The Nugget

Another chapter from Amy Carmichael's Kohila:

Let a girl's education be as serious as a boy's. You bring up your girls as if they were meant for sideboard ornaments, and then complain of their frivolity. Give them the same advantages that you give their brothers. Teach them, also, that courage and truth are the pillars of their being. There is hardly a girls' school in this Christian Kingdom where the children's courage and sincerity would be thought of half so much importance as their way of coming in at a door. And give them, lastly, not only noble teachings, but noble teachers. --Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham, Elizabeth Raikes.

The simplicities of life have filled most of our pages so far, because, naturally, they come first in the story of the child Kohila. But running through them all like a vein of iron ore was that which this book has set itself to try to tell--the spiritual training of a soul; and in that training truth, loyalty, honour took first place. We were blessed in having some children who seemed to have been born truthful. But it was also true that a child might have every jewel of character that you could desire--except truth. We never dared to be off-guard there. "Truth once given form becomes imperishable," but let the edtes of truth be blurred, and that pure form is very difficult to recover.

When Kohila came, there were about two hundred in the family; there was much to do and there were few to do it, but we had many friends and, where the upbringing of children was concerned, each advised something different. So, as we were not at all self-confident, though very sure of what we wanted, we were sometimes puzzled. Never was a more pertinient fable than that of the father, son and donkey, and we made a cautionary rhyme of the story of the bear and her cub.

Said a baby bear
To his mother,
Which paw shall I move,
This or t'other?
Right or left or all
Four together?
So he stood in doubt
Asking whether,
Front or back should go,
This or t'other;
Do not talk. Just walk,
Growled his mother.

I do not expect that any of our ways were new--there is no new thing under the sun--but those ways were new then to most of our friends. And the mother of the chidlren, who was trying, till better help came, to frame a plan for their education, always with the thought of the upper and the nether springs in mind, had only had the training of an evangelist. So everything that could be gleaned, especially from an expert, was noted and pondered, sometimes to be gratefully adopted, sometimes to be discarded. . . .

India has neither a keen sense of historical truth nor a careful affection for accuracy. So we began with true wonder-stories. And nursery-rhymes, whether Tamil or English, were not about cows jumping over the moon, or tails of poor mice cut off with a carving-knife, or anything of that sort, but jingles made up on the spur of the moment about the common things of homestead, field and garden.

We tried to keep a difference between Sunday rhymes and Monday rhymes, but they sometimes overlapped:

The lizard runs along the ground and then runs up a tree,
He turns his funny little head and then he looks at me,
He wiggle-waggles up and down and then he looks at me

chanted Kohila and her set with enthusiasm one Sunday morning, just as we were on our way to the village church, which in those days we attended. Visions
of a shocked Pastor's face looking over the low mud wall that separated us from his backyard drew forth a mild remonstrance. "But look," was the instant, triumphant answer, "please look; the lizard's doing it; he's going on doing it!" So we were not too rigid. It would not grieve their Creator if we sang of what His sinless creatures did quite sinlessly on Sunday. . . .

We were often helped by those knew better than we did how to teach: they dropped many a nugget.

"You have written your t in two different ways on the blackboard," said a friend who strolled into the nursery schoolroom one day. "Children should see only one way of making a letter." That was a nugget of truth, and we picked it up with thanksgiving and turned it to acount in more matters than the making of t's.

For it reminded us that our touch must be steady. . . . We had pledged ourselves to work for that, never for anything less; our one aim was that each should be God's missionary, to use a word that whould not be limited to any one set of people.

The training of a missionary should begin in the nursery; school should continue it; home should nourish it. All influences should be bent one way. That training should not be perplexed by a mixure of thoughts, but expressed in a single line of conduct, clearly recognized for what it is. In other words, till the life of a child has had time to root, it should not be exposed to various winds (confused or conflicting examples and ideals, different ways of making t's). After it has rooted, let the winds blow as they will. Then they will only cause the roots to take a firmer grip.