem to be old questions. We find them written in bitterness or aspiration across the whole of mankind's memory from the Temple School in Jerusalem to the Academy and Lyceum in Athens to the porticos of the Forum and the Grammaticus in Rome. Today they are still asked wherever there is a child for whom someone harbors dreams of greatness. Perhaps if the new answers which have been conjured up have failed, the old answers might once again be tried for the old questions. What would happen if your child and six others arrived in their classroom one morning having learned from their parents the value of time, books, and teachers? Surely that classroom would never be the same again.

Home Helps For Using the Tools of Learning

1. Help your child develop a sense of time and follow a schedule for play and for study.


2. Teach your child the value of books; that they are the memory of mankind, and contain and make available to us what there is to be learned. Since a great part of the child's life will be spent with textbooks, he should be taught that they are a "beginning," a foundation for more learning about a subject.


3. Have your child memorize and know the meaning of the six suggestions which summarize the successful use of the textbook.


4. Teach your child to respect his teacher as a partner.


5. Help your child understand that it is his basic and sole obligation to be interested in his school work, and that the teacher can be of little help if he is not.


6. Your child must know that being interested, listening eagerly, and learning willingly arc the things necessary to give the classroom a purpose for him or the teacher.


7. Your child should know that discipline is "concerned direction" and not a set of arbitrary rules, that the beginning of discipline is belief and standard.


8. Remind the child that he is not working for the teacher, but is working for himself; the English sentences and the arithmetic problem are to help him learn—not the teacher.
   

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