said to have marked ability in that direction--as the exceptional
athlete, or the child with exceptional literary or moral feeling. On
the other hand, a child that seems to measure well up to the average
in most points, and even to excel in a few, may fall far short in
some matters,--that is, may be deficient. Thus a perfectly good
child in every other way may be unable to master the ordinary
requirements in arithmetic, or a child may have an entirely
satisfactory development in every way and be deficient in musical
discrimination.
Another kind of difference is to be found in what may be called
general capacity. Some children show higher capacity than the
average along nearly every line that can be measured or tested,
without showing a preponderance in any one direction. Such children
are said to be of high grade, or of high "vitality." In the same way
many children are below the average in nearly every line, without
being particularly defective along any one line. They can do one
thing about as well as another, just as the high-grade boys and
girls can do one thing about as well as another; but in the former
there is a limit to the possible development which is exceeded in
the latter. Among both classes of children the full development
depends upon suitable environment, but what is suitable for one may
not be suitable for the other.
From a consideration of these differences in degree and difference
in kind we may see that there is no course of training or treatment,
no method of instruction, no trick for the mother or for the teacher
that will be usable for all children under all circumstances, to
make them all come up to some preconceived uniform standard. On the
other hand, if we consider the differences as worth developing, and
even emphasizing, it must be obvious that the training and the
treatment should be adapted to the individual child so far as
possible. Starting out with essentially different human beings,
uniform treatment will not make them all alike, nor will _any_
treatment make them all alike. But starting out with a particular
human being, we can learn to treat him in such a way as to make him
develop into a more desirable person than he would become if he were
neglected or if he were treated differently. And that is the main
problem, after all.
The relation between heredity and environment may perhaps be made
clear by an extreme illustration from the physical side. Here are
two full-grown men, both five feet and four inches tall. We observe
that they are both short. Now, the shortness of one of them turns
out to be the result of heredity,--that is, he belongs to a strain
of short people. No amount of feeding or of exercise or of special
régime could have made him more than a quarter or half an inch
taller. The other man, however, belongs to a race of rather taller
men and women: his shortness of stature may be traced to
undernutrition, or to overwork, or to sickness during his childhood.
It is quite certain that a different kind of environment would have
resulted in his being as tall as his brothers and sisters.
Now, the problem of training concerns itself practically not so much
with the person who is particularly "long" by nature, nor so much
with the person who is unusually "short" by nature--and we may apply
"long" and "short" to every other trait as well as to stature. The
problem with these extremes is simply to keep the child in good
health. The special efforts of the teacher and of the parent are
devoted to giving the child who appears somewhat below the average
in some particular those special stimulations and exercises and
feedings that will bring him up to the average. We find the
extremely short too discouraging, and the extremely long do not
clamor for our attention; but it is those near the middle-point that
we want to help over to the other side of the dividing line. And
this is just as true of an undesirable character as it is of a
desirable one. We take no trouble to teach honesty to the child that
seems instinctively honest; and we give up in despair with the child
that convinces us of his utter lack of a moral sense: we concentrate
our efforts upon the delinquents whom we catch early, or upon those
who are in danger of sliding down if they are not helped along.
Perhaps one reason for the great confusion on this subject arises out
of the fact that we have become accustomed to making a sharp
distinction between physical characters on the one hand and so-called
mental and moral qualities on the other. Every one recognizes family
resemblances in physical features. A particular shape of nose or a
peculiarity of the hand appears in every member of the family,
sometimes for several successive generations. Facts like these we
accept as evidence of "heredity" without any question. We also
recognize that the Joneses of Centerville always take the measles
"hard," whereas with the Andersons vaccination never "takes." But when
it comes to mental qualities, which we are not accustomed to measure
or to recognize with the same degree of discrimination, most of us
fail to see that heredity is just as common for these as for physical
traits. Moreover, mental qualities take on such a great variety of
forms that their recognition is made doubly difficult. Thus it may be
the same mental traits that make of a certain man a successful lawyer,
of his brother an able scientist, and of their cousin a clever
criminal. No doubt each of these three men has qualities in a degree
lacking in the others; but the point is that they have many qualities
in common which are obscured by the different lines of development
they have followed.
The old parable of the wheat cast upon the ground may help us. That
which falls upon stony ground fails of germination; that which falls
upon poor soil will germinate, but will die of drought or be
scorched by the sun; that which falls upon good soil will develop
into a good plant. The _kind_ of plant that may develop is
determined by the seed, by heredity; _how_ the plant will
develop is determined by the surrounding conditions, by the
environment. On the physical side these facts are so familiar to us
that we never question the connection between development and food,
or between development and exercise, or between development and
other physical conditions. Of course, we say, an undernourished
child will never be strong; of course, an overworked child will
never be strong, of course, drinking and smoking and other
dissipation will prevent healthy development. And yet, do we not
know that of two underfed children, one will show the ill effects
more than the other; that of two overworked children, one will
survive abuse with less permanent injury than the other.
We must, then, have clear in our minds the idea that everything that
happens to a child and that may produce a reaction or an effect is
worth considering from the point of view of its influence upon his
development. Indeed, instead of discussing heredity _versus_
environment, we should try to conceive of the personality of the
child as made up of the effect of a certain heredity responding to a
certain environment. For example, the child inherits the instinct to
handle things. At a certain age this instinct will take the form of
handling objects within reach, and of breaking them. We cannot say
that the child has an instinct for breaking vases or tearing books;
he has simply the instinct to _do_ something with material that
he can handle. Now, it is possible for the child to exercise this
instinct only on material that can be broken or torn; it is also
possible for the child to exercise it on material that can be
manipulated constructively--as blocks for building, clay for
shaping, or, later, tools of various kinds. In one case the child
establishes habits of tearing or breaking; in the other the same
instincts--the same "heredity," that is--issues in habits of
_making_. Or we may take the instinct of curiosity, which every
normal child will manifest at an early stage. This instinct may find
exercise in wondering what is in parcels or closed cupboards; or it
may exercise itself in wondering about the thunder and the flowers
and the things under the earth; or it may be quite suppressed by
discouragement or by unsatisfying indulgence. Thus the same instinct
may lead under different treatments to different results. This does
not mean that every child has the making of an investigator; it
means that a perfectly healthy instinct capable of being turned to
good use is often perverted or crushed out because we have not
learned to cultivate it profitably through control of the growing
child's development.
There is abundant evidence that the mental and moral capacities are
inherited in the same way as the purely physical or physiological
ones. We have, however, much more to learn about how to control the
development of the former than about the control of the latter. Yet
this point should be clear to every parent and teacher; whatever the
child's inheritance may be, the full development of his capacities
is possible only under suitable external conditions. What these
conditions are depends upon the combination of capacities that the
particular child possesses. But to find out what these capacities
are we must give the child an opportunity to show "what's in him."
This we can do by placing him in an environment simple enough for
him to adjust himself to readily, and at the same time complex
enough to give every side of his nature a chance to respond. This is
the significance of modern educational movements that seek to leave
the child untrammelled in his responses to what goes on around him.
We have learned that some children will become tall and that others
will never reach beyond a certain height; we seek merely to keep
them healthy by suitable feeding, exercise, rest, bathing, etc. But
in the matter of mental development we have not yet learned that it
is impossible for all children to reach the same degree of
linguistic or mathematical or artistic development, and we try to
bring all of them up to our preconceived standard of what a child
_should_ do in each line. The thing that we need to find out is
what a particular child _can_ do; and then we must give him the
opportunity and the encouragement to do his best. The things we
encourage him to do will be the basis for the habits which he will
form, for the skill which he will acquire--and so for the activities
that will yield him satisfaction and determine his behavior in
relation to others. That is, the things the child learns to do well
will determine what kind of a person he will be when he grows up.
But it would be a mistake to suppose that every child is born with a
set of special aptitudes that fit him for some particular occupation.
Many children do indeed have rather special types of native ability,
as the child of artistic proclivities, or the "natural born" preacher.
And, on the other hand, many children are born with marked
shortcomings in their makeup, although these "deficiencies" need not
always interfere with their developing into excellent men and women.
For example, a child may be color-blind, or incapable of mastering a
foreign language in school, or awkward in doing work requiring great
skill--and yet capable of doing high-grade work in other lines. Those
children that have strongly-marked proclivities--which usually show
themselves early in life and which are commonly associated with strong
likes and dislikes--will no doubt do the most effective work along the
lines of their native talents. And those with marked deficiencies
should certainly not be directed into occupations wherein the lacking
talents are essential for success. But the great mass of children vary
from each other not so much in the directions along which their
special abilities lie as in the degree to which they are capable of
developing the ordinary abilities which they do have. For such
children the choice of an occupation cannot wisely be made very early
in life, nor should a very special choice be made until there has been
an opportunity to try out a large variety of activities and processes.
Indeed, even for the child of decided genius it is desirable that
there be a chance to try out many kinds of activities, both physical
and mental. This is desirable not so much in the hope of counteracting
his special bent on the theory of supplying exercise for the functions
that are not to his liking as for the purpose of giving him an
opportunity to find out _all_ he can do, and to give us a chance to
find out all he can do well.
Even children who pass as "average" children, however, may be
divided into classes according to the variations in their native
capacities. That is to say, some children, although not exhibiting
any special talents or special deficiencies, are nevertheless more
easily adjusted to doing muscular work than others; some are more
happy in the manipulation of numbers; some show greater patience;
some are more easily fatigued by the repetition of a process; some
cannot stand on their feet for long periods without suffering, and
so on. These differences should certainly be taken into
consideration, first of all, in the treatment accorded them in the
school and at home, in what is required of them, in the selection of
studies, etc. And, in the second place, these facts should be
considered in the choice of general fields of occupation. It would
be the height of cruelty and of injustice to insist upon Walter's
preparing for and entering his father's business--just to keep up
the family tradition--when a little attention to the boy's work in
school and to his play and to his personal preferences and tastes
would show that he was eminently unsuited for the business, and at
the same time well suited for some technical pursuit such as
engineering. Untold misery and failure spring from our negligence in
these matters, no less than from our direction of the child's
development in accordance with the parents' ambitions rather than in
accordance with the child's discoverable abilities and disabilities.
How far short our ordinary training falls of giving our various
capacities their full development is shown by the exquisite
acuteness of touch and of hearing acquired by children who become
blind in infancy. The senses of touch and hearing are here developed
so far beyond what ordinary persons ever attain that the belief is
quite common that one who is defective in one sense has been
compensated by "nature" with special capacity in the other senses.
As a matter of fact, however, the extreme development is not the
result of special endowment or "heredity," but altogether the result
of special training or "environment."
There is a certain sense in which the idea of heredity impresses one
with a paralyzing feeling of inevitableness. When a child is born
his sex is irrevocably fixed; the character of his eyes and of his
hair, the form of his features and the ridges on his finger-tips are
unalterable except through mutilation or disease. But up to a
certain limit the child will grow just in proportion to the nurture
that he receives. And what that limit is we may not know until we
find out through years of patient effort, through endless trying out
in every direction. He will grow farther in some directions than in
others, and the _limit_ in each direction is the element of
destiny supplied by heredity. Very few, however, reach their limit
in many directions, and no person has ever reached his limit in
every direction. The distance we do actually go depends, in
practice, altogether upon the kind of environment that is supplied.
This environment, so far as the growing child is concerned, is
entirely within our control, and we have no right to give up our
efforts and to shift the responsibility to unsatisfactory heredity
until we are quite sure that all has been done that suitable
surroundings and treatment--suitable "environment"--can do. We must
watch and wait, and work hard while we wait and watch.
XV.
FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE
Is it not strange that "school," which we provide for our beloved
children for their own good, at so great a cost of thought and
money, should be so little appreciated by them? Is it not strange
that "school," which is intended to give power and freedom, should
be looked upon by the children as no better than a prison--a good
place from which to escape?
We grown folks know how valuable school and training and discipline
are. Do we not sometimes sigh that we had not more of these
blessings in our own childhood? Or that we did not take advantage of
the little we had? If the children only knew--perhaps they would not
so eagerly seek to escape into what they vainly imagine to be
"freedom." Perhaps.
Grown folks who have thought about the matter know, of course, that
"freedom" is something different from merely being left alone. They
know that freedom is a state to be attained only through effort.
They know that freedom results from a discipline which makes a
person the master of his impulses, instead of leaving him their
slave. They know that the freedom worth striving for is freedom from
our own caprices and moods, from our blindness and ignorance and
passions. It is for this reason that we value discipline, quite
apart from anything that it may contribute to our ability to live
harmoniously with others, quite apart from anything it may do to
increase our power in an economic sense.
But if discipline is the means for attaining freedom, how does it
come about that in the past (and for most people to-day) discipline
has appeared as a method of _compelling_ children to do the
right thing--"until they have the habit"? How does it come about
that discipline, in the minds of most people, consists so largely of
_restraining_ children from doing undesirable acts--until they
are well started into the safe age of discretion? The reason seems
to be that the need for discipline or training makes itself most
quickly felt where children--or older people--infringe upon the
rights of others, or upon the proprieties. We miss discipline where
a child fails of self-restraint, acts impulsively, or loses his
temper. In short, failure of early training is indicated wherever
there is lack of self-control, or a lack of proper application to
the business in hand. It is therefore natural that discipline should
early take the form of commanding and prohibiting.
It is but a short step from this view of discipline to the
philosophy that what children do spontaneously, what they like to
do, must be wrong. And the complement to this is the feeling that
virtue and character can arise only from doing what is disagreeable
or difficult.
But the newer studies in the psychology of childhood lead to a
totally different theory of character formation. And many
experiments made in schools and institutions confirm these new
theories at every point. Moreover, if we look about, perhaps even in
our own homes, I am sure we can all find abundant support for the
modern view.
The new studies have to do with the relation that our emotions bear
to our activities and especially to the formation of habits. To
learn to do a thing, we have known for ages, we must practise
continuously and uniformly. But we did not know that the state of
feelings connected with the performance of the act had anything to
do with the result. Richard must master the scales in his music
study. These scales can be mastered in only one way--he must play
them over and over and over again, until he just has them. But
suppose Richard does not care to practise the scales over and over
and over again? Suppose that he does not care whether he ever
masters the scales or not. Well, he can be _made_ to practise,
at any rate; and perhaps some day he will thank his elders for
having thus forced upon him the extremely valuable but unappreciated
command of the scales.
But what happens in the course of this forced practise? There is
resentment, and antagonism and a growing hatred of scales, of the
man who first vented scales, of sloping rows of notes on the page of
music. And this resentment is more likely to prevent a real mastery
of the task than the enforced practise is to ensure it. The
antagonism will, at any rate, counteract the value of the practise
to a large degree. The third element in the fixation of habits that
we have heretofore too generally disregarded is that of
_satisfaction_; this is no less important than regularity and
frequency of action.
The absence of satisfaction, to say nothing of the presence of
opposite feelings, is of itself sufficient to prevent effective
learning, whether of knowledge or of skill. And when the opposite
feelings are present, the acquired act or idea tends to be pushed
out of the system at the earliest opportunity. It is in some such
way as this that many specialists in the workings of the human mind
would explain so much of our "forgetting." They say that we forget
either because we really wish to forget--the facts are unpleasant--
or because we do not sufficiently care to remember--the facts are
not sufficiently interesting, they do not sufficiently concern us.
Out of the psychological facts pertaining to the relation of the
feeling state to the learning process and to the habit-forming
process, is developed the doctrine of "interest" in education. The
very name "interest" suggests to many that this must be some plan
for sugar-coating education, or perhaps for giving children only
what they like. And this is quite the opposite of the traditional
view which is expressed by the humorist who said, "It does not
matter much what you teach a boy, so long as he doesn't like it."
But the idea of interest in modern psychology does not mean letting
the child have his own way, any more than discipline means doing
only what is unpleasant or difficult.
We can see the basic truth at the foundation of this view in the
age-long usage of the race, which awards prizes and penalties for
"good" actions and "evil" actions, respectively. If you should be
asked "_Why_ did you reward Maryann," "_Why_ did you punish Henry;"
you would no doubt say something like this: If we reward a child for
doing what we approve, he is more likely to do that sort of thing
again; if we punish, or impose unpleasant consequences, upon acts that
we disapprove, such acts are less likely to be repeated. In other
words, we have known right along that _satisfaction_ somehow leads the
child to repeat the conditions that brought about the satisfaction;
and that suffering somehow leads the child to avoid the conditions
that brought about the suffering.
What the new psychology does here is to unify what we have known. We
say not the performance of an act alone will establish a habit; not
the repetition alone will establish it; not the subsequent
satisfaction alone. All of these factors must take part, and they
must take part in association. The feeling must accompany the act.
It is not sufficient that Richard be assured that some time in the
vague future he will derive deep satisfaction from being master of
the scales; he must somehow be made to feel a present concern either
in what he is doing, or a real interest in the outcome. The time
that is to elapse between the beginning of his "practice" and the
satisfaction he is to receive must not be beyond the child's power
to appreciate.
In our actual dealing with children our experience leads us to make
use of these principles, often without realizing all that is
implied. For example, when the young child by your side shows signs
of weariness, and you still have some distance to go, you try to
stimulate his interest by telling him of the good things to come at
journey's end. If this does not serve your purpose, you draw his
attention to the bird on the tree only a hundred feet away, or you
challenge him to race with you to the next telegraph post. And if
you challenge him to such a race, you are sensible enough to let him
win it, for you know very well that nothing will discourage him so
much as defeat--that is, the unpleasant feeling of failure; and you
know that nothing will stimulate him quite as much as the
satisfaction of defeating you. In other words, you set before him
one goal after another, each but a small fraction of the main
journey, and each within the appreciation of the child, and each
offering a satisfactory conclusion that is readily and eagerly
seized as _worth striving for_, here and now.