SCHOOL STRAIN
Like all factors of degeneracy, school strain evinces itself in a systemic
nervous exhaustion manifest along lines of least resistance, as in the
neuroses of Christopher. The first types of his neuroses are due to
overstrain of certain territories related with memory, as contrasted with
diminished use of the association fibres connecting these. As Schopenhauer
has excellently observed, man is one-third intellect and two-thirds will,
and much of this last two-thirds is the result of training. Capacity for
training may be greater in one individual than another, because of
inherited or congenital deficiencies. It is, as Sully[180] remarks, "a
happy circumstance in healthy children that that most prolific excitant of
fear, the presentation of something new and uncanny, is also provocative
of curiosity, with its impulse to look and examine. A very tiny child, on
first making acquaintance with some form of physical pain, as a bump on
the head, will deliberately repeat the experience by knocking his head
against something as if experimenting and watching the effect. A clearer
case of curiosity overpowering fear is that of a child who, after pulling
the tail of a cat in a bush and getting scratched, proceeded to dive into
the bush again. Still more interesting here are gradual transitions from
actual fear, before the new and strange, to bold inspection. The child who
was frightened by her Japanese doll insisted on seeing it every day. The
behaviour of one of these small persons on the arrival at the house of a
strange dog, of a dark foreigner or some other startling novelty is a
pretty and amusing sight. The first overpowering timidity, the shrinking
back to the mother's breast, followed by curious peers, then by bolder
outstretchings of head and arms, mark the stage by which curiosity and
interest gain on fear, and finally leave it far behind. Very soon the
small, timorous creatures will grow into bold adventurers. They will make
playthings of the alarming animals and of the alarming shadows too. Later
on still perhaps they will love nothing so much as to probe the awful
mysteries of gunpowder."
In degenerate children, because of deficiencies of proper
inter-association of the memory territories in the brain, healthy
curiosity, and the instinct of sheltering are deficient, so that states of
uncertainty, producing terror, result. These become permanent in after
life, even when training as an adult is strongly antagonistic to them.
This is illustrated, as Harriet C. B. Alexander has shown,[181] in George
Eliot, who during childhood "suffered from a low general state of health
and great susceptibility to terror at night, and the liability to have all
her soul become a quivering fear," which remained during life. She had
periods of depression and vertex headache, which latter gave place to
sick headache, often attended with rheumatoid phenomena. "She was an
awkward girl, reserved and serious far beyond her years, but observant,
and addicted to the habit of sitting in corners and watching her elders."
Fear of the unknown in childhood, seemingly a reversion to the fear of the
unknown of savages, tends, like it, to produce occult belief. Despite the
German rationalism of George Eliot, such fear found utterance in her
_Behind the Veil_, a mystically occult contrast with her novels and with
the positivism which was her religion. Theoretically the philosophy of
George Eliot should have destroyed much mysticism, yet as a survival of
"night terrors" it came to the surface. A very vivid autobiographical
narrative of night-terrors and similar nervous phenomena in the childhood
of a distinguished man of letters will be found in Horatio Brown's _Life
of John Addington Symonds_.
School over-pressure in certain respects checks, even in well-developed
minds, the transition from the terror of the unknown of childhood into the
calm of maturity. Morbid fears, imperative conceptions, and imperative
acts which torture the individual during an otherwise healthy career
unquestionably originate in the early periods of life.
Degenerate children, as Kiernan[182] remarks, early manifest decided
neurotic excitability, and tend to neuroses at physiologic crises like the
first and second dentition, and the onset and close of puberty. Slight
physical or mental perturbation is followed by sleeplessness, delirium,
hallucinations, &c. Hyperaesthesia and excessive reaction to pleasant or
offensive impressions exist. Vasomotor instability is present, pallor,
blushing, palpitations or pre-cardial anxiety result from trivial moral or
physical excitants. There is no precocity or aberration of the sexual
instinct. The disposition is irritable. The grasshopper is a burden.
Psychic pain arises from the most trivial cause, and finds expression in
emotional outbursts. Sympathies and antipathies are equally intense. The
mental life swings between periods of exaltation and depression,
alternating with brief epochs of healthy indifference. Egotism is supreme,
and morality absent or perverted. This absence or perversion is often
concealed under the guise of moral superiority, religiosity, or cant.
Vanity and jealous suspiciousness are common. The intellect and temper are
exceedingly irregular. Monotonously feeble, scanty ideation passes readily
into seeming brilliance, even to the extent of hallucinations. But ideas
are barren as a rule, because generated so rapidly as to destroy each
other ere they pass into action. Energy fails ere aught can be completed.
The inability to distinguish between desires and facts produces seeming
mendacity. The will in its apparent exuberance, its capricious energy, and
innate futility, matches and distorts the one-sided talent or whimsical
genius which may exist. The whole of this mental state may not be present.
The tendency to introspection, to morbid fear, to gloom, to
hallucinations, to alternations of depression and exaltation, may occur in
a degenerate child in whom has been otherwise preserved that secondary ego
which is the latest and greatest acquirement of the race.
In the same class, according to George Parkman,[183] an American alienist
of more than eighty years ago, brilliant talents, astonishing facility of
receiving and communicating ideas often appear suddenly at puberty,
especially in females, to be later followed by mediocrity, disappointment,
and supineness.
These degenerate children have a tendency, as C. F. Folsom[184] remarks,
to manifest aberrant tendencies at the periods of stress, which may, in
Folsom's judgment, be congenital, or due to early interference with normal
brain development. These show themselves in childhood and infancy by
irregularity or disturbed sleep, irritability, apprehension, strange
ideas, great sensitiveness to external impressions, high temperature,
delirium or convulsions from slight causes, disagreeable dreams and
visions, romancing, intense feeling, periodic headache, muscular
twitching, capricious appetite, and great intolerance of stimulants and
narcotics. At puberty developmental anomalies, and not infrequently
perverted sexual instincts, are observed in both sexes. During adolescence
there is often excessive shyness or bravado, always introspection and
self-consciousness, and sometimes abeyance or absence of the sexual
instinct, which, however, is frequently of extraordinary intensity. The
imitative and imaginative faculties may be quick. The affections or
emotions are vehement but shallow. Vehement dislikes are formed, and
intense personal attachments result in extraordinary friendships, which
not seldom swing around suddenly into bitter enmity or indifference. The
passions are unduly a force in the character, which lacks will power. The
individual's higher brain centres are not well inhibited, and he dashes
about like a ship without a rudder, fairly well if the winds be fair and
the seas be calm, but dependent on the elements for the character and the
time of the final wreck. Invention, poetry, music, artistic taste,
philanthropy, intensity, and originality, are sometimes of a higher order
among these persons, but desultory, half-finished work and shiftlessness
are much more common. With many of them concentrated, sustained effort,
and attempts to keep them to it are impossible. Their common-sense
perception of the relations of life, executive or business faculty and
judgment are seldom well developed. The memory is now and then
extraordinary. They are apt to be self-conscious, egotistic, and morbidly
conscious. They easily become victims of insomnia, neurasthenia,
hypochondria, neuroticism, hysteria, or insanity. They offend against the
proprieties of life and commit crime with less cause or provocation than
other persons. While many of them are among the most gifted and attractive
people in their community, the majority are otherwise, and possess an
uncommon capacity for making fools of themselves, and of being a nuisance
to their friends and of little use to the world.
These conditions occur from heredity in degenerates, but, as Francis
Warner[185] remarks, while "it is very common to see disordered conditions
of the nervous system in children with defective construction of body,
these nerve disturbances may also be seen in children with normal
construction of body. Such signs result from the disorder, produced by
special circumstances, aiding as well as producing defect which results
from, or in the next generation becomes, defect in original construction.
Among the signs of fatigue in children is the slight amount of force
expended in movement, often with asymmetry of balance in the body. The
fatigued centres may be unequally exhausted; spontaneous finger twitches
like those of younger children may be seen, and slight movements may be
excited by noises. The head is often held on one side. The arms when
extended are not held horizontally. Usually the left is lower. The face is
no evidence of bodily nutrition. It may be well nourished, yet the body be
thin. Three per cent. of the children seen in school are below par in
nutrition. These children are of lower general constitutional power. They
tend to an ill-nourished condition under the stress of life, and many
cases of mental excitement which, while they render them sharper mentally,
militate against general nutrition."
Colin A. Scott has found corroborative evidences of similar effects of
strain in the children of the New England and Illinois schools.
These systemic nervous exhaustions may, as W. S. Christopher, of Chicago,
has shown (in remarks on neuroses already cited), take unexpected local
directions, especially involving, in accordance with the general law of
reversal, evolution or degeneracy checks on excessive action. Among the
conditions produced by school strain of serious consequence in after-life
are headaches, usually charged to anaemia or neurasthenia. These headaches,
as Sachs,[186] of New York, has shown, usually appear after emotional
excitement or fatiguing ordeal. There are other symptoms expressive of
neurasthenia, such as slight tremor of the tongue and fingers and
exaggeration of the deep reflexes, but, above all, the very persistent
vertex headache, and the child's description of pressure or heat there. In
children emotional conditions, school strain, rivalry between class-mates,
are as liable to produce neurasthenia as are the more serious struggles
for existence in later life. These headaches may pass very readily at
periods of stress into migraine. The vertigo characteristic of migraine is
not rarely found in the neurasthenic headache of childhood. What is true
of migraine is also true of epilepsy. The tremors, &c., accompanying
neurasthenic headache become the convulsions of epilepsy. G. B. Fowler
reports a case emphasising very clearly the position of Christopher. It
was that of a seven-year-old boy of mushroom growth and hothouse culture.
He began every day before breakfast with an hour at Spanish, and until
three in the afternoon was unceasingly occupied with French, German,
music, and the ordinary school curriculum. This policy, initiated four
years before, the pressure being gradually increased, had been maintained
almost without interruption. The child had consequently developed into a
sort of phonograph, capable of starting automatic expressions which
afforded much entertainment to visitors, and gave the ambitious father
great hope and comfort. Under such conditions it is not to be wondered at
that something gave way, and, fortunately for the brain, it was the
sphincter of the anus. When this deplorable occurrence first took place
the child was sharply reprimanded; the accident repeating itself, however,
two or three times weekly, and later about once a day, more pronounced
measures were instituted. The boy was often severely flogged, deprived of
liberty, luxuries, &c., yet without avail. The lower bowel was perfectly
normal. The sphincter was tight, grasped the finger with the usual
firmness, and there were no sources of irritation about the anus. The
abnormal conditions under which the child had been living very naturally
at the outset were the cause of the difficulty. Cessation of the
punishment and release from books was ordered. The result was
satisfactory. In three weeks the involuntary discharge became gradually
less frequent, and finally ceased altogether.
Mental strain produces precisely similar effects on the nerve control of
the stomach. All types of nervous disturbances of the stomach--merycism
(cud-chewing), bulimia (ox appetite), acoria (incapacity for getting
enough)--result, as Ewald[187] has shown, from nerve strain, and increase
this through auto-intoxication.
The sphincter of bladder often gives way, and is a very frequent
expression of nervous exhaustion in the child, often increased by the
effects of nerve strain on the kidneys, which do their work of
purification imperfectly, while excreting nearly pure water. The enormous
quantity of clear urine passed during worry is a generally recognised
expression of such strain. This nerve-strain interference with the
purifying work of the kidneys leads to increased strain on the liver and
other glands, whence result migraine, the uric acid states, rheumatisms,
and the other perversions of nutrition. Nerve-strain on either liver,
bowel, or other glands, has similar secondary effects on the kidneys. In
part this is an organ degeneracy in function whereby man's liver and
kidneys do the work of the sauropsidal liver and kidneys.
Among the nutritive disturbances resulting from nerve-strain is the fatty
anaemia of Weir Mitchell, the juvenile obesity of Fere and others. This is
generally associated with the uric acid states which so often result from
school strain. The apparent improvement shown in increased weight leads to
increased strain, and many of these fat victims of school over-pressure
enter insane hospitals as puberty lunatics.
Other effects of the nutritive disturbances produced by school strain are
local irritations about the sexual organs. These may arise from irritation
by uric acid of the mouth of the bladder in boys, or of the vagina and
bladder in girls. Neurotic persons are liable to nerve storms, which
express themselves in emotional displays or restlessness or nagging
tendencies. These often coincide with the uric acid tendency to express
itself in "storms," like other periodical phenomena of the nervous system.
In consequence, "sexual storms" result in neuropaths, whether the
neuropathy be inherited or acquired. Local genital organ irritation leads
to scratching. From this are produced "masturbation storms," which the
subject loathes but cannot control. These occur also from the direct
effects of constipation, as well as from the worms and other parasites
which constipation fosters in the bowel. Teachers, by compelling children
to retain urine through fear of masturbation, often lead to what they
intend to prevent. At the outset masturbation and sexual explosions are
often a physical expression of school strain destitute of moral
significance. They are removable by removing the school strain and its
consequences. If strengthened by protracted existence they intensify
degeneracy due to school strain.
The states of imperfect nutrition, resultant from nerve strains on gland
function, in this way and in others, interfere with the proper evolution
of puberty and the involutional changes at the "change of life," which
occurs in both sexes. The conditions of "nervous cough," of so-called
"catarrh," and its ally, bronchorrhoea, are often found as expressions of
the systemic exhaustion from school strain, and are treated as purely
local conditions.
School strain, therefore, produces, like all the acquired factors of
degeneracy, a systemic nervous exhaustion which may be expressed either in
general neuropathy or hysteria after puberty, or in the tropho-neuroses,
like gout and allied states, or in epilepsy or arterial change,
predisposing to rupture of arteries at periods of stress, with resultant
convulsions and paralysis.