CHAPTER X

INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK

The general change and plasticity at puberty--English teaching--Causes

of its failure: (1) too much time to other languages, (2)

subordination of literary content to form, (3) too early stress on eye

and hand instead of ear and mouth, (4) excessive use of concrete

words--Children's interest in words--Their favorites--Slang--Story

telling--Age of reading crazes--What to read--The historic

sense--Growth of memory span.

Just as about the only duty of young children is implicit obedience,

so the chief mental training from about eight to twelve is arbitrary

memorization, drill, habituation, with only limited appeal to the

understanding. After the critical transition age of six or seven, when

the brain has achieved its adult size and weight, and teething has

reduced the chewing surface to its least extent, begins a unique stage

of life marked by reduced growth and increased activity and power to

resist both disease and fatigue, which suggests what was, in some just

post-simian age of our race, its period of maturity. Here belong

discipline in writing, reading, spelling, verbal memory, manual

training, practise of instrumental technic, proper names, drawing,

drill in arithmetic, foreign languages by oral methods, the correct

pronunciation of which is far harder if acquired later, etc. The hand

is never so near the brain. Most of the content of the mind has

entered it through the senses, and the eye-and ear-gates should be

open at their widest. Authority should now take precedence of reason.

Children comprehend much and very rapidly if we can only refrain from

explaining, but this slows down intuition, tends to make casuists and

prigs and to enfeeble the ultimate vigor of reason. It is the age of

little method and much matter. The good teacher is now a _pedotrieb_,

or boy-driver. Boys of this age at now not very affectionate. They

take pleasure in obliging and imitating those they like and perhaps in

disobliging those they dislike. They have much selfishness and little

sentiment. As this period draws to a close and the teens begin, the

average normal child will not be bookish but should read and write

well, know a few dozen well-chosen books, play several dozen games, be

well started in one or more ancient and modern languages--if these

must be studied at all, should know something of several industries

and how to make many things he is interested in, belong to a few teams

and societies, know much about nature in his environment, be able to

sing and draw, should have memorized much more than he now does, and

be acquainted, at least in story form, with the outlines of many of

the best works in literature and the epochs and persons in history.[1]

Morally he should have been through many if not most forms of what

parents and teachers commonly call "badness," and Professor Yoder even

calls "meanness". He should have fought, whipped and been whipped,

used language offensive to the prude and to the prim precisian, been

in some scrapes, had something to do with bad, if more with good,

associates, and been exposed to and already recovering from as many

forms of ethical mumps and measles as, by having in mild form now he

can be rendered immune to later when they become far more dangerous,

because his moral and religious as well as his rational nature is

normally rudimentary. He is not depraved, but only in a savage or

half-animal stage, although to a large-brained, large-hearted and

truly parental soul that does not call what causes it inconvenience by

opprobrious names, an altogether lovable and even fascinating stage.

The more we know of boyhood the more narrow and often selfish do adult

ideals of it appear. Something is amiss with the lad of ten who is

very good, studious, industrious, thoughtful, altruistic, quiet,

polite, respectful, obedient, gentlemanly, orderly, always in good

toilet, docile to reason, who turns away from stories that reek with

gore, prefers adult companionship to that of his mates, refuses all

low associates, speaks standard English, or is as pious and deeply in

love with religious services as the typical maiden teacher or the _à

la mode_ parent wishes. Such a boy is either under-vitalized and

anemic and precocious by nature, a repressed, overtrained,

conventionalized manikin, a hypocrite, as some can become under

pressure thus early in life, or else a genius of some kind with a

little of all these.

But with the teens all this begins to be changed and many of these

precepts must be gradually reversed. There is an outburst of growth

that needs a large part of the total kinetic energy of the body. There

is a new interest in adults, a passion to be treated like one's

elders, to make plans for the future, a new sensitiveness to adult

praise or blame. The large muscles have their innings and there is a

new clumsiness of body and mind. The blood-vessels expand and blushing

is increased, new sensations and feelings arise, the imagination

blossoms, love of nature is born, music is felt in a new, more inward

way, fatigue comes easier and sooner; and if heredity and environment

enable the individual to cross this bridge successfully there is

sometimes almost a break of continuity, and a new being emerges. The

drill methods of the preceding period must be slowly relaxed and new

appeals made to freedom and interest. We can no longer coerce a break,

but must lead and inspire if we would avoid arrest. Individuality must

have a longer tether. Never is the power to appreciate so far ahead of

the power to express, and never does understanding so outstrip ability

to explain. Overaccuracy is atrophy. Both mental and moral acquisition

sink at once too deep to be reproduced by examination without injury

both to intellect and will. There is nothing in the environment to

which the adolescent nature does not keenly respond. With pedagogic

tact we can teach about everything we know that is really worth

knowing; but if we amplify and morselize instead of giving great

wholes, if we let the hammer that strikes the bell rest too long

against it and deaden the sound, and if we wait before each methodic

step till the pupil has reproduced all the last, we starve and retard

the soul, which is now all insight and receptivity. Plasticity is at

its maximum, utterance at its minimum. The inward traffic obstructs

the outer currents. Boys especially are often dumb-bound,

monophrastic, inarticulate, and semi-aphasic save in their own

vigorous and inelegant way. Nature prompts to a modest reticence for

which the deflowerers of all ephebic naiveté should have some respect.

Deep interests arise which are almost as sacred as is the hour of

visitation of the Holy Ghost to the religious teacher. The mind at

times grows in leaps and bounds in a way that seems to defy the great

enemy, fatigue; and yet when the teacher grows a little tiresome the

pupil is tired in a moment. Thus we have the converse danger of

forcing knowledge upon unwilling and unripe minds that have no love

for it, which is in many ways psychologically akin to a nameless crime

that in some parts of the country meets summary vengeance.

(_A_) The heart of education as well as its phyletic root is the

vernacular literature and language. These are the chief instruments of

the social as well as of the ethnic and patriotic instinct. The prime

place of the former we saw in the last chapter, and we now pass to the

latter, the uniqueness of which should first be considered.

The Century, the largest complete dictionary of English, claims to

have 250,000 words, as against 55,000 in the old Webster's Unabridged.

Worcester's Unabridged of 1860 has 105,000; Murray's, now in L, it is

said, will contain 240,000 principal and 140,000 compound words, or

380,000 words in all. The dictionary of the French Academy has 33,000;

that of the Royal Spanish Academy, 50,000; the Dutch dictionary of Van

Dale, 86,000; the Italian and Portuguese, each about 50,000 literary,

or 150,000 encyclopedic words. Of course, words can really be counted

hardly more than ideas or impressions, and compounds, dialects,

obsolete terms, localisms, and especially technical terms, swell the

number indefinitely. A competent philologist[2] says, if given large

liberty, he "will undertake to supply 1,000,000 English words for

1,000,000 American dollars." Chamberlain[3] estimates that our

language contains more than two score as many words as all those left

us from the Latin. Many savage languages contain only a very few

thousand, and some but a few hundred, words. Our tongue is essentially

Saxon in its vocabulary and its spirit and, from the time when it was

despised and vulgar, has followed an expansion policy, swallowing with

little modification terms not only from classical antiquity, but from

all modern languages--Indian, African, Chinese, Mongolian--according

to its needs, its adopted children far outnumbering those of its own

blood. It absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant

of thieves and beggars; is actually creative in the baby talk of

mothers and nurses; drops, forgets, and actually invents new words

with no pedigree like those of Lear, Carrol, and many others.[4]

In this vast field the mind of the child early begins to take flight.

Here his soul finds its native breath and vital air. He may live as a

peasant, using, as Max Müller says many do, but a few hundred words

during his lifetime; or he may need 8,000, like Milton, 15,000, like

Shakespeare, 20,000 or 30,000, like Huxley, who commanded both

literary and technical terms; while in understanding, which far

outstrips, use, a philologist may master perhaps 100,000 or 200,000

words. The content of a tongue may contain only folk-lore and terms

for immediate practical life, or this content may be indefinitely

elaborated in a rich literature and science. The former is generally

well on in its development before speech itself becomes an abject of

study. Greek literature was fully grown when the Sophists, and finally

Aristotle, developed the rudiments of grammar, the parts of speech

being at first closely related with his ten metaphysical categories.

Our modern tongue had the fortune, unknown to those of antiquity, when

it was crude and despised, to be patronized and regulated by Latin

grammarians, and has had a long experience, both for good and evil,

with their conserving and uniformitizing instincts. It has, too, a

long history of resistance to this control. Once spelling was a matter

of fashion or even individual taste; and as the constraint grew, two

pedagogues in the thirteenth century fought a duel for the right

spelling of the word, and that maintained by the survivor prevailed.

Phonic and economic influences are now again making some headway

against orthographic orthodoxy here; so with definitions. In the days

of Johnson's dictionary, individuality still had wide range in

determining meanings. In pronunciation, too: we may now pronounce the

word _tomato_ in six ways, all sanctioned by dictionaries. Of our

tongue in particular it is true, as Tylor says in general, condensing

a longer passage, "take language all in all, it is the product of a

rough-and-ready ingenuity and of the great rule of thumb. It is an old

barbaric engine, which in its highest development is altered, patched,

and tinkered into capability. It is originally and naturally a product

of low culture, developed by ages of conscious and unconscious

improvement to answer more or less perfectly the requirements of

modern civilization."

It is plain, therefore, that no grammar, and least of all that derived

from the prim, meager Latin contingent of it, is adequate to legislate

for the free spirit of our magnificent tongue. Again, if this is ever

done and English ever has a grammar that is to it what Latin grammar

is to that language, it will only be when the psychology of speech

represented, e.g., in Wundt's Psychologie der Sprache,[5] which is now

compiling and organizing the best elements from all grammars, is

complete. The reason why English speakers find such difficulty in

learning other languages is because ours has so far outgrown them by

throwing off not only inflections but many old rules of syntax, that

we have had to go backward to an earlier and more obsolescent stage of

human development. In 1414, at the Council of Constance, when Emperor

Sigismund was rebuked for a wrong gender, he replied, "I am King of

the Romans and above grammar." Thomas Jefferson later wrote, "Where

strictures of grammar does not weaken expression it should be attended

to; but where by a small grammatical negligence the energy of an idea

is condensed or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor

in contempt." Browning, Whitman, and Kipling deliberately violate

grammar and secure thereby unique effects neither asking nor needing

excuse.

By general consent both high school and college youth in this country

are in an advanced stage of degeneration in the command of this the

world's greatest organ of the intellect; and that, despite the fact

that the study of English often continues from primary into college

grades, that no topic counts for more, and that marked deficiency here

often debars from all other courses. Every careful study of the

subject for nearly twenty years shows deterioration, and Professor

Shurman, of Nebraska, thinks it now worse than at any time for forty

years. We are in the case of many Christians described by Dante, who

strove by prayers to get nearer to God when in fact with every

petition they were departing farther from him. Such a comprehensive

fact must have many causes.

I. One of these is the excessive time given to other languages just at

the psychological period of greatest linguistic plasticity and

capacity for growth. School invention and tradition is so inveterate

that it is hard for us to understand that there is little educational

value--and perhaps it is deëducational--to learn to tell the time of

day or name a spade in several different tongues or to learn to say

the Lord's Prayer in many different languages, any one of which the

Lord only can understand. The polyglot people that one meets on great

international highways of travel are linguists only in the sense that

the moke on the variety stage who plays a dozen instruments equally

badly is a musician. It is a psychological impossibility to pass

through the apprenticeship stage of learning foreign languages at the

age when the vernacular is setting without crippling it. The extremes

are the youth in ancient Greece studying his own language only and the

modern high school boy and girl dabbling in three or perhaps four

languages. Latin, which in the eight years preceding 1898 increased

one hundred and seventy-four per cent. in American high schools, while

the proportion entering college in the country and even in

Massachusetts steadily declined, is the chief offender. In the day of

its pedagogical glory Latin was the universal tongue of the learned.

Sturm's idea was to train boys so that if suddenly transported to

ancient Rome or Greece they would be at home there. Language, it was

said, was the chief instrument of culture; Latin, the chief language

and therefore a better drill in the vernacular than the vernacular

itself. Its rules were wholesome swathing bands for the modern

languages when in their infancy. Boys must speak only Latin on the

playground. They thought, felt, and developed an intellectual life in

and with that tongue.[6] But how changed all this is now. Statistical

studies show that five hours a week for a year gives command of but a

few hundred words, that two years does not double this number, and

that command of the language and its resources in the original is

almost never attained, but that it is abandoned not only by the

increasing percentage that do not go to college but also by the

increasing percentage who drop it forever at the college door. Its

enormous numerical increase due to high school requirements, the

increasing percentage of girl pupils more ready to follow the

teacher's advice, in connection with the deteriorating quality of the

girls--inevitable with their increasing numbers, the sense that Latin

means entering upon a higher education, the special reverence for it

by Catholic children, the overcrowded market for Latin teachers whom a

recent writer says can be procured by the score at less rates than in

almost any other subject, the modern methods of teaching it which work

well with less knowledge of it by the teacher than in the case of

other school topics, have been attended perhaps inevitably by steady

pedagogic decline despite the vaunted new methods; until now the baby

Latin in the average high school class is a kind of sanctified relic,

a ghost of a ghost, suggesting Swift's Struldbrugs, doomed to physical

immortality but shriveling and with increasing horror of all things

new. In 1892 the German emperor declared it a shame for a boy to excel

in Latin composition, and in the high schools of Sweden and Norway it

has been practically abandoned. In the present stage of its

educational decadence the power of the dead hand is strongly

illustrated by the new installation of the old Roman pronunciation

with which our tongue has only remote analogies, which makes havoc

with proper names which is unknown and unrecognized in the schools of

the European continent, and which makes a pedantic affectation out of

more vocalism. I do not know nor care whether the old Romans

pronounced thus or not, but if historic fidelity in this sense has

pedagogic justification, why still teach a text like the _Viri Romae_,

which is not a classic but a modern pedagogue's composition?

I believe profoundly in the Latin both as a university specialty and

for all students who even approach mastery, but for the vast numbers

who stop in the early stages of proficiency it is disastrous to the

vernacular. Compare the evils of translation English, which not even

the most competent and laborious teaching can wholly prevent and which

careless mechanical instruction directly fosters, with the vigorous

fresh productions of a boy or girl writing or speaking of something of

vital present interest. The psychology of translation shows that it

gives the novice a consciousness of etymologies which rather impedes

than helps the free movement of the mind. Jowett said in substance

that it is almost impossible to render either of the great dead

languages into English without compromise, and this tends to injure

the idiomatic mastery of one's own tongue, which can be got only by

much hard experience in uttering our own thoughts before trying to

shape the dead thoughts of others into our language. We confound the

little knowledge of word-histories which Latin gives with the far

higher and subtler sentence-sense which makes the soul of one language

so different from that of another, and training in which ought not to

end until one has become more or less of a stylist and knows how to

hew out modes of expressing his own individuality in great language.

There is a sense in which Macaulay was not an Englishman at all, but a

Ciceronian Latinist who foisted an alien style upon our tongue; and

even Addison is a foreigner compared to the virile Kipling. The nature

and needs of the adolescent mind demand bread and meat, while Latin

rudiments are husks. In his autobiography, Booker Washington says that

for ten years after their emancipation, the two chief ambitions of the

young negro of the South were to hold office and to study Latin, and

he adds that the chief endeavor of his life has been against these

tendencies. For the American boy and girl, high school too often means

Latin. This gives at first a pleasing sense of exaltation to a higher

stage of life, but after from one to three years the great majority

who enter the high school drop out limp and discouraged for many

reasons, largely, however, because they are not fed. Defective

nutrition of the mind also causes a restlessness, which enhances all

the influences which make boys and girls leave school.

II. The second cause of this degeneration is the subordination of

literature and content to language study. Grammar arises in the old

age of language. As once applied to our relatively grammarless tongue

it always was more or less of a school-made artifact and an alien

yoke, and has become increasingly so as English has grown great and

free. Its ghost, in the many textbooks devoted to it, lacks just the

quality of logic which made and besouled it. Philology, too, with all

its magnificence, is not a product of the nascent stages of speech. In

the college, which is its stronghold, it has so inspired professors of

English that their ideal is to be critical rather than creative till

they prefer the minute reading of a few masterpieces to a wide general

knowledge, and a typical university announces that "in every case the

examiners will treat mere knowledge of books as less important than

the ability to write good English" that will parse and that is

spelled, punctuated, capitalized, and paragraphed aright. Good

professors of English literature are hard to find, and upon them

philologists, who are plentiful, look with a certain condescension.

Many academic chairs of English are filled by men whose acquaintance

of our literature is very narrow, who wish to be linguistic and not

literary, and this is true even in ancient tongues.

At a brilliant examination, a candidate for the doctor's degree who

had answered many questions concerning the forms of Lucretius, when

asked whether he was a dramatist, historian, poet, or philosopher, did

not know, and his professor deemed the question improper. I visited

the eleventh recitation in Othello in a high school class of nineteen

pupils, not one of whom knew how the story ended, so intent had they

been kept on its verbiage. Hence, too, has come the twelve feet of

text-books on English on my shelves with many standard works, edited

for schools, with more notes than text. Fashion that works from above

down the grades and college entrance requirements are in large measure

responsible for this, perhaps now the worst case of the prostitution

of content to form.

Long exposure to this method of linguistic manicuring tends to make

students who try to write ultra-fastidiously, seeking an over-refined

elaboration of petty trifles, as if the less the content the greater

the triumph of form alone could be. These petty but pretty nothings

are like German confectionery, that appeals to the eye but has little

for taste and is worse than nothing for the digestion. It is like

straining work on an empty stomach. For youth this embroidery of

details is the precocious senescence that Nordau has so copiously

illustrated as literary decadence. Language is vastly larger than all

its content, and the way to teach it is to focus the mind upon story,

history, oratory, drama, Bible, for their esthetic, mental, and above

all, moral content, as shown in the last chapter. The more unconscious

processes that reflect imitatively the linguistic environment and that

strike out intuitively oral and written vents for interests so intense

that they must be told and shared, are what teach us how to command

the resources of our mother tongue. These prescriptions and

corrections and consciousness of the manifold ways of error are never

so peculiarly liable to hinder rather than to help as in early

adolescence, when the soul has a new content and a new sense for it,

and so abhors and is so incapable of precision and propriety of

diction. To hold up the flights of exuberant youth by forever being on

the hunt for errors is, to borrow the language of the gridiron, low

tackle, and I would rather be convicted of many errors by such methods

than use them. Of course this has its place, but it must always be

subordinated to a larger view, as in one of the newly discovered

_logia_ ascribed to Jesus, who, when he found a man gathering sticks

on Sunday, said to him, "If you understand what you are doing, it is

well, but if not, thou shalt be damned." The great teacher who, when

asked how he obtained such rare results in expression, answered, "By

carefully neglecting it and seeking utter absorption in

subject-matter," was also a good practical psychologist. This is the

inveterate tendency that in other ages has made pedagogic scribes,

Talmudists, epigoni, and sophists, who have magnified the letter and

lost the spirit. But there are yet other seats of difficulty.

III. It is hard and, in the history of the race, a late change, to

receive language through the eye which reads instead of through the

ear which hears. Not only is perception measurably quite distinctly

slower, but book language is related to oral speech somewhat as an

herbarium is to a garden, or a museum of stuffed specimens to a

menagerie. The invention of letters is a novelty in the history of the

race that spoke for countless ages before it wrote. The winged word of

mouth is saturated with color, perhaps hot with feeling, musical with

inflection, is the utterance of a living present personality, the

consummation of man's gregarious instincts. The book is dead and more

or less impersonal, best apprehended in solitude, its matter more

intellectualized; it deals in remoter second-hand knowledge so that

Plato reproached Aristotle as being a reader, one remove from the

first spontaneous source of original impressions and ideas, and the

doughty medieval knights scorned reading as a mere clerk's trick, not

wishing to muddle their wits with other people's ideas when their own

were good enough for them. But although some of the great men in

history could not read, and though some of the illiterate were often

morally and intellectually above some of the literate, the argument

here is that the printed page must not be too suddenly or too early

thrust between the child and life. The plea is for moral and objective

work, more stories, narratives, and even vivid readings, as is now

done statedly in more than a dozen of the public libraries of the

country, not so often by teachers as by librarians, all to the end

that the ear, the chief receptacle of language, be maintained in its

dominance, that the fine sense of sound, rhythm, cadence,

pronunciation, and speech-music generally be not atrophied, that the

eye which normally ranges freely from far to near be not injured by

the confined treadmill and zigzag of the printed page.

Closely connected with this, and perhaps psychologically worse, is the

substitution of the pen and the scribbling fingers for the mouth and

tongue. Speech is directly to and from the soul. Writing, the

deliberation of which fits age better than youth, slows down its

impetuosity many fold, and is in every way farther removed from vocal

utterance than is the eye from the ear. Never have there been so many

pounds of paper, so many pencils, and such excessive scribbling as in

the calamopapyrus [Pen-paper] pedagogy of to-day and in this country.

Not only has the daily theme spread as infection, but the daily lesson

is now extracted through the point of a pencil instead of from the

mouth. The tongue rests and the curve of writer's cramp takes a sharp

turn upward, as if we were making scribes, reporters, and

proof-readers. In some schools, teachers seem to be conducting

correspondence classes with their own pupils. It all makes excellent

busy work, keeps the pupils quiet and orderly, and allows the school

output to be quantified, and some of it gives time for more care in

the choice of words. But is it a gain to substitute a letter for a

visit, to try to give written precedence over spoken forms? Here again

we violate the great law that the child repeats the history of the

race, and that, from the larger historic standpoint, writing as a mode

of utterance is only the latest fashion.

Of course the pupils must write, and write well, just as they must

read, and read much; but that English suffers from insisting upon this

double long circuit too early and cultivates it to excess, devitalizes

school language and makes it a little unreal, like other affectations

of adult ways, so that on escaping from its thraldom the child and

youth slump back to the language of the street as never before. This

is a false application of the principle of learning to do by doing.

The young do not learn to write by writing, but by reading and

hearing. To become a good writer one must read, feel, think,

experience, until he has something to say that others want to hear.

The golden age of French literature, as Gaston Deschamps and

Brunetière have lately told us, was that of the salon, when

conversation dominated letters, set fashions, and made the charm of

French style. Its lowest ebb was when bookishness led and people began

to talk as they wrote.

IV. The fourth cause of degeneration of school English is the growing

preponderance of concrete words for designating things of sense and

physical acts, over the higher element of language that names and

deals with concepts, ideas, and non-material things. The object-lesson

came in as a reaction against the danger of merely verbal and

definition knowledge and word memory. Now it has gone so far that not

only things but even languages, vernacular and foreign, are taught by

appeals to the eye. More lately, elementary science has introduced

another area of pictures and things while industrial education has

still further greatly enlarged the material sensori-motor element of

training. Geography is taught with artifacts, globes, maps, sand

boxes, drawing. Miss Margaret Smith[7] counted two hundred and eighty

objects that must be distributed and gathered for forty pupils in a

single art lesson. Instruction, moreover, is more and more busied upon

parts and details rather than wholes, upon analysis rather than

synthesis. Thus in modern pedagogy there is an increased tyranny of

things, a growing neglect or exclusion of all that is unseen.

The first result of this is that the modern school child is more and

more mentally helpless without objects of sense. Conversation is

increasingly concrete, if not of material things and persons present

in time and even place. Instead of dealing with thoughts and ideas,

speech and writing is close to sense and the words used are names for

images and acts. But there is another higher part of language that is

not so abjectly tied down to perception, but that lives, moves, and

has its being in the field of concepts rather than percepts, which, to

use Earle's distinction, is symbolic and not presentative, that

describes thinking that is not mere contiguity in space or sequence in

time but that is best in the far higher and more mental associations

of likeness, that is more remote from activity, that, to use logical

terminology, is connotative and not merely denotative, that has

extension as well as intension, that requires abstraction and

generalization. Without this latter element higher mental development

is lacking because this means more than word-painting the material

world.

Our school youth today suffer from just this defect. If their psychic

operations can be called thought it is of that elementary and half

animal kind that consists imagery. Their talk with each other is of

things of present and immediate interest. They lack even the elements

of imagination, which makes new combinations and is creative, because

they are dominated by mental pictures of the sensory. Large views that

take them afield away from the persons and things and acts they know

do not appeal to them. Attempts to think rigorously are too hard. The

teacher feels that all the content of mind must come in through the

senses, and that if these are well fed, inferences and generalizations

will come of themselves later. Many pupils have never in their lives

talked five minutes before others on any subject whatever that can

properly be called intellectual. It irks them to occupy themselves

with purely mental processes, so enslaved are they by what is near and

personal, and thus they are impoverished in the best elements of

language. It is as if what are sometimes called the associative

fibers, both ends of which are in the brain, were dwarfed in

comparison with the afferent and efferent fibers that mediate sense

and motion.

That the soul of language as an instrument of thought consists in this

non-presentative element, so often lacking, is conclusively shown in

the facts of speech diseases. In the slowly progressive aphasias, of

late so carefully studied, the words first lost are those of things

and acts most familiar to the patient, while the words that persist

longest in the wreckage of the speech-centers are generally words that

do not designate the things of sense. A tailor loses the power to name

his chalk, measure, shears, although he can long talk fluently of what

little he may chance to know of God, beauty, truth, virtue, happiness,

prosperity, etc. The farmer is unable to name the cattle in his yard

or his own occupations, although he can reason as well as ever about

politics; can not discuss coin or bills, but can talk of financial

policies and securities, or about health and wealth generally. The

reason obvious. It is because concrete thinking has two forms, the

word and the image, and the latter so tends to take the place of the

former that it can be lost to both sense and articulation without

great impairment, whereas conceptual thinking lacks imagery and

depends upon words alone, and hence these must persist because they

have no alternate form which vicariates for them.

In its lower stages, speech is necessarily closely bound up with the

concrete world; but its real glory appears in its later stages and its

higher forms, because there the soul takes flight in the intellectual

world, learns to live amidst its more spiritual realities, to put

names to thoughts, which is far higher than to put names to things. It

is in this world that the best things in the best books live; and the

modern school-bred distaste for them, the low-ranged mental action

that hovers near the coastline of matter and can not launch out with

zest into the open sea of thoughts, holding communion with the great

dead of the past or the great living of the distant present, seems

almost like a slow progressive abandonment of the high attribute of

speech and the lapse toward infantile or animal picture-thinking. If

the school is slowly becoming speechless in this sense, if it is

lapsing in all departments toward busy work and losing silence,

repose, the power of logical thought, and even that of meditation,

which is the muse of originality, this is perhaps the gravest of all

these types of decay. If the child has no resources in solitude, can

not think without the visual provocation, is losing subjective life,

enthusiasm for public, social, ethical questions, is crippled for

intellectual pursuits, cares only in a languid way for literary prose

and poetry, responds only to sensuous stimuli and events at short

range, and is indifferent to all wide relations and moral

responsibility, cares only for commercial self-interest, the tactics

of field sport, laboratory occupations and things which call be

illustrated from a pedagogic museum, then the school is dwarfing, in

dawning maturity, the higher powers that belong to this stage of

development and is responsible for mental arrest.

In this deplorable condition, if we turn to the child study of speech

for help, we find that, although it has been chiefly occupied with

infant vocabularies, there are already a very few and confessedly

crude and feeble beginnings, but even these shed more light on the

lost pathway than all other sources combined. The child once set in

their midst again corrects the wise men. We will first briefly

recapitulate these and then state and apply their lessons.

Miss Williams[8] found that out of 253 young ladies only 133 did not

have favorite sounds, _[long "a"]_ and _a_ leading among the vowels,

and _l_, _r_ and _m_ among the constants. Eighty-five had favorite

words often lugged in, 329 being good. Two hundred and twenty-one, as

children, had favorite proper names in geography, and also for boys,

but especially for girls. The order of a few of the latter is as

follows: Helen, 36; Bessie, 25; Violet and Lilly, 20; Elsie and

Beatrice, 18; Dorothy and Alice, 17; Ethel, 15; Myrtle, 14; Mabel,

Marguerite, Pearl, and Rose, 13; May, 12; Margaret, Daisy, and Grace,

11; Ruth and Florence, 9; Gladys, 8; Maud, Nellie, and Gertrude, 7;

Blanche and Mary, 6; Eveline and Pansy, 5; Belle, Beulah, Constance,

Eleanor, Elizabeth, Eve, Laura, Lulu, Pauline, Virginia, and Vivian, 4

each, etc.

Of ten words found interesting to adolescents, murmur was the

favorite, most enjoying its sound. Lullaby, supreme,

annannamannannaharoumlemay, immemorial, lillibulero, burbled, and

incarnadine were liked by most, while zigzag and shigsback were not

liked. This writer says that adolescence is marked by some increased

love of words for motor activity and in interest in words as things in

themselves, but shows a still greater rise of interest in new words

and pronunciations; "above all, there is a tremendous rise in interest

in words as instruments of thought." The flood of new experiences,

feelings, and views finds the old vocabulary inadequate, hence "the

dumb, bound feeling of which most adolescents at one time or another

complain and also I suspect from this study in the case of girls, we

have an explanation of the rise of interest in slang." "The second

idea suggested by our study is the tremendous importance of hearing in

the affective side of language."

Conradi[9] found that of 273 returns concerning children's pleasure in

knowing or using new words, ninety-two per cent were affirmative,

eight per cent negative, and fifty per cent gave words especially

"liked." Some were partial to big words, some for those with z in

them. Some found most pleasure in saying them to themselves and some

in using them with others. In all there were nearly three hundred such

words, very few of which were artificial. As to words pretty or queer

in form or sound, his list was nearly as large, but the greater part

of the words were different. Sixty per cent of all had had periods of

spontaneously trying to select their vocabulary by making lists,

studying the dictionary, etc. The age of those who did so would seem

to average not far from early puberty, but the data are too meager for

conclusion. A few started to go through the dictionary, some wished to

astonish their companions or used large new words to themselves or

their dolls. Seventy percent had had a passion for affecting foreign

words when English would do as well. Conradi says "the age varies from

twelve to eighteen, most being fourteen to sixteen." Some indulge this

tendency in letters, and would like to do so in conversation, but fear

ridicule. Fifty-six per cent reported cases of superfine elegance or

affected primness or precision in the use of words. Some had spells of

effort in this direction, some belabor compositions to get a style

that suits them, some memorise fine passages to this end, or modulate

their voices to aid them, affect elegance with a chosen mate by

agreement soliloquize before a glass with poses. According to his

curve this tendency culminates at fourteen.

Adjectivism, adverbism, and nounism, or marked disposition to multiply

one or more of the above classes of words, and in the above order,

also occur near the early teens. Adjectives are often used as

adverbial prefixes to other adjectives, and here favorite words are

marked. Nearly half of Conradi's reports show it, but the list of

words so used is small.

[Illustration: Graph showing Slang, Reading Craze, and Precision by

Age.]

Miss Williams presents on interesting curve of slang confessed as

being both attractive and used by 226 out of 251. From this it appears

that early adolescence is the curve of greatest pleasure in its use,

fourteen being the culminating year. There is very little until

eleven, when the curve for girls rises very rapidly, to fall nearly us

rapidly from fifteen to seventeen. Ninety-three out of 104 who used it

did so despite criticism.

Conradi, who collected and prints a long list of current slang words

and phrases, found that of 295 young boys and girls not one failed to

confess their use, and eighty-five per cent of all gave the age at

which they thought it most common. On this basis he constructs the

above curve, comparing with this the curve of a craze for reading and

for precision in speech.

The reasons given are, in order of frequency, that slang was more

emphatic, more exact, more concise, convenient, sounded pretty,

relieved formality, was natural, manly, appropriate, etc. Only a very

few thought it was vulgar, limited the vocabulary, led to or was a

substitute for swearing, destroyed exactness, etc. This writer

attempts a provisional classification of slang expressions under the

suggestive heads of rebukes to pride, boasting and loquacity,

hypocrisy, quaint and emphatic negatives, exaggerations, exclamations,

mild oaths, attending to one's own business and not meddling or

interfering, names for money, absurdity, neurotic effects of surprise

or shock, honesty and lying, getting confused, fine appearance and

dress, words for intoxication which Partridge has collected,[10]for

anger collated by Chamberlain,[11] crudeness or innocent naïveté, love

and sentimentality, etc. Slang is also rich in describing conflicts of

all kinds, praising courage, censuring inquisitiveness, and as a

school of moral discipline, but he finds, however, a very large number

unclassified; and while he maintains throughout a distinction between

that used by boys and by girls, sex differences are not very marked.

The great majority of terms are mentioned but once, and a few under

nearly all of the above heads have great numerical precedence. A

somewhat striking fact is the manifold variations of a pet typical

form. Twenty-three shock expletives, e.g., are, "Wouldn't that ----

you?" the blank being filled by jar, choke, cook, rattle, scorch, get,

start, etc., or instead of _you_ adjectives are devised. Feeling is so

intense and massive, and psychic processes are so rapid, forcible, and

undeveloped that the pithiness of some of those expressions makes them

brilliant and creative works of genius, and after securing an

apprenticeship are sure of adoption. Their very lawlessness helps to

keep speech from rigidity and desiccation, and they hit off nearly

every essential phrase of adolescent life and experience.

Conventional modes of speech do not satisfy the adolescent, so that he

is often either reticent or slangy. Walt Whitman[12] says that slang

is "an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism and

to express itself illimitably, which in the highest walks produces

poets and poems"; and again, "Daring as it is to say so, in the growth

of language it is certain that the retrospect of slang from the start

would be the recalling from their nebulous condition of all that is

poetical in the stores of human utterance." Lowell[13] says, "There is

death in the dictionary, and where language is too strictly limited by

convention, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also, and

we get a potted literature, Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees."

Lounsbury asserts that "slang is an effort on the part of the users of

language to say something more vividly, strongly, concisely than the

language existing permits it to be said. It is the source from which

the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed." Conradi

adds in substance that weak or vicious slang is too feeble to survive,

and what is vital enough to live fills a need. The final authority is

the people, and it is better to teach youth to discriminate between

good and bad slang rather than to forbid it entirely. Emerson calls it

language in the making, its crude, vital, material. It is often an

effective school of moral description, a palliative for profanity, and

expresses the natural craving for superlatives. Faults are hit off and

condemned with the curtness sententiousness of proverbs devised by

youth to sanctify itself and correct its own faults. The pedagogue

objects that it violates good form and established usage, but why

should the habits of hundreds of years ago control when they can not

satisfy the needs of youth, which requires a _lingua franca_ of its

own, often called "slanguage"? Most high school and college youth of

both sexes have two distinct styles, that of the classroom which is as

unnatural as the etiquette of a royal drawing-room reception or a

formal call, and the other, that of their own breezy, free, natural

life. Often these two have no relation to or effect upon each other,

and often the latter is at times put by with good resolves to speak as

purely and therefore as self-consciously as they knew, with petty

fines for every slang expression. But very few, and these generally

husky boys, boldly try to assert their own rude but vigorous

vernacular in the field of school requirements.

These simple studies in this vast field demonstrate little or nothing,

but they suggest very much. Slang commonly expresses a moral judgment

and falls into ethical categories. It usually concerns ideas,

sentiment, and will, has a psychic content, and is never, like the

language of the school, a mere picture of objects of sense or a

description of acts. To restate it in correct English would be a

course in ethics, courtesy, taste, logical predication and opposition,

honesty, self-possession, modesty, and just the ideal and

non-presentative mental content that youth most needs, and which the

sensuous presentation methods of teaching have neglected. Those who

see in speech nothing but form condemn it because it is vulgar. Youth

has been left to meet these high needs alone, and the prevalence of

these crude forms is an indictment of the delinquency of pedagogues in

not teaching their pupils to develop and use their intellect properly.

Their pith and meatiness are a standing illustration of the need of

condensation for intellectual objects that later growth analyzes.

These expressions also illustrate the law that the higher and larger

the spiritual content, the grosser must be the illustration in which

it is first couched. Further studies now in progress will, I believe,

make this still clearer.

Again, we see in the above, outcrops of the strong pubescent instinct

to enlarge the vocabulary in two ways. One is to affect foreign

equivalents. This at first suggests an appetency for another language

like the dog-Latin gibberish of children. It is one of the motives

that prompts many to study Latin or French, but it has little depth,

for it turns out, on closer study, to be only the affectation of

superiority and the love of mystifying others. The other is a very

different impulse to widen the vernacular. To pause to learn several

foreign equivalents of things of sense may be anti-educational if it

limits the expansion of thought in our own tongue. The two are, in

fact, often inversely related to each other. In giving a foreign

synonym when the mind seeks a new native word, the pedagogue does not

deal fairly. In this irradiation into the mother tongue, sometimes

experience with the sentiment or feeling, act, fact, or object

precedes, and then a name for it is demanded, or conversely the sound,

size, oddness or jingle of the word is first attractive and the

meaning comes later. The latter needs the recognition and utilization

which the former already has. Lists of favorite words should be

wrought out for spelling and writing and their meanings illustrated,

for these have often the charm of novelty as on the frontier of

knowledge and enlarge the mental horizon like new discoveries. We must

not starve this voracious new appetite "for words as instruments of

thought."

Interest in story-telling rises till twelve or thirteen, and

thereafter falls off perhaps rather suddenly, partly because youth is

now more interested in receiving than in giving. As in the drawing

curve we saw a characteristic age when the child loses pleasure in

creating as its power of appreciating pictures rapidly arises, so now,

as the reading curve rises, auditory receptivity makes way for the

visual method shown in the rise of the reading curve with augmented

zest for book-method of acquisition. Darkness or twilight enhances the

story interest in children, for it eliminates the distraction of sense

and encourages the imagination to unfold its pinions, but the youthful

fancy is less bat-like and can take its boldest flights in broad

daylight. A camp-fire, or an open hearth with tales of animals,

ghosts, heroism, and adventure can teach virtue, and vocabulary,

style, and substance in their native unity.

The pubescent reading passion is partly the cause and partly an effect

of the new zest in and docility to the adult world and also of the

fact that the receptive are now and here so immeasurably in advance of

the creative powers. Now the individual transcends his own experience

and learns to profit by that of others. There is now evolved a

penumbral region in the soul more or less beyond the reach of all

school methods, a world of glimpses and hints, and the work here is

that of the prospector and not of the careful miner. It is the age of

skipping and sampling, of pressing the keys lightly. What is acquired

is not examinable but only suggestive. Perhaps nothing read now fails

to leave its mark. It can not be orally reproduced at call, but on

emergency it is at hand for use. As Augustine said of God, so the

child might say of most of his mental content in these psychic areas,

"If you ask me, I do not know; but if you do not ask me, I know very

well"--a case analogous to the typical girl who exclaimed to her

teacher, "I can do and understand this perfectly if you only won't

explain it." That is why examinations in English, if not impossible,

as Goldwin Smith and Oxford hold, are very liable to be harmful, and

recitations and critical notes an impertinence, and always in danger

of causing arrest of this exquisite romantic function in which

literature comes in the closest relation to life, keeping the heart

warm, reënforcing all its good motives, preforming choices, and

universalizing its sympathies.

R. W. Bullock[14] classified and tabulated 2,000 returns from

school-children from the third to the twelfth grade, both inclusive,

concerning their reading. From this it appeared that the average boy

of the third grade "read 4.9 books in six months; that the average

falls to 3.6 in the fourth and fifth grades and rises to a maximum of

6.5 at the seventh grade, then drops quite regularly to 3 in the

twelfth grade at the end of the high school course." The independent

tabulation of returns from other cities showed little variation.

"Grade for grade, the girls read more than the boys, and as a rule

they reach their maximum a year sooner, and from a general maximum of

5.9 books there is a drop to 3.3 at the end of the course." The age of

reading may be postponed or accelerated perhaps nearly a year by the

absence or presence of library facilities. Tabulating the short

stories read per week, it was found that these averaged 2.1 in the

third grade, rose to 7.7 per week in the seventh grade, and in the

twelfth had fallen to 2.3, showing the same general tendency.

The percentage tables for boys' preference for eight classes of

stories are here only suggestive. "War stories seem popular with third

grade boys, and that liking seems well marked through the sixth,

seventh, and eighth grades. Stories of adventure are popular all

through the heroic period, reaching their maximum in the eighth and

ninth grades. The liking for biography and travel or exploration grows

gradually to a climax in the ninth grade, and remains well up through

the course. The tender sentiment has little charm for the average

grade boy, and only in the high school course does he acknowledge any

considerable use of love stories. In the sixth grade he is fond of

detective stories, but they lose their charm for him as he grows

older." For girls, "stories of adventure are popular in the sixth

grade, and stories of travel are always enjoyed. The girl likes

biography, but in the high school, true to her sex, she prefers

stories of great women rather than great men, but because she can not

get them reads those of men. Pity it is that the biographies of so few

of the world's many great women are written. The taste for love

stories increases steadily to the end of the high school course.

Beyond that we have no record." Thus "the maximum amount of reading is

done in every instance between the sixth and eighth grades, the

average being in the seventh grade at an average age of fourteen and

one-tenth years." Seventy-five per cent of all discuss their reading

with some one, and the writer urges that "when ninety-five per cent of

the boys prefer adventure or seventy-five per cent of the girls prefer

love stories, that is what they are going to read," and the duty of

the teacher or librarian is to see that they have both in the highest,

purest form.

Henderson[15] found that of 2,989 children from nine to fifteen, least

books were read at the age of nine and most at the age of fifteen, and

that there was "a gradual rise in amount throughout, the only break

being in the case of girls at the age of fourteen and the boys at the

age of twelve." For fiction the high-water mark was reached for both

sexes at eleven, and the subsequent fall is far less rapid for girls

than for boys. "At the age of thirteen the record for travel and

adventure stands highest in the case of the boys, phenomenally so.

There is a gradual rise in history with age, and a corresponding

decline in fiction."

Kirkpatrick[16] classified returns from 5,000 children from the fourth

to the ninth grade in answer to questions that concerned their

reading. He found a sudden increase in the sixth grade, when children

are about twelve, when there is often a veritable, reading craze.

Dolls are abandoned and "plays, games, and companionship of others are

less attractive, and the reading hunger in many children becomes

insatiable and is often quite indiscriminate." It seems to "most

frequently begin at about twelve years of age and continue at least

three or four years," after which increased home duties, social

responsibilities, and school requirements reduce it and make it more

discriminating in quality. "The fact that boys read about twice, as

much history and travel as girls and only about two-thirds as much

poetry and stories shows beyond question that the emotional and

intellectual wants of boys and girls are essentially different before

sexual maturity."

Miss Vostrovsky[17] found that among 1,269 children there was a great

increase of taste for reading as shown by the number of books taken

from the library, which began with a sharp rise at eleven and

increased steadily to nineteen, when her survey ended; that boys read

most till seventeen, and then girls took the precedence. The taste for

juvenile stories was declining and that for fiction and general

literature was rapidly increased. At about the sixteenth year a change

took place in both sexes, "showing then the beginning of a greater

interest in works of a more general character." Girls read more

fiction than boys at every age, but the interest in it begins to be

very decided at adolescence. With girls it appears to come a little

earlier and with greater suddenness, while the juvenile story

maintains a strong hold upon boys even after the fifteenth year. The

curve of decline in juvenile stories is much more pronounced in both

sexes than the rise of fiction. Through the teens there is a great

increase in the definiteness of answers to the questions why books

were chosen. Instead of being read because they were "good" or "nice,"

they were read because recommended, and later because of some special

interest. Girls relied on recommendations more than boys. The latter

were more guided by reason the former by sentiment. Nearly three times

as many boys in the early teens chose books because they were exciting

or venturesome. Even the stories which girls called exciting were tame

compared with those chosen by boys. Girls chose books more than four

times as often because of children in them, and more often because

they ware funny. Boys care very little for style, but must have

incidents and heroes. The author says "the special interest that girls

have in fiction begins about the age of adolescence. After the

sixteenth year the extreme delight in stories fades," or school

demands become more imperative and uniform. Girls prefer domestic

stories and those with characters like themselves and scenes like

those with which they are familiar. "No boy confesses to a purely

girl's story, while girls frankly do to an interesting story about

boys. Women writers seem to appeal more to girls, men writers to boys.

Hence, the authors named by each sex are almost entirely different. In

fiction more standard works, were drawn by boys than by girls." "When

left to develop according to chance, the tendency is often toward a

selection of books which unfit one for every-day living, either by

presenting, on the one hand, too many scenes of delicious excitement

or, on the other, by narrowing the vision to the wider possibilities

of life."

Out of 523 full answers, Lancaster found that 453 "had what might be

called a craze for reading at some time in the adolescent period," and

thinks parents little realize the intensity of the desire to read or

how this nascent period is the golden age to cultivate taste and

inoculate against reading what is bad. The curve rises rapidly from

eleven to fourteen, culminates at fifteen, after which it falls

rapidly. Some become omnivorous readers of everything in their way;

others are profoundly, and perhaps for life, impressed with some

single book; others have now crazes for history, now for novels, now

for dramas or for poetry; some devour encyclopedias; some imagine

themselves destined to be great novelists and compose long romances;

some can give the dates with accuracy of the different periods of the

development of their tastes from the fairy tales of early childhood to

the travels and adventures of boyhood and then to romance, poetry,

history, etc; and some give the order of their development of taste

for the great poets.

The careful statistics of Dr. Reyer show that the greatest greed of

reading is from the age of fifteen to twenty-two, and is on the

average greatest of all at twenty. He finds that ten per cent of the

young people of this age do forty per cent of all the reading. Before

twenty the curve ascends very rapidly, to fall afterward yet more

rapidly as the need of bread-winning becomes imperative. After

thirty-five the great public reads but little. Every youth should have

his or her own library, which, however small, should be select. To

seal some knowledge of their content with the delightful sense of

ownership helps to preserve the apparatus of culture, keeps green

early memories, or makes one of the best tangible mementoes of

parental care and love. For the young especially, the only ark of

safety in the dark and rapidly rising flood of printer's ink is to

turn resolutely away from the ideal of quantity to that of quality.

While literature rescues youth from individual limitations and enables

it to act and think more as spectators of all time, and sharers of all

existence, the passion for reading may be excessive, and books which

from the silent alcoves of our nearly 5,500 American libraries rule

the world more now than ever before, may cause the young to neglect

the oracles within, weaken them by too wide reading, make conversation

bookish, and overwhelm spontaneity and originality with a

superfetation of alien ideas.

The reading passion may rage with great intensity when the soul takes

its first long flight in the world of books, and ninety per cent of

all Conradi's cases showed it. Of these, thirty-two per cent read to

have the feelings stirred and the desire of knowledge was a far less

frequent motive. Some read to pass idle time, others to appear learned

or to acquire a style or a vocabulary. Romance led. Some specialized,

and with some the appetite was omnivorous. Some preferred books about

or addressed to children, some fairy tales, and some sought only those

for adults. The night is often invaded and some become "perfectly

wild" over exciting adventures or the dangers and hardships of true

lovers, laughing and crying as the story turns from grave to gay, and

a few read several books a week. Some were forbidden and read by

stealth alone, or with books hidden in their desks or under school

books. Some few live thus for years in an atmosphere highly charged

with romance, and burn out their fires wickedly early with a sudden

and extreme expansiveness that makes life about them uninteresting and

unreal, and that reacts to commonplace later. Conradi prints some two

or three hundred favorite books and authors of early and of later

adolescence. The natural reading of early youth is not classic nor

blighted by compulsion or uniformity for all. This age seeks to

express originality and personality in individual choices and tastes.

Suggestive and briefly descriptive lists of best books and authors by

authorities in different fields on which some time is spent in making

selection, talks about books, pooling knowledge of them, with no

course of reading even advised and much less prescribed, is the best

guidance for developing the habit of rapid cursory reading. Others

before professor De Long, of Colorado, have held that the power of

reading a page in moment, as a mathematician sums up a column of

figures and as the artist Doré was able to read a book by turning the

leaves, can be attained by training and practise. School pressure

should not suppress this instinct of omnivorous reading, which at this

age sometimes prompts the resolve to read encyclopedias, and even

libraries, or to sample everything to be found in books at home. Along

with, but never suppressing, it there should be some stated reading,

but this should lay down only kinds of reading like the four

emphasized in the last chapter or offer a goodly number of large

alternative groups of books and authors, like the five of the Leland

Stanford University, and permit wide liberty of choice to both teacher

and pupil. Few triumphs of the uniformitarians, who sacrifice

individual needs to mechanical convenience in dealing with youth in

masses, have been so sad as marking off and standardizing a definite

quantum of requirements here. Instead of irrigating a wide field, the

well-springs of literary interest are forced to cut a deep canyon and

leave wide desert plains of ignorance on either side. Besides

imitation, which reads what others do, is the desire to read something

no one else does, and this is a palladium of individuality. Bad as is

the principle, the selections are worse, including the saccharinity

ineffable of Tennyson's Princess (a strange expression of the

progressive feminization of the high school and yet satirizing the

scholastic aspiration of girls) which the virile boy abhors, books

about books which are two removes from life, and ponderous Latinity

authors which for the Saxon boy suggest David fighting in Saul's

armor, and which warp and pervert the nascent sentence-sense on a

foreign model. Worst of all, the prime moral purpose of youthful

reading is ignored in choices based on form and style; and a growing

profusion of notes that distract from content to language, the study

of which belongs in the college if not in the university, develops the

tendencies of criticism before the higher powers of sympathetic

appreciation have done their work.[18]

(B) Other new mental powers and aptitudes are as yet too little

studied. Very slight are the observations so far made, of children's

historic, which is so clearly akin to literary, interest and capacity.

With regard to this and several other subjects in the curriculum we

are in the state of Watts when he gazed at the tea-kettle and began to

dream of the steam-engine; we are just recognizing a new power and

method destined to reconstruct and increase the efficiency of

education, but only after a long and toilsome period of limited

successes.

Mrs. Barnes[19], told a story without date, place, name, or moral and

compared the questions which 1,250 children would like to have

answered about it. She found that the interest of girls in persons, or

the number who asked the question "who," culminated at twelve, when it

coincided with that of boys, but that the latter continued to rise to

fifteen. The interest to know "place where" events occurred culminated

at eleven with girls, and at fifteen, and at a far higher point, with

boys. The questions "how" and "why," calling for the method and

reason, both culminated at twelve for girls and fifteen for boys, but

were more infrequent and showed less age differences than the

preceding question. Interest in the results of the action was most

pronounced of all, culminating at twelve in girls and fifteen in boys.

Details and time excited far less interest, the former jointly

culminating for both sexes at eleven. Interest in the truth of the

narrative was extremely slight, although it became manifest at

fifteen, and was growing at sixteen. The number of inferences drawn

steadily increased with age, although the increase was very slight

after thirteen. Both legitimate and critical inferences increased

after eleven, while imaginative inferences at that age had nearly

reached their maximum. Interest in names was very strong throughout,

as in primitive people. Boys were more curious concerning "who,"

"where," and "how"; girls as to "why." In general, the historic

curiosity of boys was greater than that of girls, and culminated

later. The inferences drawn from an imagined finding of a log-house,

boat, and arrows on a lonely island indicate that the power of

inference, both legitimate and imaginative, develops strongly at

twelve and thirteen, after which doubt and the critical faculties are

apparent; which coincides with Mr. M.A. Tucker's conclusion, that

doubt develops at thirteen and that personal inference diminishes

about that age.

The children were given two accounts of the fall of Fort Sumter, one

in the terms of a school history and the other a despatch of equal

length from Major Anderson, and asked which was best, should be kept,

and why. Choice of the narrative steadily declined after eleven and

that of the despatch increased, the former reaching its lowest, the

latter its highest, point at fifteen, indicating a preference for the

first-hand record. The number of those whose choice was affected by

style showed no great change, from twelve to fifteen, but rose very

rapidly for the nest two years. Those who chose the despatch because

it was true, signed, etc., increased rapidly in girls and boys

throughout the teens, and the preference for the telegram as a more

direct source increased very rapidly from thirteen to seventeen.

Other studies of this kind led Mrs. Barnes to conclude that children

remembered items by groups; that whole groups were often omitted; that

those containing most action were best remembered; that what is

remembered is remembered with great accuracy; that generalities are

often made more specific; that the number of details a child carries

away from a connected narrative is not much above fifty, so that their

numbers should be limited; and from it all was inferred the necessity

of accuracy, of massing details about central characters or incidents,

letting action dominate, omitting all that is aside from the main line

of the story, of bringing out cause and effect and dramatizing where

possible.

Miss Patterson[20] collated the answers of 2,237 children to the

question "What does 1895 mean?" The blanks "Don't know" decreased very

rapidly from six to eight, and thereafter maintained a slight but

constant percentage. Those who expanded the phase a little without

intelligence were most numerous from eight to ten, while the

proportion who gave a correct explanation rose quite steadily for both

sexes and culminated at fourteen for girls and fifteen for boys. The

latter only indicates the pupils of real historic knowledge. The

writer concludes that "the sense of historical time is altogether

lacking with children of seven, and may be described as slight up to

the age of twelve." History, it is thought, should be introduced early

with no difference between boys and girls, but "up to the age of

twelve or thirteen it should be presented in a series of striking

biographies and events, appearing if possible in contemporary ballads

and chronicles, and illustrated by maps, chronological charts, and as

richly as possible by pictures of contemporary objects, buildings, and

people." At the age of fourteen or fifteen, another sort of work

should appear. Original sources should still be used, but they should

illustrate not "the picture of human society moving before us in a

long panorama, but should give us the opportunity to study the

organization, thought, feeling, of a time as seen in its concrete

embodiments, its documents, monuments, men, and books." The statesmen,

thinkers, poets, should now exceed explorers and fighters; reflection

and interpretation, discrimination of the true from the false,

comparison, etc., are now first in order; while later yet, perhaps in

college, should come severer methods and special monographic study.

Studies of mentality, so well advanced for infants and so well begun

for lower grades, are still very meager for adolescent stages so far

as they bear on growth in the power to deal with arithmetic, drawing

and pictures, puzzles, superstitions, collections, attention, reason,

etc. Enough has been done to show that with authority to collect data

on plans and by methods that can now be operated and with aid which

should now be appropriated by school boards and teachers'

associations, incalculable pedagogic economy could be secured and the

scientific and professional character of teaching every topic in upper

grammar and high school and even in the early college grades be

greatly enhanced. To enter upon this laborious task in every branch of

study is perhaps our chief present need and duty to our youth in

school, although individual studies like that of Binet[21] belong

elsewhere.

(C) The studies of memory up the grades show characteristic adolescent

changes, and some of these results are directly usable in school.

Bolton[22] tested the power of 1,500 children to remember and write

dictated digits, and found, of course, increasing accuracy with the

older pupils. He also found that the memory span increased with age

rather than with the growth of intelligence as determined by grade.

The pupils depended largely upon visualisation, and this and

concentrated attention suggested that growth of memory did not

necessarily accompany intellectual advancement. Girls generally

surpassed boys, and as with clicks too rapid to be counted, it was

found that when the pupils reached the limits of their span, the

number of digits was overestimated. The power of concentrated and

prolonged attention was tested. The probability of error for the

larger number of digits, 7 and 8, decreased in a marked way with the

development of pubescence, at least up to fourteen years, with the

suggestion of a slight rise again at fifteen.

In comprehensive tests of the ability of Chicago children to remember

figures seen, heard, or repeated by them, it was found that, from

seven to nine, auditory were slightly better remembered than visual

impressions. From that age the latter steadily increased over the

former. After thirteen, auditory memory increased but little, and was

already about ten per cent behind visual, which continued to increase

at least till seventeen. Audiovisual memory was better than either

alone, and the span of even this was improved when articulatory memory

was added. When the tests were made upon pupils of the same age in

different grades it was found in Chicago that memory power, whether

tested by sight, hearing, or articulation, was best in those pupils

whose school standing was highest, and least where standing was

lowest.

When a series of digits was immediately repeated orally and a record

made, it was found[23] that while from the age of eight to twelve the

memory span increased only eight points, from fourteen to eighteen it

increased thirteen points. The number of correct reproductions of

numbers of seven places increased during the teens, although this

class of children remain about one digit behind normal children of

corresponding age. In general, though not without exceptions, it was

found that intelligence grew with memory span, although the former is

far more inferior to that of the normal child than the latter, and

also that weakness of this kind of memory is not an especially

prominent factor of weak-mindedness.

Shaw[24] tested memory in 700 school children by dividing a story of

324 words into 152 phrases, having it read and immediately reproduced

by them, and selecting alternate grades from the third grammar to the

end of the high school, with a few college students. The maximum power

of this kind of memory was attained by boys in the high school period.

Girls remembered forty-three per cent in the seventh grade, and in the

high school forty-seven per cent. The increase by two-year periods was

most rapid between the third and fifth grades. Four terms were

remembered on the average by at least ninety per cent of the pupils,

41 by fifty per cent, and 130 by ten per cent. The story written out

in the terms remembered by each percentage from ten to ninety affords

a most interesting picture of the growth of memory, and even its

errors of omission, insertion, substitution and displacement. "The

growth of memory is more rapid in the case of girls than boys, and the

figures suggest a coincidence with the general law, that the rapid

development incident to puberty occurs earlier in girls than in boys."

In a careful study of children's memory, Kemsies[25] concludes that

the quality of memory improves with age more rapidly than the

quantity.

W.G. Monroe tested 275 boys and 293 girls, well distributed, from

seven to seventeen years of age, and found a marked rise for both

visual and auditory memory at fifteen for both sexes. For both sexes,

also, auditory memory was best at sixteen and visual at fifteen.

When accuracy in remembering the length of tone was used as a test, it

was found there was loss from six to seven and gain from seven to

eight for both sexes. From eight to nine girls lost rapidly for one

and gained rapidly for the following year, while boys were nearly

stationary till ten, after which both sexes gained to their maximum at

fourteen years of age and declined for the two subsequent years, both

gaining power from sixteen to seventeen, but neither attaining the

accuracy they had at fourteen.[26]

[Illustration: Girls and Boys at Memory Reproductions compared.]

Netschajeff[27] subjected 637 school children, well distributed

between the ages of nine and eighteen, to the following tests. Twelve

very distinct objects were shown them, each for two seconds, which

must them be immediately written down. Twelve very distinct noises

were made out of sight; numbers of two figures each were read;

three-syllable words, which were names of familiar objects, objects

that suggested noises, words designating touch, temperature, and

muscle sensations, words describing states of feeling, and names of

abstract ideas also were given them. The above eight series of twelve

each were all reproduced in writing, and showed that each kind of

memory here tested increased with age, with some slight tendency to

decline at or just before puberty, then to rise and to slightly

decline after the sixteenth or seventeenth year. Memory for objects

showed the greatest amount of increase during the year studied, and

works for feeling next, although at all ages the latter was

considerably below the former. Boys showed stronger memory for real

impressions, and girls excelled for numbers and words. The difference

of these two kinds of memory was less with girls than with boys. The

greatest difference between the sexes lay between eleven and fourteen

years. This seems, at eighteen or nineteen, to be slightly increased.

"This is especially great at the age of puberty." Children from nine

to eleven have but slight power of reproducing emotions, but this

increases in the next few years very rapidly, as does that of the

abstract words. Girls from nine to eleven deal better with words than

with objects; boys slightly excel with objects. Illusions in

reproducing words which mistake sense, sound, and rhythm, which is not

infrequent with younger children, decline with age especially at

puberty. Up to this period girls are most subject to these illusions,

and afterward boys. The preceding tables, in which the ordinates

represent the number of correct reproductions and the abscissas the

age, are interesting.

Lobsien made tests similar to those of Netschajeff,[28] with

modifications for greater accuracy, upon 238 boys and 224 girls from

nine to fourteen and a half years of age. The preceding tables show

the development of the various kinds of memory for boys and girls:

BOYS.

Age. Objects Noises Number Visual Acoustic Touch Feeling Sounds

Concepts Concepts Concepts Concepts

13-14-1/2 92.56 71.89 80.67 73.00 74.78 75.33 75.44 40.56

12-13 76.45 57.38 72.33 69.67 64.89 73.67 58.67 37.87

11-12 89.78 57.19 70.22 59.67 63.00 73.33 55.33 19.99

10-11 87.12 55.33 49.33 55.11 48.44 57.11 38.33 12.44

9-10 64.00 53.33 49.09 46.58 43.78 43.67 27.22 7.22

Normal 82.2 59.02 64.8 60.6 59.4 64.2 31.2 24.0

value.

GIRLS.

13-14-1/2 99.56 82.67 87.22 96.67 71.44 82.00 70.22 41.33

12-13 92.89 75.56 74.89 77.22 63.11 74.67 67.33 34.89

11-12 94.00 56.00 73.56 72.78 72.11 70.89 73.33 28.22

10-11 75.78 46.22 62.44 56.22 54.78 58.78 43.22 10.44

9-10 89.33 46.22 50.44 54.22 38.22 51.11 32.89 6.89

Normal 91.4 62.2 71.8 71.0 60.2 67.2 59.4 23.8

value.

The table for boys shows in the fourteenth year a marked increase of

memory for objects, noises, and feelings, especially as compared with

the marked relative decline the preceding year, when there was a

decided increase in visual concepts and senseless sounds. The twelfth

year shows the greatest increase in number memory, acoustic

impressions, touch, and feeling. The tenth and eleventh years show

marked increase of memory for objects and their names. Thus the

increase in the strength of memory is by no means the same year by

year, but progress focuses on some forms and others are neglected.

Hence each type of memory shows an almost regular increase and

decrease in relative strength.

The table for girls shown marked increase of all memory forms about

the twelfth year. This relative increase is exceeded only in the

fourteenth year for visual concepts. The thirteenth year shows the

greatest increase for sounds and a remarkable regression for objects

in passing from the lowest to the next grade above.

In the accuracy of reproducing the order of impressions, girls much

exceeded boys at all ages. For seen object, their accuracy was twice

that of boys, the boys excelling in order only in number. In general,

ability to reproduce a series of impressions increases and decreases

with the power to reproduce in any order, but by no means in direct

proportion to it. The effect of the last member in a series by a

purely mechanical reproduction is best in boys. The range and energy

of reproduction is far higher than ordered sequence. In general girls

slightly exceed boys in recalling numbers, touch concepts, and sounds,

and largely exceed in recalling feeling concepts, real things and

visual concept.

Colegrove[29] tabulated returns from the early memories of 1,658

correspondents with 6,069 memories, from which he reached the

conclusions, represented in the following curves, for the earliest

three memories of white males and females.

In the cuts on the following page, the heavy line represents the first

memory, the broken the second, and the dotted the third. Age at the

time of reporting is represented in distance to the right, and the age

of the person at the time of the occurrence remembered is represented

by the distance upward. "There is a rise in all the curves at

adolescence. This shows that, from the age of twelve to fifteen, boys

do not recall so early memories as they do both before and after this

period." This Colegrove ascribes to the fact that the present seems so

large and rich. At any rate, "the earliest memories of boys at the age

of fourteen average almost four years." His curves for girls show that

the age of all the first three memories which they are able to recall

is higher at fourteen than at any period before or after; that at

seven and eight the average age of the first things recalled is nearly

a year earlier than it is at fourteen. This means that at puberty

there is a marked and characteristic obliteration of infantile

memories which lapse to oblivion with augmented absorption in the

present.

[Illustration: Untitled Graph.]

It was found that males have the greatest number of memories for

protracted or repeated occurrences, for people, and clothing,

topographical and logical matters; that females have better memories

for novel occurrences or single impressions. Already at ten and eleven

motor memories begin to decrease for females and increase for males.

At fourteen and fifteen, motor memories nearly culminate for males,

but still further decline for females. The former show a marked

decrease in memory for relatives and playmates and an increase for

other persons. Sickness and accidents to self are remembered less by

males and better by females, as are memories of fears. At eighteen and

nineteen there is a marked and continued increase in the visual

memories of each sex and the auditory memory of females. Memory for

the activity of others increases for both, but far more strongly for

males. Colegrove concludes from his data that "the period of

adolescence is one of great psychical awaking. A wide range of

memories is found at this time. From the fourteenth year with girls

and the fifteenth with boys the auditory memories are strongly

developed. At the dawn of adolescence the motor memory of voice nearly

culminates, and they have fewer memories of sickness and accidents to

self. During this time the memory of other persons and the activity of

others is emphasized in case of both boys and girls. In general, at

this period the special sensory memories are numerous, and it is the

golden age for motor memories. Now, too, the memories of high ideals,

self-sacrifice, and self-forgetfulness are cherished. Wider interests

than self and immediate friends become the objects of reflection and

recollection."

After twenty there is marked change in the memory content. The male

acquires more and the female less visual and auditory memories. The

memories of the female are more logical, and topographical features

increase. Memories of sickness and accidents to self decrease with the

males and increase with the females, while in the case of both there

is relative decline in the memories of sickness and accident to

others. From all this it would appear that different memories

culminate at different periods, and bear immediate relation to the

whole mental life of the period. While perhaps some of the finer

analyses of Colegrove may invite further confirmation, his main

results given above are not only suggestive, but rendered very

plausible by his evidence.

Statistics based upon replies to the question as to whether pleasant

or unpleasant experiences were best remembered, show that the former

increase at eleven, rise rapidly at fourteen, and culminate at

eighteen for males, and that the curve of painful memories follows the

same course, although for both there is a drop at fifteen. For

females, the pleasant memories increase rapidly from eleven to

thirteen, decline a little at fourteen, rise again at sixteen, and

culminate at seventeen, and the painful memories follow nearly the

same course, only with a slight drop at fifteen. Thus, up to

twenty-two for males, there is a marked preponderance of pleasant over

painful memories, although the two rise and fall together. After

thirty, unpleasant memories are but little recalled. For the Indians

and negroes in this census, unpleasant memories play a far more and

often preponderating rôle suggesting persecution and sad experiences.

Different elements of the total content of memory come to prominence

at different ages. He also found that the best remembered years of

life are sixteen to seventeen for males and fifteen for females, and

that in general the adolescent period has more to do than any other in

forming and furnishing the memory plexus, while the seventh and eighth

year are most poorly remembered.

It is also known that many false memories insert themselves into the

texture of remembered experiences. One dreams a friend is dead and

thinks she is till she is met one day in the street; or dreams of a

fire and inquires about it in the morning; dreams of a present and

searches the house for it next day; delays breakfast for a friend, who

arrived the night before in a dream, to come down to breakfast; a

child hunts for a bushel of pennies dreamed of, etc. These phantoms

falsify our memory most often, according to Dr. Colegrove, between

sixteen and nineteen.

Mnemonic devices prompt children to change rings to keep appointments,

tie knots in the handkerchief, put shoes on the dressing-table, hide

garments, associate faces with hoods, names with acts, things, or

qualities they suggest; visualize, connect figures, letters with

colors, etc. From a scrutiny of the original material, which I was

kindly allowed to make, this appears to rise rapidly at puberty.

[Footnote 1: See my Ideal School as Based on Child Study. Proceedings

of the National Educational Association, 1901, pp. 470-490.]

[Footnote 2: Charles P.G. Scott: The Number of Words in the English

and Other Languages. Princeton University Bulletin, May, 1902, vol.

13, pp. 106-111.]

[Footnote 3: The Teaching of English. Pedagogical Seminary, June,

1902, vol. 9, pp. 161-168.]

[Footnote 4: See my Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self. American

Journal of Psychology, April, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 351-395.]

[Footnote 5: Sprachgeschichte und Sprachpsychologie, mit Rucksicht auf

B. Delbrück's "Grundfragen der Sprachforschung." Leipzig, W.

Engelmann, 1901]

[Footnote 6: Latin in the High School. By Edward Conradi. Pedagogical

Seminary, March, 1905, vol. 12, pp. 1-26.]

[Footnote 7: The Psychological and Pedagogical Aspect of Language.

Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 438-458.]

[Footnote 8: Children's Interest in Words. Pedagogical Seminary,

September, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 274-295.]

[Footnote 9: Children's Interests in Words, Slang, Stories, etc.

Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 359-404.]

[Footnote 10: American Journal of Psychology, April, 1900, vol. 11, p.

345 _et seq._]

[Footnote 11: American Journal of Psychology, January, 1895, vol. 6,

pp. 585-592. See also vol. 10, p. 517 _et seq._]

[Footnote 12: North American Review, November, 1885, vol. 141, pp.

431-435.]

[Footnote 13: Introduction to the Biglow Papers, series ii.]

[Footnote 14: Some Observations on Children's Reading. Proceedings of

the National Educational Association, 1897, pp. 1015-102l.]

[Footnote 15: Report on Child Reading. New York Report of State

Superintendent, 1897, vol. 2, p. 979.]

[Footnote 16: Children's reading. North-Western Monthly, December,

1898, vol. 9, pp. 188-191, and January, 1899, vol. 9, pp. 229-233.]

[Footnote 17: A study of Children's Reading Tastes. Pedagogical

Seminary, December, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 523-535.]

[Footnote 18: Perhaps the best and most notable school reader is Das

Deutsche Lesebuch, begun nearly fifty years ago by Hopf and Paulsiek,

and lately supplemented by a corps of writers headed by Döbeln, all in

ten volumes of over 3,500 pages and containing nearly six times as

much matter as the largest American series. Many men for years went

over the history of German literature, from the Eddas and

Nibelungenlied down, including a few living writers, carefully

selecting saga, legends, _Märchen_, fables, proverbs, hymns, a few

prayers, Bible tales, conundrums, jests, and humorous tales, with many

digests, epitomes and condensation of great standards, quotations,

epic, lyric, dramatic poetry, adventure, exploration, biography, with

sketches of the life of each writer quoted, with a large final volume

on the history of German literature. All this, it is explained, is

"_stataric_" or required to be read between _Octava_[A] and

_Obersecunda_. It is no aimless anthology or chrestomathy like

Chambers's Encyclopedia, but it is perhaps the best product of

prolonged concerted study to select from a vast field the best to feed

each nascent stage of later childhood and early youth, and to secure

the maximum of pleasure and profit. The ethical end is dominant

throughout this pedagogic canon.]

[Footnote A: The Prussian gymnasium, whose course is classical and

fits for the University, has nine classes in three divisions of three

classes each. The lower classes are Octava, Septa, Sexta, Quinta, and

Quarta; the middle classes, Untertertia, Obertertia, and Untersecunda;

the higher classes, Obersecunda, Unterprima, and Oberprima. Pupils

must be at least nine years of age and have done three years

preparatory work before entrance.]

[Footnote 19: The Historic Sense among Children. In her Studies in

Historical Method. D. C. Heath and Co., Boston, 1896, p. 57.]

[Footnote 20: Special Study on Children's Sense of Historical Time.

Mrs. Barnes's Studies in Historical Method, D.C. Heath and Co.,

Boston, 1896, p. 94.]

[Footnote 21: L'Etude expérimentale de l'intelligence. Schleicher

Frères, Paris, 1903.]

[Footnote 22: The Growth of Memory in School Children. American

Journal of Psychology, April, 1892, vol. 9, pp. 362-380.]

[Footnote 23: Contribution to the Psychology and Pedagogy of

Feeble-minded Children. By G.E. Johnson. Pedagogical Seminary,

October, 1895, vol. 3, p. 270.]

[Footnote 24: A Test of Memory in School Children. Pedagogical

Seminary, October, 1898, vol. 4, pp. 61-78.]

[Footnote 25: Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie, Pathologie und

Hygiene. February, 1900. Jahrgang II, Heft 1, pp. 21-30.]

[Footnote 26: See Scripture: Scientific Child Study. Transactions of

the Illinois Society for Child Study, May, 1895, vol. 1, No. 2, pp.

32-37.]

[Footnote 27: Experimentelle Untersuchungen über die

Gedächtnissentwickelung bei Schulkindern. Zeits. f. Psychologie, u.

Physiologie der Sinnes-organe, November, 1900. Bd. 24. Heft 5, pp.

321-351.]

[Footnote 28: See Note 4, p. 270.]

[Footnote 29: Memory: An Inductive Study. By F.W. Colegrove. Henry

Holt and Co., New York, 1900, p. 229. See also Individual Memories.

American Journal of Psychology, January, 1899, vol. 10, pp 228-255.]

* * * * *