XV

Being in a barbaric stage, we are afraid of thought. We are under the

erroneous belief that thinking, study, causes nervousness and mental

disorders. In my practice as physician in nervous and mental diseases, I

can say without hesitation that I have not met a single case of nervous

or mental trouble caused by too much thinking or overstudy. This is at

present the opinion of the best psychopathologists. What produces

nervousness is worry, emotional excitement and lack of interest in the

work. But that is precisely what we do with our children. We do not take

care to develop a love of knowledge in their early life for fear of

brain injury, and then when it is late to acquire the interest, we force

them to study, and we cram them and feed them and stuff them like geese.

What you often get is fatty degeneration of the mental liver.

If, however, you do not neglect the child between the second and third

year, and see to it that the brain should not be starved, should have

its proper function, like the rest of the bodily organs, by developing

an interest in intellectual activity and love of knowledge, no forcing

of the child to study is afterwards requisite. The child will go on by

himself,—he will derive intense enjoyment from his intellectual

activity, as he does from his games and physical exercise. The child

will be stronger, healthier, sturdier than the present average child,

with its purely animal activities and total neglect of brain-function.

His physical and mental development will go apace. He will not be a

barbarian with animal proclivities and a strong distaste for knowledge

and mental enjoyment, but he will be a strong, healthy, _thinking man_.

Besides, many a mental trouble will be prevented in adult-life. The

child will acquire knowledge with the same ease as he learns to ride the

bicycle or play ball. By the tenth year, without almost any effort, the

child will acquire the knowledge which at present the best

college-graduate obtains with infinite labor and pain. That this can be

accomplished I can say with authority; I know it as a fact from my own

experience with child-life.

From an economical standpoint alone, think of the saving it would ensure

for society. Consider the fact that our children spend nearly eight

years in the common school, studying spelling and arithmetic, and do not

know them when they graduate! Think of the eight years of waste of

school buildings and salaries for the teaching force. However, our real

object is not economy, but the development of a strong, healthy, great

race of genius.

As fathers and mothers it may interest you to learn of one of those boys

who were brought up in the love and enjoyment of knowledge for its own

sake. At the age of twelve, when other children of his age are hardly

able to read and spell, and drag a miserable mental existence at the

apron strings of some antiquated school-dame, the boy is intensely

enjoying courses in the highest branches of mathematics and astronomy at

one of our foremost universities. The Iliad and the Odyssey are known to

him by heart, and he is deeply interested in the advanced work of

Classical Philology. He is able to read Herodotus, Æschylus, Sophocles,

Euripides, Aristophanes, Lucian and other Greek writers with the same

zest and ease as our schoolboy reads his Robinson Crusoe or the

productions of Cooper and Henty. The boy has a fair understanding of

Comparative Philology and Mythology. He is well versed in Logic, Ancient

History, American History and has a general insight into our politics

and into the groundwork of our Constitution. At the same time he is of

an extremely happy disposition, brimming over with humor and fun. His

physical condition is splendid, his cheeks glow with health. Many a girl

would envy his complexion. Being above five feet four he towers above

the average boy of his age. His physical constitution, weight, form and

hardihood of organs, far surpasses that of the ordinary schoolboy. He

looks like a boy of sixteen. He is healthy, strong and sturdy.

The philistine-pseudagogues, the self-contented school-autocrats are so

imbued with the fear of intellectual activity and with the superstitious

dread of early mental education, they are so obsessed with the morbid

phobia of human reflective powers, they are so deluded by the belief

that study causes disease that they eagerly adhere to the delusion, to

quote from a school-superintendent’s letter, about the boy being “in a

sanitarium, old and worn-out.” No doubt, the cramming, the routine, the

rote, the mental and moral tyranny of the principal and

school-superintendent do tend to nervous degeneracy and mental

break-down. Poor old college owls, academic barn-yard-fowls and worn-out

sickly school-bats, you are panic-stricken by the power of sunlight, you

are in agonizing, in mortal terror of critical, reflective thought, you

dread and suppress the genius of the young.

We do not appreciate the genius harbored in the average child, and we

let it lie fallow. We are mentally poor, not because we lack riches, but

because we do not know how to use the wealth of mines, the hidden

treasures, the now inaccessible mental powers which we possess.

In speaking of our mental capacities, Francis Galton, I think, says that

we are in relation to the ancient Greeks what the Bushmen and Hottentots

are in relation to us. Galton and many other learned men regard the

modern European races as inferior to the Hellenic race. They are wrong,

and I know from experience that they are wrong. It rests in our hands

either to remain inferior barbarians or to rival and even surpass in

brilliancy the genius of the ancient Hellenes. We can develop into a

great race by the proper education of man’s genius.