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G. Stanley Hall
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Title: Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Author: G. Stanley Hall
Posting Date: October 18, 2012 [EBook #9173]
Release Date: October, 2005
First Posted: September 10, 2003
Language: English
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YOUTH
ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE
BY
G. STANLEY HALL, Ph.D., LL.D.
President of Clark University and
Professor of Psychology
And Pedagogy
PREFACE
I have often been asked to select and epitomize the practical and
especially the pedagogical conclusions of my large volumes on
Adolescence, published in 1904, in such form that they may be
available at a minimum cost to parents, teachers, reading circles,
normal schools, and college classes, by whom even the larger volumes
have been often used. This, with the coöperation of the publishers and
with the valuable aid of Superintendent C.N. Kendall of Indianapolis,
I have tried to do, following in the main the original text, with only
such minor changes and additions as were necessary to bring the topics
up to date, and adding a new chapter on moral and religions education.
For the scientific justification of my educational conclusions I must,
of course, refer to the larger volumes. The last chapter is not in
"Adolescence," but is revised from a paper printed elsewhere. I am
indebted to Dr. Theodore L. Smith of Clark University for verification
of all references, proof-reading, and many minor changes.
G. STANLEY HALL.
CONTENTS
I.--PRE-ADOLESCENCE
Introduction: Characterization of the age from eight to twelve--The
era of recapitulating the stages of primitive human development--Life
close to nature--The age also for drill, habituation, memory work, and
regermination--Adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but
very distinct from it
II.--THE MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL
Muscles as organs of the will, of character, and even of thought--The
muscular virtues--Fundamental and accessory muscles and functions--The
development of the mind and of the upright position--Small muscles as
organs of thought--School lays too much stress upon these--Chorea--Vast
numbers of automatic movements in children--Great variety of
spontaneous activities--Poise, control, and spurtiness--Pen and tongue
wagging--Sedentary school life vs. free out-of-door activities--Modern
decay of muscles, especially in girls--Plasticity of motor habits at
puberty
III.--INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION.
Trade classes and schools, their importance in the international
market--Our dangers and the superiority of German workmen--The effects
of a tariff--Description of schools between the kindergarten and the
industrial school--Equal salaries for teachers in France--Dangers from
machinery--The advantages of life on the old New England farm--Its
resemblance to the education we now give negroes and Indians--Its
advantage for all-sided muscular development
IV.--MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD.
History of the movement--Its philosophy--The value of hand training in
the development of the brain and its significance in the making of
man--A grammar of our many industries hard--The best we do can reach
but few--Very great defects in manual training methods which do not
base on science and make nothing salable--The Leipzig system--Sloyd is
hypermethodic--These crude peasant industries can never satisfy
educational needs--The gospel of work; William Morris and the arts and
crafts movement--Its spirit desirable--The magic effects of a brief
period of intense work--The natural development of the drawing
instinct in the child
V.--GYMNASTICS
The story of Jahn and the Turners--The enthusiasm which this movement
generated in Germany--The ideal of bringing out latent powers--The
concept of more perfect voluntary control--Swedish gymnastics--Doing
everything possible for the body as a machine--Liberal physical
culture--Ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements
and correcting defects--The ideal of symmetry and prescribing
exercises to bring the body to a standard--Lamentable lack of
correlation between these four systems--Illustrations of the great
good that a systematic training can effect--Athletic records--Greek
physical training
VI.--PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES
The view of Groos partial, and a better explanation of play proposed
as rehearsing ancestral activities--The glory of Greek physical
training, its ideals and results--The first spontaneous movements of
infancy as keys to the past--Necessity of developing basal powers
before those that are later and peculiar to the individual--Plays that
interest due to their antiquity--Play with dolls--Play distinguished
by age--Play preferences of children and their reasons--The profound
significance of rhythm--The value of dancing and also its
significance, history, and the desirability of reintroducing
it--Fighting--Boxing--Wrestling--Bushido--Foot-ball--Military
ideals--Showing off--Cold baths--Hill climbing--The playground
movement--The psychology of play--Its relation to work
VII.--FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES.
Classification of children's faults--Peculiar children--Real fault as
distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease--Truancy, its
nature and effects--The genesis of crime--The lie, its classes and
relations to imagination--Predatory activities--Gangs--Causes of
crime--The effects of stories of crime--Temibility--Juvenile crime and
its treatment
VIII.--BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH.
Knightly ideals and honor--Thirty adolescents from
Shakespeare--Goethe--C.D. Warner--Aldrich--The fugitive nature of
adolescent experience--Extravagance of autobiographies--Stories that
attach to great names--Some typical crazes--Illustrations from George
Eliot, Edison, Chatterton, Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley,
Lyell, Byron, Heine, Napoleon, Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, Madame
Roland, Louisa Alcott, F.H. Burnett, Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff,
Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey, Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and
scores of others
IX.--THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS.
Change from childish to adult friends--Influence of favorite
teachers--What children wish or plan to do or be--Property and the
money sense--Social judgments--The only child--First social
organizations--Student life--Associations for youth controlled by
adults
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
XI.--THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS.
Equal opportunities of higher education now open--Brings new dangers
to women--Ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the
sexes should and do diverge--Different interests--Sex tension--Girls
more mature than boys at the same age--Radical psychic and
physiological differences between the sexes--The bachelor women--Needed
reconstruction--Food--Sleep--Regimen--Manners--Religion--Regularity--
The topics for a girls' curriculum--The eternally womanly
XII.--MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING.
Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of
brain--Difficulties in teaching morals--Methods in Europe--Obedience
to commands--Good habits should be mechanized--Value of scolding--How
to flog aright--Its dangers--Moral precepts and
proverbs--Habituation--Training will through
intellect--Examinations--Concentration--Originality--Froebel and the
naive--First ideas of God--Conscience--Importance of Old and New
Testaments--Sex dangers--Love and religion--Conversion
CHAPTER I
PRE-ADOLESCENCE
Introduction: Characterization of the age from eight to twelve--The
era of recapitulating the stages of primitive human development--Life
close to nature--The age also for drill, habituation, memory, work and
regermination--Adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but
very distinct from it.
The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of
human life. The acute stage of teething is passing, the brain has
acquired nearly its adult size and weight, health is almost at its
best, activity is greater and more varied than it ever was before or
ever will be again, and there is peculiar endurance, vitality, and
resistance to fatigue. The child develops a life of its own outside
the home circle, and its natural interests are never so independent of
adult influence. Perception is very acute, and there is great immunity
to exposure, danger, accident, as well as to temptation. Reason, true
morality, religion, sympathy, love, and esthetic enjoyment are but
very slightly developed.
Everything, in short, suggests that this period may represent in the
individual what was once for a very protracted and relatively
stationary period an age of maturity in the remote ancestors of our
race, when the young of our species, who were perhaps pygmoid, shifted
for themselves independently of further parental aid. The qualities
developed during pre-adolescence are, in the evolutionary history of
the race, far older than hereditary traits of body and mind which
develop later and which may be compared to a new and higher story
built upon our primal nature. Heredity is so far both more stable and
more secure. The elements of personality are few, but are well
organised on a simple, effective plan. The momentum of these traits
inherited from our indefinitely remote ancestors is great, and they
are often clearly distinguishable from those to be added later. Thus
the boy is father of the man in a new sense, in that his qualities are
indefinitely older and existed, well compacted, untold ages before the
more distinctly human attributes were developed. Indeed there are a
few faint indications of an earlier age node, at about the age of six,
as if amid the instabilities of health we could detect signs that this
may have been the age of puberty in remote ages of the past. I have
also given reasons that lead me to the conclusion that, despite its
dominance, the function of sexual maturity and procreative power is
peculiarly mobile up and down the age-line independently of many of
the qualities usually so closely associated with it, so that much that
sex created in the phylum now precedes it in the individual.
Rousseau would leave prepubescent years to nature and to these primal
hereditary impulsions and allow the fundamental traits of savagery
their fling till twelve. Biological psychology finds many and cogent
reasons to confirm this view _if only a proper environment could be
provided_. The child revels in savagery; and if its tribal, predatory,
hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could
be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem
hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organized and directed
as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than all that the best
modern school can provide. Rudimentary organs of the soul, now
suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms
later, would be developed in their season so that we should be immune
to them in maturer years, on the principle of the Aristotelian
catharsis for which I have tried to suggest a far broader application
than the Stagirite could see in his day.
These inborn and more or less savage instincts can and should be
allowed some scope. The deep and strong cravings in the individual for
those primitive experiences and occupations in which his ancestors
became skilful through the pressure of necessity should not be
ignored, but can and should be, at least partially, satisfied in a
vicarious way, by tales from literature, history, and tradition which
present the crude and primitive virtues of the heroes of the world's
childhood. In this way, aided by his vivid visual imagination, the
child may enter upon his heritage from the past, live out each stage
of life to its fullest and realize in himself all its manifold
tendencies. Echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the remote past
of the race they must remain, but just these are the murmurings of the
only muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity.
Thus we not only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for
further psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which are
the most precious and potential things on earth. So, too, in our
urbanized hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its
time, we must teach nature, although the very phrase is ominous. But
we must not, in so doing, wean still more from, but perpetually incite
to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, the
true homes of childhood in this wild, undomesticated stage from which
modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him. Books and
reading are distasteful, for the very soul and body cry out for a more
active, objective life, and to know nature and man at first hand.
These two staples, stories and nature, by these informal methods of
the home and the environment, constitute fundamental education.
But now another remove from nature seems to be made necessary by the
manifold knowledges and skills of our highly complex civilization. We
should transplant the human sapling, I concede reluctantly, as early
as eight, but not before, to the schoolhouse with its imperfect
lighting, ventilation, temperature. We must shut out nature and open
books. The child must sit on unhygienic benches and work the tiny
muscles that wag the tongue and pen, and let all the others, which
constitute nearly half its weight, decay. Even if it be prematurely,
he must be subjected to special disciplines and be apprenticed to the
higher qualities of adulthood; for he is not only a product of nature,
but a candidate for a highly developed humanity. To many, if not most,
of the influences here there can be at first but little inner
response. Insight, understanding, interest, sentiment, are for the
most part only nascent; and most that pertains to the true kingdom of
mature manhood is embryonic. The wisest requirements seem to the child
more or less alien, arbitrary, heteronomous, artificial, falsetto.
There is much passivity, often active resistance and evasion, and
perhaps spasms of obstinacy, to it all. But the senses are keen and
alert, reactions immediate and vigorous; and the memory is quick, sure
and lasting; and ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of
many a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfolding.
Never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline,
such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new
conditions. It is the age of external and mechanical training.
Reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign
tongues and their pronunciations, the manipulation of numbers and of
geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden
hour; and if it passes unimproved, all these can never be acquired
later without a heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. These
necessities may be hard for the health of body, sense, mind, as well
as for morals; and pedagogic art consists in breaking the child into
them betimes as intensely and as quickly as possible with minimal
strain and with the least amount of explanation or coquetting for
natural interest, and in calling medicine confectionery. This is not
teaching in its true sense so much as it is drill, inculcation, and
regimentation. The method should be mechanical, repetitive,
authoritative, dogmatic. The automatic powers are now at their very
apex, and they can do and bear more than our degenerate pedagogy knows
or dreams of. Here we have something to learn from the schoolmasters
of the past back to the middle ages, and even from the ancients. The
greatest stress, with short periods and few hours, incessant
insistence, incitement, and little reliance upon interest, reason or
work done without the presence of the teacher, should be the guiding
principles for pressure in these essentially formal and, to the child,
contentless elements of knowledge. These should be sharply
distinguished from the indigenous, evoking, and more truly educational
factors described in the last paragraph, which are meaty,
content-full, and relatively formless as to time of day, method,
spirit, and perhaps environment and personnel of teacher, and possibly
somewhat in season of the year, almost as sharply as work differs from
play, or perhaps as the virility of man that loves to command a
phalanx, be a martinet and drill-master, differs from femininity which
excels in persuasion, sympathetic insight, story-telling, and in the
tact that discerns and utilizes spontaneous interests in the young.
Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human
traits are now born. The qualities of body and soul that now emerge
are far newer. The child comes from and harks back to a remoter past;
the adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of
the race slowly become prepotent. Development is less gradual and more
saltatory, suggestive of some ancient period of storm and stress when
old moorings were broken and a higher level attained. The annual rate
of growth in height, weight, and strength is increased and often
doubled, and even more. Important functions, previously non-existent,
arise. Growth of parts and organs loses its former proportions, some
permanently and some for a season. Some of these are still growing in
old age and others are soon arrested and atrophy. The old measures of
dimensions become obsolete, and old harmonies are broken. The range of
individual differences and average errors in all physical measurements
and all psychic tests increases. Some linger long in the childish
stage and advance late or slowly, while others push on with a sudden
outburst of impulsion to early maturity. Bones and muscles lead all
other tissues, as if they vied with each other; and there is frequent
flabbiness or tension as one or the other leads. Nature arms youth for
conflict with all the resources at her command--speed, power of
shoulder, biceps, back, leg, jaw--strengthens and enlarges skull,
thorax, hips, makes man aggressive and prepares woman's frame for
maternity.
* * * * *
CHAPTER II
THE MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL
Muscles as organs of the will, of character and even of thought--The
muscular virtues--Fundamental and accessory muscles and functions--The
development of the mind and of the upright position--Small
muscles as organs of thought--School lays too much stress upon
these--Chorea--vast numbers of automatic movements in children--Great
variety of spontaneous activities--Poise, control and spurtiness--Pen
and tongue wagging--Sedentary school life _vs_ free out-of-door
activities--Modern decay of muscles, especially in girls--Plasticity
of motor habits at puberty.
The muscles are by weight about forty-three per cent. of the average
adult male human body. They expend a large fraction of all the kinetic
energy of the adult body, which a recent estimate places as high as
one-fifth. The cortical centers for the voluntary muscles extend over
most of the lateral psychic zones of the brain, so that their culture
is brain building. In a sense they are organs of digestion, for which
function they play a very important rôle. Muscles are in a most
intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will. They have built
all the roads, cities, and machines in the world, written all the
books, spoken all the words, and, in fact, done everything that man
has accomplished with matter. If they are undeveloped or grow relaxed
and flabby, the dreadful chasm between good intentions and their
execution is liable to appear and widen. Character might be in a sense
defined as a plexus of motor habits. To call conduct three-fourths of
life, with Matthew Arnold; to describe man as one-third intellect and
two-thirds will, with Schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does
or that he is the sum of his movements, with F.W. Robertson; that
character is simply muscle habits, with Maudsley; that the age of art
is now slowly superseding the age of science, and that the artist will
drive out with the professor, with the anonymous author of "Rembrandt
als Erzicher";[1] that history is consciously willed movements, with
Bluntschli; or that we could form no conception of force or energy in
the world but for our own muscular effort; to hold that most thought
involves change of muscle tension as more or less integral to it--all
this shows how we have modified the antique Ciceronian conception
_vivere est cogitari_, [To live is to think] to _vivere est velle_,
[To live is to will] and gives us a new sense of the importance of
muscular development and regimen.[2]
Modern psychology thus sees in muscles organs of expression for all
efferent processes. Beyond all their demonstrable functions, every
change of attention and of psychic states generally plays upon them
unconsciously, modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may
be called organs of thought and feeling as well as of will, in which
some now see the true Kantian thing-in-itself the real substance of
the world, in the anthropomorphism of force. Habits even determine the
deeper strata of belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not
words, are the language of complete men. The motor areas are closely
related and largely identical with the psychic, and muscle culture
develops brain-centers as nothing else yet demonstrably does. Muscles
are the vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience, character, and
even of manners and customs. For the young, motor education is
cardinal, and is now coming to due recognition; and, for all,
education is incomplete without a motor side. Skill, endurance, and
perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue,
velleity, caprice, _ennui_, restlessness, lack of control and poise,
muscular faults.
To understand the momentous changes of motor functions that
characterize adolescence we must consider other than the measurable
aspects of the subject. Perhaps the best scale on which to measure all
normal growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the
progress from fundamental to accessory. The former designates the
muscles and movements of the trunk and large joints, neck, back, hips,
shoulders, knees, and elbows, sometimes called central, and which in
general man has in common with the higher and larger animals. Their
activities are few, mostly simultaneous, alternating and rhythmic, as
of the legs in walking, and predominate in hard-working men and women
with little culture or intelligence, and often in idiots. The latter
or accessory movements are those of the hand, tongue, face, and
articulatory organs, and these may be connected into a long and
greatly diversified series, as those used in writing, talking,
piano-playing. They are represented by smaller and more numerous
muscles, whose functions develop later in life and represent a higher
standpoint of evolution. These smaller muscles for finer movements
come into function later and are chiefly associated with psychic
activity, which plays upon them by incessantly changing their
tensions, if not causing actual movement. It is these that are so
liable to disorder in the many automatisms and choreic tics we see in
school children, especially if excited or fatigued. General paralysis
usually begins in the higher levels by breaking these down, so that
the first symptom of its insidious and never interrupted progress is
inability to execute the more exact and delicate movements of tongue
or hand, or both. Starting with the latest evolutionary level, it is a
devolution that may work downward till very many of the fundamental
activities are lost before death.
Nothing better illustrates this distinction than the difference
between the fore foot of animals and the human hand. The first begins
as a fin or paddle or is armed with a hoof, and is used solely for
locomotion. Some carnivora with claws use the fore limb also for
holding well as tearing, and others for digging. Arboreal life seems
to have almost created the simian hand and to have wrought a
revolution in the form and use of the forearm and its accessory
organs, the fingers. Apes and other tree-climbing creatures must not
only adjust their prehensile organ to a wide variety of distances and
sizes of branches, but must use the hands more or less freely for
picking, transporting, and eating fruit; and this has probably been a
prime factor in lifting man to the erect position, without which human
intelligence as we know it could have hardly been possible. "When we
attempt to measure the gap between man and the lower animals in terms
of the form of movement, the wonder is no less great than when we use
the term of mentality."[3] The degree of approximation to human
intelligence in anthropoid animals follows very closely the degree of
approximation to human movements.
The gradual acquirement of the erect position by the human infant
admirably repeats this long phylogenetic evolution.[4] At first the
limbs are of almost no use in locomotion, but the fundamental trunk
muscles with those that move the large joints are more or less
spasmodically active. Then comes creeping, with use of the hip
muscles, while all below the knee is useless, as also are the fingers.
Slowly the leg and foot are degraded to locomotion, slowly the great
toe becomes more limited in its action, the thumb increases in
flexibility and strength of opposition, and the fingers grow more
mobile and controllable. As the body slowly assumes the vertical
attitude, the form of the chest changes till its greatest diameter is
transverse instead of from front to back. The shoulder-blades are less
parallel than in quadrupeds, and spread out till they approximate the
same plane. This gives the arm freedom of movement laterally, so that
it can be rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in man as contrasted
to one hundred degrees in apes, thus giving man the command of almost
any point within a sphere of which the two arms are radii. The power
of grasping was partly developed from and partly added to the old
locomotor function of the fore limbs; the jerky aimless automatisms,
as well as the slow rhythmic flexion and extension of the fingers and
hand, movements which are perhaps survivals of arboreal or of even
earlier aquatic life, are coördinated; and the bilateral and
simultaneous rhythmic movements of the heavier muscles are
supplemented by the more finely adjusted and specialized activities
which as the end of the growth period is approached are determined
less by heredity and more by environment. In a sense, a child or a man
is the sum total of his movements or tendencies to move; and nature
and instinct chiefly determine the basal, and education the accessory
parts of our activities.
The entire accessory system is thus of vital importance for the
development of all of the arts of expression. These smaller muscles
might almost be called organs of thought. Their tension is modified
with the faintest change of soul, such as is seen in accent,
inflection, facial expressions, handwriting, and many forms of
so-called mind-reading, which, in fact, is always muscle-reading. The
day-laborer of low intelligence, with a practical vocabulary of not
over five hundred words, who can hardly move each of his fingers
without moving others or all of them, who can not move his brows or
corrugate his forehead at will, and whose inflection is very
monotonous, illustrates a condition of arrest or atrophy of this
later, finer, accessory system of muscles. On the other hand, the
child, precocious in any or all of these later respects, is very
liable to be undeveloped in the larger and more fundamental parts and
functions. The full unfoldment of each is, in fact, an inexorable
condition precedent for the normal development to full and abiding
maturity of the higher and more refined muscularity, just as
conversely the awkwardness and clumsiness of adolescence mark a
temporary loss of balance in the opposite direction. If this general
conception be correct, then nature does not finish the basis of her
pyramid in the way Ross, Mercier, and others have assumed, but lays a
part of the foundation and, after carrying it to an apex, normally
goes back and adds to the foundation to carry up the apex still higher
and, if prevented from so doing, expends her energy in building the
apex up at a sharper angle till instability results. School and
kindergarten often lay a disproportionate strain on the tiny accessory
muscles, weighing altogether but a few ounces, that wag the tongue,
move the pen, and do fine work requiring accuracy. But still at this
stage prolonged work requiring great accuracy is irksome and brings
dangers homologous to those caused by too much fine work in the
kindergarten before the first adjustment of large to small muscles,
which lasts until adolescence, is established. Then disproportion
between function and growth often causes symptoms of chorea. The chief
danger is arrest of the development and control of the smaller
muscles. Many occupations and forms of athletics, on the contrary,
place the stress mainly upon groups of fundamental muscles to the
neglect of finer motor possibilities. Some who excel in heavy
athletics no doubt coarsen their motor reactions, become not only
inexact and heavy but unresponsive to finer stimuli, as if the large
muscles were hypertrophied and the small ones arrested. On the other
hand, many young men, and probably more young women, expend too little
of their available active energy upon basal and massive muscle work,
and cultivate too much, and above all too early, the delicate
responsive work. This is, perhaps, the best physiological
characterization of precocity and issues in excessive nervous and
muscular irritability. The great influx of muscular vigor that unfolds
during adolescent years and which was originally not only necessary to
successful propagation, but expressive of virility, seems to be a very
plastic quantity, so that motor regimen and exercise at this stage is
probably more important and all-conditioning for mentality, sexuality,
and health than at any other period of life. Intensity, and for a time
a spurty diathesis, is as instinctive and desirable as are the copious
minor automatisms which spontaneously give the alphabet out of which
complex and finer motor series are later spelled by the conscious
will. Mercier and others have pointed out that, as most skilled labor,
so school work and modern activities in civilized life generally lay
premature and disproportionate strains upon those kinds of movement
requiring exactness. Stress upon basal movements is not only
compensating but is of higher therapeutic value against the disorders
of the accessory system; it constitutes the best core or prophylactic
for fidgets and tense states, and directly develops poise, control,
and psycho-physical equilibrium. Even when contractions reach choreic
intensity the best treatment is to throw activities down the scale
that measures the difference between primary and secondary movements
and to make the former predominate.
The number of movements, the frequency with which they are repeated,
their diversity, the number of combinations, and their total kinetic
quantum in young children, whether we consider movements of the body
as a whole, fundamental movements of large limbs, or finer accessory
motions, is amazing. Nearly every external stimulus is answered by a
motor response. Dresslar[5] observed a thirteen months' old baby for
four hours, and found, to follow Preyer's classification, impulsive or
spontaneous, reflex, instinctive, imitative, inhibitive, expressive,
and even deliberative movements, with marked satisfaction in rhythm,
attempts to do almost anything which appealed to him, and almost
inexhaustible efferent resources. A friend has tried to record every
word uttered by a four-year-old girl during a portion of a day, and
finds nothing less than verbigerations. A teacher noted the activities
of a fourteen-year-old boy during the study time of a single school
day[6], with similar results.
Lindley[7] studied 897 common motor automatisms in children, which he
divided into 92 classes: 45 in the region of the head, 20 in the feet
and legs, 19 in the hands and fingers. Arranged in the order of
frequency with which each was found, the list stood as follows:
fingers, feet, lips, tongue, head, body, hands, mouth, eyes, jaws,
legs, forehead, face, arms, ears. In the last five alone adolescents
exceeded children, the latter excelling the former most in those of
head, mouth, legs, and tongue, in this order. The writer believes that
there are many more automatisms than appeared in his returns.
School life, especially in the lower grades, is a rich field for the
study of these activities. They are familiar, as licking things,
clicking with the tongue, grinding the teeth, scratching, tapping,
twirling a lock of hair or chewing it, biting the nails (Bérillon's
onychophagia), shrugging, corrugating, pulling buttons or twisting
garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, thumbs, rotating, nodding
and shaking the head, squinting and winking, swaying, pouting and
grimacing, scraping the floor, rubbing hands, stroking, patting,
flicking the fingers, wagging, snapping the fingers, muffling,
squinting, picking the face, interlacing the fingers, cracking the
joints, finger plays, biting and nibbling, trotting the leg, sucking
things, etc.
The average number of automatisms per 100 persons Smith found to be in
children 176, in adolescents 110. Swaying is chiefly with children;
playing and drumming with the fingers is more common among
adolescents; the movements of fingers and feet decline little with
age, and those of eyes and forehead increase, which is significant for
the development of attention. Girls excel greatly in swaying, and
also, although less, in finger automatism; and boys lead in movements
of tongue, feet, and hands. Such movements increase, with too much
sitting, intensity of effort, such as to fix attention, and vary with
the nature of the activity willed, but involve few muscles directly
used in a given task. They increase up the kindergarten grades and
fall off rapidly in the primary grades; are greater with tasks
requiring fine and exact movements than with those involving large
movements. Automatisms are often a sign of the difficulty of tasks.
The restlessness that they often express is one of the commonest signs
of fatigue. They are mostly in the accessory muscles, while those of
the fundamental muscles (body, legs, and arms) disappear rapidly with
age; those of eye, brow, and jaw show greatest increase with age, but
their frequency in general declines with growing maturity, although
there is increased frequency of certain specialized contractions,
which indicate the gradual settling of expression in the face.
Often such movements pass over by insensible gradation into the morbid
automatism of chorea, and in yet lower levels of decay we see them in
the aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick.
In idiots[8] arrest of higher powers often goes with hypertrophy of
these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as nature impels
those partially blind to rub the eyes for "light-hunger," so it
prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head for cerebrations),
rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc. Movements often pass to fixed
attitudes and postures of limbs or body, disturbing the normal balance
between flexors and extensors, the significance of which as nerve
signs or exponents of habitual brain states and tensions Warner has so
admirably shown.
Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a
considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children.
Many of what are now often called nerve signs and even choreic
symptoms, the fidgetiness in school on cloudy days and often after a
vacation, the motor superfluities of awkwardness, embarrassment,
extreme effort, excitement, fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the
forms in which we receive the full momentum of heredity and mark a
natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and
especially of will. Hence they must be abundant. All parts should act
in all possible ways at first and untrammeled by the activity of all
other parts and functions. Some of these activities are more essential
for growth in size than are later and more conscious movements. Here
as everywhere the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded
before the ability to check or even to use them can develop. All
movements arising from spontaneous activity of nerve cells or centers
must be made in order even to avoid the atrophy of disease. Not only
so, but this purer kind of innateness must often be helped out to some
extent in some children by stimulating reflexes; a rich and wide
repertory of sensation must be made familiar; more or less and very
guarded, watched and limited experiences of hunger, thirst, cold,
heat, tastes, sounds, smells, colors, brightnesses, tactile
irritations, and perhaps even occasional tickling and pain to play off
the vastly complex function of laughing, crying, etc., may in some
cases be judicious. Conscious and unconscious imitation or repetition
of every sort of copy may also help to establish the immediate and
low-level connection between afferent and efferent processes that
brings the organism into direct _rapport_ and harmony with the whole
world of sense. Perhaps the more rankly and independently they are
developed to full functional integrity, each in its season, if we only
knew that season, the better. Premature control by higher centers, or
coördination into higher compounds of habits and ordered serial
activities, is repressive and wasteful, and the mature will of which
they are components, or which must at least domesticate them, is
stronger and more forcible if this serial stage is not unduly
abridged.
But, secondly, many, if not most, of these activities when developed a
little, group after group, as they arise, must be controlled, checked,
and organized into higher and often more serial compounds. The
inhibiting functions are at first hard. In trying to sit still the
child sets its teeth, holds the breath, clenches its fists and perhaps
makes every muscle tense with a great effort that very soon exhausts.
This repressive function is probably not worked from special nervous
centers, nor can we speak with confidence of collisions with "sums of
arrest" in a sense analogous to that of Herbart, or of stimuli that
normally cause catabolic molecular processes in the cell, being
mysteriously diverted to produce increased instability or anabolic
lability in the sense of Wundt's _Mechanik der Nerven_. The concept
now suggested by many facts is that inhibition is irradiation or long
circuiting to higher and more complex brain areas, so that the energy,
whether spontaneous or reflex, is diverted to be used elsewhere. These
combinations are of a higher order, more remote from reflex action,
and modified by some Jacksonian third level.[9] Action is now not from
independent centers, but these are slowly associated, so that
excitation may flow off from one point to any other and any reaction
may result from any stimulus.
The more unified the brain the less it suffers from localization, and
the lower is the level to which any one function can exhaust the
whole. The tendency of each group of cells to discharge or overflow
into those of lower tension than themselves increases as
correspondence in time and space widens. The more one of a number of
activities gains in power to draw on all the brain, or the more
readily the active parts are fed at cost of the resting parts, the
less is rest to be found in change from one of these activities to
another, and the less do concentration and specialization prove to be
dangerous. Before, the aim was to wake all parts to function; now it
is to connect them. Intensity of this cross-section activity now tends
to unity, so that all parts of the brain energize together. In a brain
with this switchboard function well organized, each reaction has grown
independent of its own stimulus and may result from any stimulation,
and each act, e.g., a finger movement of a peculiar nature, may tire
the whole brain. This helps us to understand why brain-workers so
often excel laborers not only in sudden dynamometric strength test,
but in sustained and long-enduring effort. In a good brain or in a
good machine, power may thus be developed over a large surface, and
all of it applied to a small one, and hence the dangers of
specialization are lessened in exact proportion as the elements of our
ego are thus compacted together. It is in the variety and delicacy of
these combinations and all that they imply, far more than in the
elements of which they are composed, that man rises farthest above the
higher animals; and of these powers later adolescence is the golden
age. The aimless and archaic movements of infancy, whether massive and
complex or in the form of isolated automatic tweaks or twinges, are
thus, by slow processes of combined analysis and synthesis, involving
changes as radical as any in all the world of growth, made over into
habits and conduct that fit the world of present environment.
But, thirdly, this long process carried out with all degrees of
completeness may be arrested at any unfinished stage. Some automatisms
refuse to be controlled by the will, and both they and it are often
overworked. Here we must distinguish constantly between (1) those
growing rankly in order to be later organized under the will, and (2)
those that have become feral after this domestication of them has lost
power from disease or fatigue, and (3) those that have never been
subjugated because the central power that should have used them to
weave the texture of willed action--the proper language of complete
manhood--was itself arrested or degenerate. With regard to many of
these movements these distinctions can be made with confidence, and in
some children more certainly than in others. In childhood, before
twelve, the efferent patterns should be developed into many more or
less indelible habits, and their colors set fast. Motor specialties
requiring exactness and grace like piano-playing, drawing, writing,
pronunciation of a foreign tongue, dancing, acting, singing, and a
host of virtuosities, must be well begun before the relative arrest of
accessory growth at the dawn of the ephebic regeneration and before
its great afflux of strength. The facts seem to show that children of
this age, such as Hancock[10] described, who could not stand with feet
close together and eyes closed without swaying much, could not walk
backward, sit still half a minute, dress alone, tie two ends of a
string together, interlace slats, wind thread, spin a top, stand on
toes or heels, hop on each foot, drive a nail, roll a hoop, skate, hit
fingers together rapidly in succession beginning at the little finger
and then reversing, etc., are the very ones in whom automatisms are
most marked or else they are those constitutionally inert, dull, or
uneducable.
In children these motor residua may persist as characteristic features
of inflection, accent, or manners; automatisms may become morbid in
stammering or stuttering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting,
tics or tweaks, etc. Instead of disappearing with age, as they should,
they are seen in the blind as facial grimaces uncorrected by the
mirror or facial consciousness, in the deaf as inarticulate noises;
and they may tend to grow monstrous with age as if they were
disintegrated fragments of our personality, split off and aborted, or
motor parasites leaving our psycho-physic ego poorer in energy and
plasticity of adaptation, till the distraction and anarchy of the
individual nature becomes conspicuous and pathetic.
At puberty, however, when muscle habits are so plastic, when there is
a new relation between quantity or volume of motor energy and
qualitative differentiation, and between volitional control and reflex
activities, these kinetic remnants strongly tend to shoot together
into wrong aggregates if right ones are not formed. Good manners and
correct motor form generally, as well as skill, are the most economic
ways of doing things; but this is the age of wasteful ways,
awkwardness mannerisms, tensions that are a constant leakage of vital
energy, perhaps semi-imperative acts, contortions, quaint movements,
more elaborated than in childhood and often highly anesthetic and
disagreeable, motor coördinations that will need laborious
decomposition later. The avoidable factor in their causation is, with
some modification, not unlike that of the simpler feral movements and
faulty attitudes, carriage, and postures in children; viz., some form
of overpressure or misfit between environment and nature. As during
the years from four to eight there is great danger that overemphasis
of the activities of the accessory muscles will sow the seeds of
chorea, or aggravate predispositions to it, now again comes a greatly
increased danger, hardly existing from eight to twelve, that
overprecision, especially if fundamental activities are neglected,
will bring nervous strain and stunting precocity. This is again the
age of the basal, e.g., hill-climbing muscle, of leg and back and
shoulder work, and of the yet more fundamental heart, lung, and chest
muscles. Now again, the study of a book, under the usual conditions of
sitting in a closed space and using pen, tongue, and eye combined, has
a tendency to overstimulate the accessory muscles. This is especially
harmful for city children who are too prone to the distraction of
overmobility at an age especially exposed to maladjustment of motor
income and expenditure; and it constitutes not a liberal or
power-generating, but a highly and prematurely specialized, narrowing,
and weakening education unless offset by safeguards better than any
system of gymnastics, which is at best artificial and exaggerated.
As Bryan well says, "The efficiency of a machine depends so far as we
know upon the maximum force, rate, amplitude, and variety of direction
of its movements and upon the exactness with which below these maxima
the force, rate, amplitude, and direction of the movements can be
controlled." The motor efficiency of a man depends upon his ability in
all these respects. Moreover, the education of the small muscles and
fine adjustments of larger ones is as near mental training as physical
culture can get; for these are the thought-muscles and movements, and
their perfected function is to reflect and express by slight
modifications of tension and tone every psychic change. Only the brain
itself is more closely and immediately an organ of thought than are
these muscles and their activity, reflex, spontaneous, or imitative in
origin. Whether any of them are of value, as Lindley thinks, in
arousing the brain to activity, or as Müller suggests, in drawing off
sensations or venting efferent impulses that would otherwise distract,
we need not here discuss. If so, this is, of course, a secondary and
late function--nature's way of making the best of things and utilizing
remnants.
With these facts and their implications in mind we can next pass to
consider the conditions under which the adolescent muscles best
develop. Here we confront one of the greatest and most difficult
problems of our age. Changes in modern motor life have been so vast
and sudden as to present some of the most comprehensive and
all-conditioning dangers that threaten civilized races. Not only have
the forms of labor been radically changed within a generation or two,
but the basal activities that shaped the body of primitive man have
been suddenly swept away by the new methods of modern industry. Even
popular sports, games, and recreations, so abundant in the early life
of all progressive peoples, have been reduced and transformed; and the
play age, that once extended on to middle life and often old age, has
been restricted. Sedentary life in schools and offices, as we have
seen, is reducing the vigor and size of our lower limbs. Our industry
is no longer under hygienic conditions; and instead of being out of
doors, in the country, or of highly diversified kinds, it is now
specialized, monotonous, carried on in closed spaces, bad air, and
perhaps poor light, especially in cities. The diseases and arrest bred
in the young by life in shops, offices, factories, and schools
increase. Work is rigidly bound to fixed hours, uniform standards,
stints and piece-products; and instead of a finished article, each
individual now achieves a part of a single process and knows little of
those that precede or follow. Machinery has relieved the large basal
muscles and laid more stress upon fine and exact movements that
involve nerve strain. The coarser forms of work that involve hard
lifting, carrying, digging, etc., are themselves specialized, and
skilled labor requires more and more brain-work. It has been estimated
that "the diminution of manual labor required to do a given quantity
of work in 1884 as compared with 1870 is no less than 70 per
cent."[11] Personal interest in and the old native sense of
responsibility for results, ownership and use of the finished
products, which have been the inspiration and soul of work in all the
past, are in more and more fields gone. Those who realize how small a
proportion of the young male population train or even engage in
amateur sports with zest and regularity, how very few and picked men
strive for records, and how immediate and amazing are the results of
judicious training, can best understand how far below his
possibilities as a motor being the average modern man goes through
life, and how far short in this respect he falls from fulfilling
nature's design for him.
For unnumbered generations primitive man in the nomad age wandered,
made perhaps annual migrations, and bore heavy burdens, while we ride
relatively unencumbered. He tilled the reluctant soil, digging with
rude implements where we use machines of many man-power. In the stone,
iron, and bronze age, he shaped stone and metals, and wrought with
infinite pains and effort, products that we buy without even knowledge
of the processes by which they are made. As hunter he followed game,
which, when found, he chased, fought, and overcame in a struggle
perhaps desperate, while we shoot it at a distance with little risk or
effort. In warfare he fought hand to hand and eye to eye, while we
kill "with as much black powder as can be put in a woman's thimble."
He caught and domesticated scores of species of wild animals and
taught them to serve him; fished with patience and skill that
compensated his crude tools, weapons, implements, and tackle; danced
to exhaustion in the service of his gods or in memory of his forebears
imitating every animal, rehearsing all his own activities in mimic
form to the point of exhaustion, while we move through a few figures
in closed spaces. He dressed hides, wove baskets which we can not
reproduce, and fabrics which we only poorly imitate by machinery, made
pottery which set our fashions, played games that invigorated body and
soul. His courtship was with feats of prowess and skill, and meant
physical effort and endurance.
Adolescent girls, especially in the middle classes, in upper grammar
and high school grades, during the golden age for nascent muscular
development, suffer perhaps most of all in this respect. Grave as are
the evils of child labor, I believe far more pubescents in this
country now suffer from too little than from too much physical
exercise, while most who suffer from work do so because it is too
uniform, one-sided, accessory, or performed under unwholesome
conditions, and not because it is excessive in amount. Modern industry
has thus largely ceased to be a means of physical development and
needs to be offset by compensating modes of activity. Many
labor-saving devices increase neural strain, so that one of the
problems of our time is how to preserve and restore nerve energy.
Under present industrial systems this must grow worse and not better
in the future. Healthy natural industries will be less and less open
to the young. This is the new situation that now confronts those
concerned for motor education, if they would only make good what is
lost.
Some of the results of these conditions are seen in average
measurements of dimensions, proportions, strength, skill, and control.
Despite the excellence of the few, the testimony of those most
familiar with the bodies of children and adults, and their physical
powers, gives evidence of the ravages of modern modes of life that,
without a wide-spread motor revival, can bode only degeneration for
our nation and our race. The number of common things that can not be
done at all; the large proportion of our youth who must be exempted
from any kinds of activity or a great amount of any; the thin limbs,
collapsed shoulders or chests, the bilateral asymmetry, weak hearts,
lungs, eyes, puny and bad muddy or pallid complexions, tired ways,
automatism, dyspeptic stomachs, the effects of youthful error or of
impoverished heredity, delicate and tender nurture, often, alas, only
too necessary, show the lamentable and cumulative effects of long
neglect of the motor abilities, the most educable of all man's powers,
and perhaps the most important for his well-being. If the unfaithful
stewards of these puny and shameful bodies had again, as in Sparta, to
strip and stand before stern judges and render them account, and be
smitten with a conviction of their weakness, guilty deformity, and
arrest of growth; if they were brought to realize how they are fallen
beings, as weak as stern theologians once deemed them depraved, and
how great their need of physical salvation, we might hope again for a
physical renaissance. Such a rebirth the world has seen but twice or
perhaps thrice, and each was followed by the two or three of the
brightest culture periods of history, and formed an epoch in the
advancement of the kingdom of man. A vast body of evidence could be
collected from the writings of anthropologists showing how superior
unspoiled savages are to civilized man in correct or esthetic
proportions of body, in many forms of endurance of fatigue, hardship,
and power to bear exposure, in the development and preservation of
teeth and hair, in keenness of senses, absence of deformities, as well
as immunity to many of our diseases. Their women are stronger and bear
hardship and exposure, monthly periods and childbirth, better.
Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a
disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater
average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ
diseases.
The progressive realization of these tendencies has prompted most of
the best recent and great changes motor-ward in education and also in
personal regimen. Health- and strength-giving agencies have put to
school the large motor areas of the brain, so long neglected, and have
vastly enlarged their scope. Thousands of youth are now inspired with
new enthusiasm for physical development; and new institutions of many
kinds and grades have arisen, with a voluminous literature, unnumbered
specialists, specialties, new apparatus, tests, movements, methods,
and theories; and the press, the public, and the church are awakened
to a fresh interest in the body and its powers. All this is
magnificent, but sadly inadequate to cope with the new needs and
dangers, which are vastly greater.
[Footnote 1: Dieterich. Göttingen, 1886.]
[Footnote 2: See Chap. xii.]
[Footnote 3: F. Burk in From Fundamental to Accessory. Pedagogical
Seminary, Oct., 1898, vol. 6, pp. 5-64.]
[Footnote 4: Creeping and Walking, by A.W. Trettien. American Journal
of Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57.]
[Footnote 5: A Morning Observation of a Baby. Pedagogical Seminary,
December 1901, vol. 8, pp. 469-481.]
[Footnote 6: Kate Carman. Notes on School Activity. Pedagogical
Seminary, March, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 106-117.]
[Footnote 7: A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of
Mental Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp.
491-517.]
[Footnote 8: G.E. Johnson. Psychology and Pegagogy of Feeble-Minded
Children. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1895, vol. 3, pp. 246-301.]
[Footnote 9: Dr. Hughlings Jackson, the eminent English pathologist,
was the first to make practical application of the evolutionary theory
of the nervous system to the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsies and
mental diseases. The practical success of this application was so
great that the Hughlings-Jackson "three-level theory" is now the
established basis of English diagnosis. He conceived the nervous
mechanism as composed of three systems, arranged in the form of a
hierarchy, the higher including the lower, and yet each having a
certain degree of independence. The first level represents the type of
simplest reflex and involuntary movement and is localized in the gray
matter of the spinal cord, medulla, and pons. The second, or middle
level, comprises those structures which receive sensory impulses from
the cells of the lowest level instead of directly from the periphery
or the non-nervous tissues. The motor cells of this middle level also
discharge into the motor mechanisms of the lowest level. Jackson
located these middle level structures in the cortex of the central
convolutions, the basal ganglia and the centers of the special senses
in the cortex. The highest level bears the same relation to the middle
level that it bears to the lowest i.e., no continuous connection
between the highest and the lowest is assumed; the structures of the
middle level mediate between them as a system of relays. According to
this hierarchical arrangement of the nervous system, the lowest level
which is the simplest and oldest "contains the mechanism for the
simple fundamental movements in reflexes and involuntary reactions.
The second level regroups these simple movements by combinations and
associations of cortical structure in wider, more complex mechanisms,
producing a higher class of movements. The highest level unifies the
whole nervous system and, according to Jackson, is the anatomical
basis of mind."
For a fuller account of this theory see Burk: From Fundamental to
Accessory in the Nervous System and of Movements. Pedagogical
Seminary, October, 1898, vol. 6, pp. 17-23.]
[Footnote 10: A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of
Mental Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp.
491-517.]
[Footnote 11: Encyclopedia of Social Reform, Funk and Wagnalls, 1896,
p. 1095]
* * * * *
CHAPTER III
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION
Trade classes and schools, their importance in the international
market--Our dangers and the superiority of German workmen--The effects
of a tariff--Description of schools between the kindergarten and the
industrial school--Equal salaries for teachers in France--Dangers from
machinery--The advantages of life on the old New England farm--Its
resemblance to the education we now give negroes and Indians--Its
advantage for all-sided muscular development.
We must glance at a few of the best and most typical methods of
muscular development, following the order: industrial education,
manual training, gymnastics, and play, sports, and games.
Industrial education is now imperative for every nation that would
excel in agriculture, manufacture, and trade, not only because of the
growing intensity of competition, but because of the decline of the
apprentice system and the growing intricacy of processes, requiring
only the skill needed for livelihood. Thousands of our youth of late
have been diverted from secondary schools to the monotechnic or trade
classes now established for horology, glass-work, brick-laying,
carpentry, forging, dressmaking, cooking, typesetting, bookbinding,
brewing, seamanship, work in leather, rubber, horticulture, gardening,
photography, basketry, stock-raising, typewriting, stenography and
bookkeeping, elementary commercial training for practical preparation
for clerkships, etc. In this work not only is Boston, our most
advanced city, as President Pritchett[1] has shown in detail, far
behind Berlin, but German workmen and shopmen a slowly taking the best
places even in England; and but for a high tariff, which protects our
inferiority, the competitive pressure would be still greater. In
Germany, especially, this training is far more diversified than here,
always being colored if not determined by the prevalent industry of
the region and more specialised and helped out by evening and even
Sunday classes in the school buildings, and by the still strong
apprentice system. Froebelian influence in manual training reaches
through the eight school years and is in some respects better than
ours in lower grades, but is very rarely coeducational, girls' work of
sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving, etc., not being considered
manual training. There are now over 1,500 schools and workshops in
Germany where manual training is taught; twenty-five of these are
independent schools. The work really began in 1875 with v. Kass, and
is promoted by the great Society for Boys' Handwork. Much stress is
laid on paper and pasteboard work in lower grades, under the influence
of Kurufa of Darmstadt. Many objects for illustrating science are
made, and one course embraces the Seyner water-wheel.[2]
In France it is made more effective by the equal salaries of teachers
everywhere, thus securing better instruction in the country.
Adolescence is the golden period for acquiring the skill that comes by
practice, so essential in the struggle for survival. In general this
kind of motor education is least of all free, but subservient to the
tool, machine, process, finished product, or end in view; and to these
health and development are subordinated, so that they tend to be ever
more narrow and special. The standard here is maximal efficiency of
the capacities that earn. It may favor bad habitual attitudes,
muscular development of but one part, excessive large or small
muscles, involve too much time or effort, unhealthful conditions,
etc., but it has the great advantage of utility, which is the
mainspring of all industry. In a very few departments and places this
training has felt the influence of the arts and crafts movement and
has been faintly touched with the inspiration of beauty. While such
courses give those who follow them marked advantage over those who do
not, they are chiefly utilitarian and do little to mature or unfold
the physical powers, and may involve arrest or degeneration.
Where not one but several or many professes are taught, the case is
far better. Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for
motor development. This is due to its great variety of occupations,
healthful conditions, and the incalculable phyletic reënforcement from
immemorial times. I have computed some three-score industries[3] as
the census now classifies them; that were more or less generally known
and practiced sixty years ago in a little township, which not only in
this but in other respects has many features of an ideal educational
environment for adolescent boys, combining as it does not only
physical and industrial, but civil and religious elements in wise
proportions and with pedagogic objectivity, and representing the ideal
of such a state of intelligent citizen voters as was contemplated by
the framers of our Constitution.
Contrast this life with that of a "hand" in a modern shoe factory, who
does all day but one of the eighty-one stages or processes from a
tanned hide to a finished shoe, or of a man in a shirt shop who is one
of thirty-nine, each of whom does as piece-work a single step
requiring great exactness, speed, and skill, and who never knows how a
whole shirt is made, and we shall see that the present beginning of a
revival of interest in muscular development comes none too early. So
liberal is muscular education of this kind that its work in somewhat
primitive form has been restored and copied many features by many
educational institutions for adolescents, of the Abbotsholme type and
grade, and several others, whose purpose is to train for primitive
conditions of colonial life. Thousands of school gardens have also
been lately developed for lower grades, which have given a new impetus
to the study of nature. Farm training at its best instills love of
country, ruralizes taste, borrows some of its ideals from Goethe's
pedagogic province, and perhaps even from Gilman's pie-shaped
communities, with villages at the center irradiating to farms in all
directions. In England, where by the law of primogeniture holdings are
large and in few hands, this training has never flourished, as it has
greatly in France, where nearly every adult male may own land and a
large proportion will come to do so. So of processes. As a student in
Germany I took a few lessons each of a bookbinder, a glassblower, a
shoemaker, a plumber, and a blacksmith, and here I have learned in a
crude way the technique of the gold-beater and old-fashioned
broom-maker, etc., none of which come amiss in the laboratory; and I
am proud that I can still mow and keep my scythe sharp, chop, plow,
milk, churn, make cheese and soap, braid a palm-leaf hat complete,
knit, spin and even "put in a piece" in an old-fashioned hand loom,
and weave frocking. But thus pride bows low before the pupils of our
best institutions for negroes, Indians, and juvenile delinquents,
whose training is often in more than a score of industries and who
to-day in my judgment receive the best training in the land, if judged
by the annual growth in mind, morals, health, physique, ability, and
knowledge, all taken together. Instead of seeking soft, ready-made
places near home, such education impels to the frontier, to strike out
new careers, to start at the bottom and rise by merit, beginning so
low that every change must be a rise. Wherever youth thus trained are
thrown, they land like a cat on all-fours and are armed _cap-à-pie_
for the struggle of life. Agriculture, manufacture, and commerce are
the bases of national prosperity; and on them all professions,
institutions, and even culture, are more and more dependent, while the
old ideals of mere study and brain-work are fast becoming obsolete. We
really retain only the knowledge we apply. We should get up interest
in new processes like that of a naturalist in new species. Those who
leave school at any age or stage should be best fitted to take up
their life work instead of leaving unfitted for it, aimless and
discouraged. Instead of dropping out limp and disheartened, we should
train "struggle-for-lifeurs," in Daudet's phrase, and that betimes, so
that the young come back to it not too late for securing the best
benefits, after having wasted the years best fitted for it in
profitless studies or in the hard school of failure. By such methods
many of our flabby, undeveloped, anemic, easy-living city youth would
be regenerated in body and spirit. Some of the now oldest, richest,
and most famous schools of the world were at first established by
charity for poor boys who worked their way, and such institutions have
an undreamed-of future. No others so well fit for a life of
respectable and successful muscle work, and perhaps this should be
central for all at this stage. This diversity of training develops the
muscular activities rendered necessary by man's early development,
which were so largely concerned with food, shelter, clothing, making
and selling commodities necessary for life, comfort and safety. The
natural state of man is not war, hot peace; and perhaps Dawson[4] is
right in thinking that three-fourths of man's physical activities in
the past have gone into such vocations. Industry has determined the
nature and trend of muscular development; and youth, who have pets,
till the soil, build, manufacture, use tools, and master elementary
processes and skills, are most truly repeating the history of the
race. This, too, lays the best foundation for intellectual careers.
The study of pure science, as well as its higher technology, follows
rather than precedes this. In the largest sense this is the order of
nature, from fundamental and generalized to finer accessory and
specialized organs and functions; and such a sequence best weeds out
and subordinates automatisms. The age of stress in most of these kinds
of training is that of most rapid increment of muscular power, as we
have seen in the middle and later teens rather than childhood, as some
recent methods have mistakenly assumed; and this prepolytechnic work,
wherever and in whatever degree it is possible, is a better adjunct of
secondary courses than manual training, the sad fact being that,
according to the best estimates, only a fraction of one per cent of
those who need this training in this country are now receiving it.
[Footnote 1: The Place of Industrial and Technical Training in Public
Education. Technology Review, January, 1902, vol. 4, pp. 10-37.]
[Footnote 2: See an article by Dr. H.E. Kock, Education, December,
1902, vol. 23, pp. 193-203.]
[Footnote 3: See my Boy Life in a Massachusetts Country Town Forty
Years Ago. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 192-207.]
[Footnote 4: The Muscular Activities Rendered Necessary by Man's Early
Environment, American Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7,
pp. 80-85.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER IV
MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD
History of the movement--Its philosophy--The value of hand training in
the development of the brain and its significance in the making of
man--A grammar of our many industries hard--The best we do can reach
but few--Very great defects in our manual training methods which do
not base on science and make nothing salable--The Leipzig
system--Sloyd is hypermethodic--These crude peasant industries can
never satisfy educational needs--The gospel of work, William Morris
and the arts and crafts movement--Its spirit desirable--The magic
effects of a brief period of intense work--The natural development of
the drawing instinct in the child.
Manual training has many origins; but in its now most widely accepted
form it came to us more than a generation ago from Moscow, and has its
best representation here in our new and often magnificent
manual-training high schools and in many courses in other public
schools. This work meets the growing demand of the country for a more
practical education, a demand which often greatly exceeds the
accommodations. The philosophy, if such it may be called, that
underlies the movement, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike
Pestalozzi's "_keine Kentnisse ohne Fertigkeiten_," [No knowledge
without skill] in that it lessens the interval between thinking and
doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend
to taste; interests many not successful in ordinary school; tends to
the better appreciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for
some studies; adds somewhat to the average length of the school
period; gives a sense of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful
preparation for a number of vocations. These claims are all well
founded, and this work is a valuable addition to the pedagogic
agencies of any country or state. As man excels the higher anthropoids
perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind, and since the manual
areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical
centers are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent instrument
in opening the intellect as well as in training sense and will. It is
no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for
but an insignificant fraction of the nearly sixteen millions or twenty
per cent of the young people of the country between fifteen and
twenty-four.
When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations
of the method are painful to contemplate. The work is essentially
manual and offers little for the legs, where most of the muscular
tissues of the body lie, those which respond most to training and are
now most in danger of degeneration at this age; the back and trunk
also are little trained. Consideration of proportion and bilateral
asymmetry are practically ignored. Almost in proportion as these
schools have multiplied, the rage for uniformity, together with
motives of economy and administrative efficiency on account of
overcrowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the principle
that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. This is a
double misfortune; for the courses were not sufficiently considered at
first and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the
methods of industry have undergone vast changes since they were given
shape. There are now between three and four hundred occupations in the
census, more than half of these involving manual work, so that never
perhaps was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these
natural developments into conscious art, to extract what may be called
basal types. This requires an effort not without analogy to
Aristotle's attempt to extract from the topics of the marketplace the
underlying categories eternally conditioning all thought, or to
construct a grammar of speech. Hardly an attempt worthy the name, not
even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in this
field to study the conditions and to meet them. Like Froebel's gifts
and occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human
occupations in infant form, the processes selected are underived and
find their justification rather in their logical sequence and
coherence than in being true norms of work. If these latter be
attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so snugly in a
brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious. The wards of
the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more
intricate and mazy. As H.T. Bailey well puts it in substance, a master
in any art-craft must have a fourfold equipment: 1. Ability to grasp
an idea and embody it. 2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide
repertory of methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 3.
Knowledge of the history of the craft. 4. Skill in technical
processes. American schools emphasize chiefly only the last.
The actual result is thus a course rich in details representing wood
and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the
course treating of the former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly
tending to make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers; that of the
latter, iron in its rigidity and an excellent school for smiths,
mechanics, and machinists. These courses are not liberal because they
hardly touch science, which is rapidly becoming the real basis of
every industry. Almost nothing that can be called scientific knowledge
is required or even much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical
drawing and its implicates. These schools instinctively fear and
repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value
or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few
trades. This tendency also they even fear, less often because
unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect
it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these
schools were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic
methods and matter. Industry is everywhere and always for the sake of
the product, and to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination
is a fatal mistake. To focus on process only, with no reference to the
object made, is here an almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content
to form, which in all history has been the chief stigma of
degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using animal; but tools are
always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their
invention. Hence a course in tool manipulation only, with persistent
refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be
introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly,
hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades
certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as
tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and
photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus
more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the
material universe, all is sacrificed to supernormalized method.
As in all hypermethodic schemes, the thought side is feeble. There is
no control of the work of these schools by the higher technical
institutions such as the college exercises over the high school, so
that few of them do work that fits for advanced training or is thought
best by technical faculties. In most of its current narrow forms,
manual training will prove to be historically, as it is educationally,
extemporized and tentative, and will soon be superseded by broader
methods and be forgotten and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of
departure from which future progress will loom up.
Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the
experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and
original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard
work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he
has connected them even with the kindergarten below. In general the
whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest
of new educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles,
metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines,
etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the
final result. In every detail the prime consideration should be the
nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their
hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest connection with
science at every point should do the same for the intellect. Each
operation and each tool--the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel,
draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe--will be studied with reference to its
orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and
the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in
France often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right,
left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to
individuality.
Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful,
deft. The movement was organised in Sweden a quarter of a century ago
as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home
industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was installed in an
institution of its own for training teachers at Nääs. It works in wood
only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of
from eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans; but its
manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not
only to be useful but self-active and self-respecting, and to revere
exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes that all and
especially the motor-minded can really understand only what they make,
and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. It
aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian system, and
to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its
best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off. This change
of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor
development of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it
originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its
origin in its models, the Penates of the sloyd household, the unique
features of which persist like a national school of art, despite
transplantation and transformation.[1]
Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises,
tools, drawing, and models. Each must be progressive, so that every
new step in each series involves a new and next developmental step in
all the others, and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and
degree of development of each power appealed to in the child. Yet
there has been hardly an attempt to justify either the physiological
or the psychological reason of a single step in any of these series,
and the coördination of the series even with each other, to say
nothing of their adaptation to the stages of the child's development.
This, if as pat and complete as is urged, would indeed constitute on
the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty, totality in variety,
etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer's eyes. But the "45
tools, 72 exercises, 31 models, 15 of which are joints," all learned
by teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four
years, are overmethodic; and such correlation is impossible in so many
series at once. Every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of
powers, is hard enough, since the fall lost us Eden; and woodwork,
could it be upon that of the tree of knowledge itself, incompatible
with enjoying its fruit. Although a philosopher may see the whole
universe in its smallest part, all his theory can not reproduce
educational wholes from fragments of it. The real merits of sloyd have
caused its enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and claims far
beyond their modest bounds; and although its field covers the great
transition from childhood to youth, one searches in vain both its
literature and practise for the slightest recognition of the new
motives and methods that puberty suggests. Especially in its partially
acclimatized forms to American conditions, it is all adult and almost
scholastic; and as the most elaborate machinery may sometimes be run
by a poor power-wheel, if the stream be swift and copious enough, so
the mighty rent that sets toward motor education would give it some
degree of success were it worse and less economic of pedagogic
momentum than it is. It holds singularly aloof from other methods of
efferent training and resists coördination with them, and its
provisions for other than hand development are slight. It will be one
of the last to accept its true but modest place as contributing
certain few but precious elements in the greater synthesis that
impends. Indian industries, basketry, pottery, bead, leather, bows and
arrows, bark, etc., which our civilization is making lost arts by
forcing the white man's industries upon red men at reservation schools
and elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization that
Swedish peasant work has received to develop even greater educational
values; and the same is true of the indigenous household work of the
old New England farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are
only now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few
educators.
This brings us to the arts and crafts movement, originating with
Carlyle's gospel of work and Ruskin's medievalism, developed by
William Morris and his disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by
the ridicule of the comic opera "Patience," and lately revived in some
of its features by Cobden-Sanderson, and of late to some extent in
various centers in this country. Its ideal was to restore the day of
the seven ancient guilds and of Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler, when
conscience and beauty inspired work, and the hand did what machines
only imitate and vulgarize. In the past, which this school of motor
culture harks back to, work, for which our degenerate age lacks even
respect, was indeed praise. Refined men and women have remembered
these early days, when their race was in its prime, as a lost paradise
which they would regain by designing and even weaving tapestries and
muslins; experimenting in vats with dyes to rival Tyrian purple;
printing and binding by hand books that surpass the best of the
Aldine, and Elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering brass; forging
locks, irons, and candlesticks; becoming artists in burned wood and
leather; seeking old effects of simplicity and solidity in furniture
and decoration, as well as architecture, stained glass, and to some
extent in dress and manners; and all this toil and moil was _ad
majorem gloriam hominis_ [To the greater glory of man] in a new
socialistic state, where the artist, and even the artisan, should take
his rightful place above the man who merely knows. The day of the mere
professor, who deals in knowledge, is gone; and the day of the doer,
who creates, has come. The brain and the hand, too long divorced and
each weak and mean without the other; use and beauty, each alone
vulgar; letters and labor, each soulless without the other, are
henceforth to be one and inseparable; and this union will lift man to
a higher level. The workman in his apron and paper hat, inspired by
the new socialism and the old spirit of chivalry as revived by Scott,
revering Wagner's revival of the old _Deutschenthum_ that was to
conquer _Christenthum_, or Tennyson's Arthurian cycle--this was its
ideal; even as the Jews rekindled their loyalty to the ancient
traditions of their race and made their Bible under Ezra; as we begin
to revere the day of the farmer-citizen, who made our institutions, or
as some of us would revive his vanishing industrial life for the red
man.
Although this movement was by older men and women and had in it
something of the longing regret of senescence for days that are no
more, it shows us the glory which invests racial adolescence when it
is recalled in maturity, the time when the soul can best appreciate
the value of its creations and its possibilities, and really lives
again in its glamour and finds in it its greatest inspiration. Hence
it has its lessons for us here. A touch, but not too much of it,
should be felt in all manual education, which is just as capable of
idealism as literary education. This gives soul, interest, content,
beauty, taste. If not a polyphrastic philosophy seeking to dignify the
occupation of the workshop by a pretentious Volapük of reasons and
abstract theories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a
psychological quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be
worked. Thus the best forces from the past should be turned on to
shape and reinforce the best tendencies of the present. The writings
of the above gospelers of work not only could and should, but will be
used to inspire manual-training high schools, sloyd and even some of
the less scholastic industrial courses; but each is incomplete without
the other. These books and those that breathe their spirit should be
the mental workshop of all who do tool, lathe, and forge work; who
design and draw patterns, carve or mold; or of those who study how to
shape matter for human uses, and whose aim is to obtain diplomas or
certificates of fitness to teach all such things. The muse of art and
even of music will have some voice in the great synthesis which is to
gather up the scattered, hence ineffective, elements of secondary
motor training, in forms which shall represent all the needs of
adolescents in the order and proportion that nature and growth stages
indicate, drawing, with this end supreme, upon all the resources that
history and reform offer to our selection. All this can never make
work become play. Indeed it will and should make work harder and more
unlike play and of another genus, because the former is thus given its
own proper soul and leads its own distinct, but richer, and more
abounding life.
I must not close this section without brief mention of two important
studies that have supplied each a new and important determination
concerning laws of work peculiar to adolescence.
The main telegraphic line requires a speed of over seventy letters per
minute of all whom they will employ. As a sending rate this is not
very difficult and is often attained after two months' practise. This
standard for a receiving rate is harder and later, and inquiry at
schools where it is taught shows that about seventy-five per cent of
those who begin the study fail to reach this speed and so are not
employed. Bryan and Harter[2] explained the rate of improvement in
both sending and receiving, with results represented for one typical
subject in the curve on the following page.
From the first, sending improves most rapidly and crosses the
dead-line a few months before the receiving rate, which may fall
short. Curves 1 and 2 represent the same student. I have added line 3
to illustrate the three-fourths who fail. Receiving is far less
pleasant than sending, and years of daily practise at ordinary rates
will not bring a man to his maximum rate; he remains on the low
plateau with no progress beyond a certain point. If forced by stress
of work, danger of being dropped, or by will power to make a prolonged
and intense effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate and
permanently attains a faster pace. This is true at each step, and
every advance seems to cost even more intensive effort than the former
one. At length, for those who go on, the rate of receiving, which is a
more complex process, exceeds that of sending; and the curves of the
above figure would cross if prolonged. The expert receives so much
faster than he sends that abbreviated codes are used, and he may take
eighty to eighty-five words a minute on a typewriter in correct form.
[Illustration: Letters per Minute x Weeks of Practice.]
The motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a perhaps
physiological limit, which the receiving curve does not suggest. This
seems a special case of a general though not yet explained law. In
learning a foreign language, speaking is first and easiest, and
hearing takes a late but often sudden start to independence. Perhaps
this holds of every ability. To Bryan this suggests as a hierarchy of
habits, the plateau of little or no improvement, meaning that lower
order habits are approaching their maximum but are not yet automatic
enough to leave the attention free to attack higher order habits. The
second ascent from drudgery to freedom, which comes through
automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent. One stroke of
attention comes to do what once took many. To attain such effective
speed is not dependent on reaction time. This shooting together of
units distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack.
In many, if not all, skills where expertness is sought, there is a
long discouraging level, and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if
here, too, as we have reason to think in the growth of both the body
as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make leaps and
attains her ends by alternate rests and rushes. Youth lives along on a
low level of interest and accomplishment and then starts onward, is
transformed, converted; the hard becomes easy; the old life sinks to a
lower stratum; and a new and higher order, perhaps a higher brain
level and functions, is evolved. The practical implication here of the
necessity of hard concentrative effort as a condition of advancement
is re-enforced by a quotation from Senator Stanford on the effect of
early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training
colts for racing. Let-ups are especially dangerous. He says, "It is
the supreme effort that develops." This, I may add, suggests what is
developed elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned
by spontaneous muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that
muscles are thus organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary
attention is motivated by the same nisus of development even in its
most adult form, and that the products of science, invention,
discovery, as well as the association plexus of all that was
originally determined in the form of consciousness, are made by
rhythmic alternation of attack, as it moves from point to point
creating diversions and recurrence.
The other study, although quite independent, is part a special
application and illustration of the same principle.
At the age of four or five, when they can do little more than
scribble, children's chief interest in pictures is as finished
products; but in the second period, which Lange calls that of artistic
illusion, the child sees in his own work not merely what it
represents, but an image of fancy back of it. This, then, is the
golden period for the development of power to create artistically. The
child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly in the act,
and he cares little for the finished picture. He draws out of his own
head, and not from copy before his eye. Anything and everything is
attempted in bold lines in this golden age of drawing. If he followed
the teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he would be
abashed at his production. Indians, conflagrations, games, brownies,
trains, pageants, battles--everything is graphically portrayed; but
only the little artist himself sees the full meaning of his lines.
Criticism or drawing strictly after nature breaks this charm, since it
gives place to mechanical reproduction in which the child has little
interest. Thus awakens him from his dream to a realization that he can
not draw, and from ten to fifteen his power of perceiving things
steadily increases and he makes almost no progress in drawing.
Adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire and ability to
draw are checked and decline after thirteen or fourteen. The curve is
the plateau which Barnes has described. The child has measured his own
productions upon the object they reproduced and found them wanting, is
discouraged and dislikes drawing. From twelve on, Barnes found drawing
more and more distasteful; and this, too, Lukens found to be the
opinion of our art teachers. The pupils may draw very properly and
improve in technique, but the interest is gone. This is the condition
in which most men remain all their lives. Their power to appreciate
steadily increases. Only a few gifted adolescents about this age begin
a to develop a new zest in production, rivaling that of the period
from five to ten, when their satisfaction is again chiefly in
creation. These are the artists whose active powers dominate.
Lukens[3] finds in his studies of drawing, that in what he calls his
fourth period of artistic development, there are those "who during
adolescence experience a rebirth of creative power." Zest in creation
then often becomes a stronger incentive to work than any pleasure or
profit to be derived from the finished product, so that in this the
propitious conditions of the first golden age of childhood are
repeated and the deepest satisfaction is again found in the work
itself. At about fourteen or fifteen, which is the transition period,
nascent faculties sometimes develop very rapidly. Lukens[4] draws the
interesting curve shown on the following page.
[Illustration: Motor, creative or productive power. Sensory or
receptive interest in the finished product.]
The reciprocity between the power to produce and that to appreciate,
roughly represented in the above curve, likely is true also in the
domain of music, and may be, perhaps, a general law of development.
Certain it is that the adolescent power to apperceive and appreciate
never so far outstrips his power to produce or reproduce as about
midway in the teens. Now impressions sink deepest. The greatest
artists are usually those who paint later, when the expressive powers
are developed, what they have felt most deeply and known best at this
age, and not those who in the late twenties, or still later, have gone
to new environments and sought to depict them. All young people draw
best those objects they love most, and their proficiency should be
some test of the contents of their minds. They must put their own
consciousness into a picture. At the dawn of this stage of
appreciation the esthetic tastes should be stimulated by exposure to,
and instructed in feeling for, the subject-matter of masterpieces; and
instruction in technique, detail, criticism, and learned
discrimination of schools of painting should be given intermittently.
Art should not now be for art's sake, but for the sake of feeling and
character, life, and conduct; it should be adjunct to morals, history,
and literature; and in all, edification should be the goal; and
personal interest, and not that of the teacher, should be the guide.
Insistence on production should be eased, and the receptive
imagination, now so hungry, should be fed and reinforced by story and
all other accessories. By such a curriculum, potential creativeness,
if it exists, will surely be evoked in its own good time. It will, at
first, attempt no commonplace drawing-master themes, but will essay
the highest that the imagination can bode forth. It may be crude and
lame in execution, but it will be lofty, perhaps grand; and if it is
original in consciousness, it will be in effect. Most creative
painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in
literature or turning points in history, representations of the
loftiest truths, embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. None who
deserve the name of artist copy anything now, and least of all with
objective fidelity to nature; and the teacher that represses or
criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not pardon the grave
faults of technique inevitable at this age when ambition ought to be
too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic
Philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other fields,
the unpardonable sin against budding promise, always at this age so
easily blighted. Just as the child of six or seven should be
encouraged in his strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of
his daily life, so now the inner life should find graphic utterance in
all its intricacy up to the full limit of unrepressed courage. For the
great majority, on the other hand, who only appreciate and will never
create, the mind, if it have its rights, will be stored with the best
images and sentiments of art; for at this time they are best
remembered and sink deepest into heart and life. Now, although the
hand may refuse, the fancy paints the world in brightest hues and
fairest forms; and such an opportunity for infecting the soul with
vaccine of ideality, hope, optimism, and courage in adversity, will
never come again. I believe that in few departments are current
educational theories and practises so hard on youth of superior gifts,
just at the age when all become geniuses for a season, very brief for
most, prolonged for some, and permanent for the best. We do not know
how to teach to, see, hear, and feel when the sense centers are most
indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand during
the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is
good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at
its lowest ebb.
Finally, our divorce between industrial and manual training is
abnormal, and higher technical education is the chief sufferer.
Professor Thurston, of Cornell, who has lately returned from a tour of
inspection abroad, reported that to equal Germany we now need: "1.
Twenty technical universities, having in their schools of engineering
50 instructors and 500 students each. 2. Two thousand technical high
schools or manual-training schools, each having not less than 200
students and 10 instructors." If we have elementary trade-schools,
this would mean technical high schools enough to accommodate 700,000
students, served by 20,000 teachers. With the strong economic
arguments in this direction we are not here concerned; but that there
are tendencies to unfit youth for life by educational method and
matter shown in strong relief from this standpoint, we shall point out
in a later chapter.
[Footnote 1: This I have elsewhere tried to show in detail. Criticisms
of High School Physics and Manual Training and Mechanic Arts in High
Schools. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 193-204.]
[Footnote 2: Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the
Telegraphic Language. Psychological Review, January, 1897, vol. 4, pp.
27-53, and July, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 344-375.]
[Footnote 3: A Study of Children's Drawings in the Early Years.
Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 79-101. See also
Drawing in the Early Years, Proceedings of the National Educational
Association, 1899, pp. 946-953. Das Kind als Künstler, von C. Götze.
Hamburg, 1898. The Genetic _vs._ the Logical Order in Drawing, by F.
Burk. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 296-323.]
[Footnote 4: Die Entwickelungsstufen beim Zeichnen. Die Kinderfehler,
September, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 166-179.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER V
GYMNASTICS
The story of Jahn and the Turners--The enthusiasm which this movement
generated in Germany--The ideal of bringing out latent powers--The
concept of more perfect voluntary control--Swedish gymnastics--Doing
everything possible for the body as a machine--Liberal physical
culture--Ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements
and correcting defects--The ideal of symmetry and prescribing
exercises to bring the body to a standard--Lamentable lack of
correlation between these four systems--Illustrations of the great
good that a systematic training can effect--Athletic records--Greek
physical training.
Under the term gymnastics, literally naked exercises, we here include
those denuded of all utilities or ulterior ends save those of physical
culture. This is essentially modern and was unknown in antiquity,
where training was for games, for war, etc. Several ideals underlie
this movement, which although closely related are distinct and as yet
by no means entirely harmonized. These may be described as follows:
A. One aim of Jahn, more developed by Spiess, and their successors,
was to do everything physically possible for the body as a mechanism.
Many postures and attitudes are assumed and many movements made that
are never called for in life. Some of these are so novel that a great
variety of new apparatus had to be devised to bring them out; and Jahn
invented many new names, some of them without etymologies, to
designate the repertory of his discoveries and inventions that
extended the range of motor life. Common movements, industries, and
even games, train only a limited number of muscles, activities, and
coördinations, and leave more or less unused groups and combinations,
so that many latent possibilities slumber, and powers slowly lapse
through disuse. Not only must these be rescued, but the new nascent
possibilities of modern progressive man must be addressed and
developed. Even the common things that the average untrained youth can
not do are legion, and each of these should be a new incentive to the
trainer as he realizes how very far below their motor possibilities
meet men live. The man of the future may, and even must, do things
impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by
heredity. Our somatic frame and its powers must therefore be carefully
studied, inventoried, and assessed afresh, and a kind and amount of
exercise required that is exactly proportioned, not perhaps to the
size but to the capability of each voluntary muscle. Thus only can we
have a truly humanistic physical development, analogous to the
training of all the powers of the mind in a broad, truly liberal, and
non-professional or non-vocational educational curriculum. The body
will thus have its rightful share in the pedagogic traditions and
inspirations of the renaissance. Thus only can we have a true scale of
standardised culture values for efferent processes; and from this we
can measure the degrees of departure, both in the direction of excess
and defect, of each form of work, motor habit; and even play. Many
modern Epigoni in the wake of this great ideal, where its momentum was
early spent, feeling that new activities might be discovered with
virtues hitherto undreamed of, have almost made fetiches of special
disciplines, both developmental and corrective, that are pictured and
landed in scores of manuals. Others have had expectations no less
excessive in the opposite direction and have argued that the greatest
possible variety of movements best developed the greatest total of
motor energy. Jahn especially thus made gymnastics a special art and
inspired great enthusiasm of humanity, and the songs of his pupils
were of a better race of man and a greater and united fatherland. It
was this feature that made his work unique in the world, and his
disciples are fond of reminding us of the fact that it was just about
one generation of men after the acme of influence of his system that,
in 1870, Germany showed herself the greatest military power since
ancient Rome, and took the acknowledged leadership of the world both
in education and science.
These theorizations even in their extreme forms have been not only
highly suggestive but have brought great and new enthusiasms and
ideals into the educational world that admirably fit adolescence. The
motive of bringing out latent, decaying, or even new powers, skills,
knacks, and feats, is full of inspiration. Patriotism is aroused, for
thus the country can be better served; thus the German Fatherland was
to be restored and unified after the dark days that followed the
humiliation of Jena. Now the ideals of religion are invoked that the
soul may have a better and regenerated somatic organism with which to
serve Jesus and the Church. Exercise is made a form of praise to God
and of service to man, and these motives are reënforced by those of
the new hygiene which strives for a new wholeness-holiness, and would
purify the body as the temple of the Holy Ghost. Thus in Young Men's
Christian Association training schools and gymnasiums the gospel of
Christianity is preached anew and seeks to bring salvation to man's
physical frame, which the still lingering effects of asceticism have
caused to be too long neglected in its progressive degeneration. As
the Greek games were in honor of the gods, so now the body is trained
to better glorify God; and regimen, chastity, and temperance are given
a new momentum. The physical salvation thus wrought will be, when
adequately written, one of the most splendid chapters in the modern
history of Christianity. Military ideals have been revived in cult and
song to hearten the warfare against evil within and without. Strength
is prayed for as well as worked for, and consecrated to the highest
uses. Last but not least, power thus developed over a large surface
may be applied to athletic contests in the field, and victories here
are valuable as fore-gleams of how sweet the glory of achievements in
higher moral and spiritual tasks will taste later.
The dangers and sources of error in this ideal of all-sided training
are, alas, only too obvious, although they only qualify its paramount
good. First, it is impossible thus to measure the quanta of training
needed so as rightly to assign to each its modicum and best modality
of training. Indeed no method of doing this has ever been attempted,
but the assessments have been arbitrary and conjectural, probably
right in some and wrong in other respects, with no adequate criterion
or test for either save only empirical experience. Secondly, heredity,
which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected forms of activity and
fails of all support for others, has been ignored. As we shall see
later, one of the best norms here is phyletic emphasis, and what lacks
this must at best be feeble; and if new powers are unfolding, their
growth must be very slow and they must be nurtured as tender buds for
generations. Thirdly, too little regard is had for the vast
differences in individuals, most of whom need much personal
prescription.
B. In practise the above ideal is never isolated from others. Perhaps
the most closely associated with it is that of increased volitional
control. Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his
activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his
environment. Every new power of controlling these by the will frees
man from slavery and widens the field of freedom. To acquire the power
of doing all with consciousness and volition mentalizes the body,
gives control over to higher brain levels, and develops them by
rescuing activities from the dominance of lower centers. Thus _mens
agitat molem._ [Footnote: Mind rules the body.] This end is favored by
the Swedish _commando_ exercises, which require great alertness of
attention to translate instantly a verbal order into an act and also,
although in somewhat less degree, by quick imitation of a leader. The
stimulus of music and rhythm are excluded because thought to interfere
with this end. A somewhat sophisticated form of this goal is sought by
several Delsartian schemes of relaxation, decomposition, and
recomposition of movements. To do all things with consciousness and to
encroach on the field of instinct involves new and more vivid sense
impressions, the range of which is increased directly as that of
motion, the more closely it approaches the focus of attention. By thus
analyzing settled and established coördinations, their elements are
set free and may be organized into new combinations, so that the
former is the first stage toward becoming a virtuoso with new special
skills. This is the road to inner secrets or intellectual rules of
professional and expert successes, such as older athletes often rely
upon when their strength begins to wane. Every untrained automatism
must be domesticated, and every striated muscle capable of direct
muscular control must be dominated by volition. Thus tensions and
incipient contractures that drain off energy can be relaxed by fiat.
Sandow's "muscle dance," the differentiation of movements of the
right and left hand--one, e.g., writing a French madrigal while the
other is drawing a picture of a country dance, or each playing
tunes of disparate rhythm and character simultaneously on the
piano--controlling heart rate, moving the ears, crying, laughing,
blushing, moving the bowels, etc., at will, feats of inhibition of
reflexes, stunts of all kinds, proficiency with many tools, deftness
in sports--these altogether would mark the extremes in this direction.
This, too, has its inspiration for youth. To be a universal adept like
Hippias suggests Diderot and the encyclopedists in the intellectual
realm. To do all with consciousness is a means to both remedial and
expert ends. Motor life often needs to be made over to a greater or
less extent; and that possibilities of vastly greater accomplishments
exist than are at present realized, is undoubted, even in manners and
morals, which are both at root only motor habits. Indeed consciousness
itself is largely and perhaps wholly corrective in its very essence
and origin. Thus life is adjusted to new environments; and if the
Platonic postulate be correct, that untaught virtues that come by
nature and instinct are no virtues, but must be made products of
reflection and reason, the sphere and need of this principle is great
indeed. But this implies a distrust of physical human nature as
deep-seated and radical as that of Calvinism for the unregenerate
heart, against which modern common sense, so often the best muse of
both psychophysics and pedagogy, protests. Individual prescription is
here as imperative as it is difficult. Wonders that now seem to be
most incredible, both of hurt and help, can undoubtedly be wrought,
but analysis should always be for the sake of synthesis and never be
beyond its need and assured completion. No thoughtful student fully
informed of the facts and tentatives in this field can doubt that here
lies one of the most promising fields of future development, full of
far-reaching and rich results for those, as yet far too few, experts
in physical training, who have philosophic minds, command the facts of
modern psychology, and whom the world awaits now as never before.
C. Another yet closely correlated ideal is that of economic postures
and movements. The system of Ling is less orthopedic than orthogenic,
although he sought primarily to correct bad attitudes and perverted
growth. Starting from the respiratory and proceeding to the muscular
system, he and his immediate pupils were content to refer to the
ill-shapen bodies of most men about them. One of their important aims
was to relax the flexor and tone up the extensor muscles and to open
the human form into postures as opposite as possible to those of the
embryo, which it tends so persistently to approximate in sitting, and
in fatigue and collapse attitudes generally. The head must balance on
the cervical vertebra and not call upon the muscles of the neck to
keep it from rolling off; the weight of the shoulders must be thrown
back off the thorax; the spine be erect to allow the abdomen free
action; the joints of the thigh extended; the hand and arm supinated,
etc. Bones must relieve muscles and nerves. Thus an erect,
self-respecting carriage must be given, and the unfortunate
association, so difficult to overcome, between effort and an involuted
posture must be broken up. This means economy and a great saving of
vital energy. Extensor action goes with expansive, flexor with
depressive states of mind; hence courage, buoyancy, hope, are favored
and handicaps removed. All that is done with great effort causes wide
irradiation of tensions to the other half of the body and also
sympathetic activities in those not involved; the law of maximal ease
and minimal expenditure of energy must be always striven for, and the
interests of the viscera never lost sight of. This involves educating
weak and neglected muscles, and like the next ideal, often shades over
by almost imperceptible gradation into the passive movements by the
Zander machines. Realizing that certain activities are sufficiently or
too much emphasized in ordinary life, stress is laid upon those which
are complemental to them, so that there is no pretense of taking
charge of the totality of motor processes, the intention being
principally to supplement deficiencies, to insure men against being
warped, distorted, or deformed by their work in life, to compensate
specialties and perform more exactly what recreation to some extent
aims at.
This wholesome but less inspiring endeavor, which combats one of the
greatest evils that under modern civilization threatens man's physical
weal, is in some respects as easy and practical as it is useful. The
great majority of city bred men, as well as all students, are prone to
deleterious effects from too much sitting; and indeed there is
anatomical evidence in the structure of the tissues, and especially
the blood-vessels of the groins, that, at his best, man is not yet
entirely adjusted to the upright position. So a method that
straightens knees, hips, spine, and shoulders, or combats the
school-desk attitude, is a most salutary contribution to a great and
growing need. In the very act of stretching, and perhaps yawning, for
which much is to be said, nature itself suggests such correctives and
preventives. To save men from being victims of their occupations is
often to add a better and larger half to their motor development. The
danger of the system, which now best represents this ideal, is
inflexibility and overscholastic treatment. It needs a great range of
individual variations if it would do more than increase circulation,
respiration, and health, or the normal functions of internal organs
and fundamental physiological activities. To clothe the frame with
honest muscles that are faithful servants of the will adds not only
strength, more active habits and efficiency, but health; and in its
material installation this system is financially economic. Personal
faults and shortcomings are constantly pointed out where this work is
best represented, and it has a distinct advantage in inciting an
acquaintance with physiology and inviting the larger fields of medical
knowledge.
D. The fourth gymnastic aim is symmetry and correct proportions.
Anthropometry and average girths and dimensions, strength, etc., of
the parts of the body are first charted in percentile grades; and each
individual is referred to the apparatus and exercises best fitted to
correct weaknesses and subnormalities. The norms here followed are not
the canons of Greek art, but those established by the measurement of
the largest numbers properly grouped by age, weight, height, etc.
Young men are found to differ very widely. Some can lift 1,000 pounds,
and some not 100; some can lift their weight between twenty and forty
times, and some not once; some are most deficient in legs, others in
shoulders, arms, backs, chests. By photography, tape, and scales, each
is interested in his own bodily condition and incited to overcome his
greatest defects; and those best endowed by nature to attain ideal
dimensions and make new records are encouraged along these lines. Thus
this ideal is also largely though not exclusively remedial.
This system can arouse youth to the greatest pitch of zest in watching
their own rapidly multiplying curves of growth in dimensions and
capacities, in plotting curves that record their own increment in
girths, lifts, and other tests, and in observing the effects of sleep,
food, correct and incorrect living upon a system so exquisitely
responsive to all these influences as are the muscles. To learn to
know and grade excellence and defect, to be known for the list of
things one can do and to have a record, or to realize what we lack of
power to break best records, even to know that we are strengthening
some point where heredity has left us with some shortage and perhaps
danger, the realization of all this may bring the first real and deep
feeling for growth that may become a passion later in things of the
soul. Growth always has its selfish aspects, and to be constantly
passing our own examination in this respect is a new and perhaps
sometimes too self-conscious endeavor of our young college barbarians;
but it is on the whole a healthful regulative, and this form of the
struggle toward perfection and escape from the handicap of birth will
later move upward to the intellectual and moral plane. To kindle a
sense of physical beauty of form in every part, such as a sculptor
has, may be to start youth on the lowest round of the Platonic ladder
that leads up to the vision of ideal beauty of soul, if his ideal be
not excess of brawn, or mere brute strength, but the true proportion
represented by the classic or mean temperance balanced like justice
between all extremes. Hard, patient, regular work, with the right
dosage for this self-cultural end, has thus at the same time a unique
moral effect.
The dangers of this system are also obvious. Nature's intent can not
be too far thwarted; and as in mental training the question is always
pertinent, so here we may ask whether it be not best in all cases to
some extent, and in some cases almost exclusively, to develop in the
direction in which we most excel, to emphasize physical individuality
and even idiosyncrasy, rather than to strive for monotonous
uniformity. Weaknesses and parts that lag behind are the most easily
overworked to the point of reaction and perhaps permanent injury.
Again, work for curative purposes lacks the exuberance of free sports:
it is not inspiring to make up areas; and therapeutic exercises
imposed like a sentence for the shortcomings of our forebears bring a
whiff of the atmosphere of the hospital, if not of the prison, into
the gymnasium.
These four ideals, while so closely interrelated, are as yet far from
harmonized. Swedish, Turner, Sargent, and American systems are each,
most unfortunately, still too blind to the others' merits and too
conscious of the others' shortcomings. To some extent they are
prevented from getting together by narrow devotion to a single cult,
aided sometimes by a pecuniary interest in the sale of their own
apparatus and books or in the training of teachers according to one
set of rubrics. The real elephant is neither a fan, a rope, a tree nor
a log, as the blind men in the fable contended, each thinking the part
he had touched to be the whole. This inability of leaders to combine
causes uncertainty and lack of confidence in, and of enthusiastic
support for, any system on the part of the public. Even the radically
different needs of the sexes have failed of recognition from the same
partisanship. All together represent only a fraction of the nature and
needs of youth. The world now demands what this country has never had,
a man who, knowing the human body, gymnastic history, and the various
great athletic traditions of the past, shall study anew the whole
motor field, as a few great leaders early in the last century tried to
do; who shall gather and correlate the literature and experiences of
the past and present with a deep sense of responsibility to the
future; who shall examine martial training with all the inspirations,
warnings, and new demands; and who shall know how to revive the
inspiration of the past animated by the same spirit as the Turners,
who were almost inflamed by referring back to the hardy life of the
early Teutons and trying to reproduce its best features; who shall
catch the spirit of, and make due connections with, popular sports
past and present, study both industry and education to compensate
their debilitating effects, and be himself animated by a great ethical
and humanistic hope and faith in a better future. Such a man, if he
ever walks the earth, will be the idol of youth, will know their
physical secrets, will come almost as a savior to the bodies of men,
and will, like Jahn, feel his calling and work sacred, and his
institution a temple in which every physical act will be for the sake
of the soul. The world of adolescence, especially that part which sits
in closed spaces conning books, groans and travails all the more
grievously and yearningly, because unconsciously, waiting for a
redeemer for its body. Till he appears, our culture must remain for
most a little hollow, falsetto, and handicapped by school-bred
diseases. The modern gymnasium performs its chief service during
adolescence and is one of the most beneficent agencies of which not a
few, but every youth, should make large use. Its spirit should be
instinct with euphoria, where the joy of being alive reaches a point
of high, although not quite its highest, intensity. While the stimulus
of rivalry and even of records is not excluded, and social feelings
may be appealed to by unison exercises and by the club spirit, and
while competitions, tournaments, and the artificial motives of prizes
and exhibitions may be invoked, the culture is in fact largely
individual. And yet in this country the annual _Turnerfest_ brings
4,000 or 5,000 men from all parts of the Union, who sometimes all
deploy and go through some of the standard exercises together under
one leader. Instead of training a few athletes, the real problem now
presented is how to raise the general level of vitality so that
children and youth may be fitted to stand the strain of modern
civilization, resist zymotic diseases, and overcome the deleterious
influences of city life. The almost immediate effects of systematic
training are surprising and would hardly be inferred from the annual
increments tabled earlier in this chapter. Sandow was a rather weakly
boy and ascribes his development chiefly to systematic training.
We have space but for two reports believed to be typical. Enebuske
reports on the effects of seven months' training on young women
averaging 22.3 years. The figures are based on the 50 percentile
column.
----------------+--------+----------------------------------+--------
| | Strength of |
|Lung | | | |right |left |Total
|capacity| legs |back |chest|forearm|forearm|Strength
----------------+--------+------+-----+-----+-------+-------+--------
Before training | 2.65 | 93 |65.5 | 27 | 26 | 23 | 230
After six months| 2.87 | 120 |81.5 | 32 | 28 | 25 | 293
----------------+--------+------+-----+-----+-------+-------+--------
By comparing records of what he deems standard normal growth with that
of 188 naval cadets from sixteen to twenty-one, who had special and
systematic training, just after the period of most rapid growth in
height, Beyer concluded that the effect of four years of this added a
little over an inch of stature, and that this gain as greatest at the
beginning. This increase was greatest for the youngest cadets. He
found also a marked increase in weight, nearly the same for each year
from seventeen to twenty one. This he thought more easily influenced
by exercise than height. A high vital index ratio of lung capacity to
weight is a very important attribute of good training. Beyer[1] found,
however, that the addition of lung area gained by exercise did not
keep up with the increase thus caused in muscular substance, and that
the vital index always became smaller in those who had gained weight
and strength by special physical training. How much gain in weight is
desirable beyond the point where the lung capacity increases at an
equal rate is unknown. If such measurements were applied to the
different gymnastic systems, we might be able to compare their
efficiency, which would be a great desideratum in view of the
unfortunate rivalry between them. Total strength, too, can be greatly
increased. Beyer thinks that from sixteen to twenty-one it may exceed
the average or normal increment fivefold, and he adds, "I firmly
believe that the now so wonderful performances of most of our strong
men are well within the reach of the majority of healthy men, if such
performances were a serious enough part of their ambition
to make them do the exercises necessary to develop them." Power of the
organs to respond to good training by increased strength probably
reaches well into middle life.
It is not encouraging to learn that, according to a recent writer,[2]
we now have seventy times as many physicians in proportion to the
general population as there are physical directors, even for the
school population alone considered. We have twice as many physicians
per population as Great Britain, four times a many as Germany, or 2
physicians, 1.8 ministers, 1.4 lawyers per thousand of the general
population; while even if all male teachers of physical training
taught only males of the military age, we should have but 0.05 of a
teacher per thousand, or if the school population alone be considered,
20 teachers per million pupils. Hence, it is inferred that the need of
wise and classified teachers in this field is at present greater than
in any other. But fortunately while spontaneous, unsystematic exercise
in a well-equipped modern gymnasium may in rare cases do harm, so far
from sharing the prejudice often felt for it by professional trainers,
we believe that free access to it without control or direction is
unquestionably a boon to youth. Even if its use be sporadic and
occasional, as it is likely to be with equal opportunity for
out-of-door exercises and especially sports, practise is sometimes
hygienic almost inversely to its amount, while even lameness from
initial excess has its lessons, and the sense of manifoldness of
inferiorities brought home by experiences gives a wholesome
self-knowledge and stimulus.
In this country more than elsewhere, especially in high school and
college, gymnasium work has been brought into healthful connection
with field sports and record competitions for both teams and
individuals who aspire to championship. This has given the former a
healthful stimulus although it is felt only by a picked few. Scores of
records have been established for running, walking, hurdling,
throwing, putting, swimming, rowing, skating, etc., each for various
shorter and longer distances and under manifold conditions, and for
both amateurs and professionals, who are easily accessible. These, in
general, show a slow but steady advance in this country since 1876,
when athletics were established here. In that year there was not a
single world's best record held by an American amateur, and
high-school boys of to-day could in most, though not in all lines,
have won the American championship twenty-five years ago. Of course,
in a strict sense, intercollegiate contests do not show the real
advance in athletics, because it is not necessary for a man in order
to win a championship to do his best; but they do show general
improvement.
We select for our purpose a few of those records longest kept. Not
dependent on external conditions like boat-racing, or on improved
apparatus like bicycling, we have interesting data of a very different
order for physical measurements. These down to present writing--July,
1906--are as follows: For the 100-yard dash, every annual record from
1876 to 1895 is 10 or 11 seconds, or between these, save in 1890,
where Owen's record of 9-4/5 seconds still stands. In the 220-yard run
there is slight improvement since 1877, but here the record of 1896
(Wefers, 21-1/5 seconds) has not been surpassed. In the quarter-mile
run, the beet record was in 1900 (Long, 47 seconds). The half-mile
record, which still stands, was made in 1895 (Kilpatrick, 1 minute
52-2/5 seconds); the mile run in 1895 (Conneff, 4 minutes 15-3/5
seconds). The running broad jump shows a very steady improvement, with
the best record in 1900 (Prinstein, 24 feet 7-1/4 inches). The running
high jump shows improvement, but less, with the record of 1895 still
standing (Sweeney, 6 feet 5-5/8 inches). The record for pole vaulting,
corrected to November, 1905, is 12 feet 132/100 inches (Dole); for
throwing the 16-pound hammer head, 100 feet 5 inches (Queckberner);
for putting the 16-pound shot, 49 feet 6 inches (Coe, 1905); the
standing high jump, 5 feet 5-1/2 inches (Ewry); for the running high
jump, 6 feet 5-5/8 inches (Sweeney). We also find that if we extend
our purview to include all kinds of records for physical achievement,
that not a few of the amateur records for activities involving
strength combined with rapid rhythm movement are held by young men of
twenty or even less.
In putting the 16-pound shot under uniform conditions the record has
improved since the early years nearly 10 feet (Coe, 49 feet 6 inches,
best at present writing, 1906). Pole vaulting shows a very marked
advance culminating in 1904 (Dole, 12 feet 132/100 inches). Most
marked of all perhaps is the great advance in throwing the 16-pound
hammer. Beginning between 70 and 80 feet in the early years, the
record is now 172 feet 11 inches (Flanagan, 1904). The two-mile
bicycle race also shows marked gain, partly, of course, due to
improvement in the wheel, the early records being nearly 7 minutes,
and the best being 2 minutes 19 seconds (McLean, 1903). Some of these
are world records, and more exceed professional records.[3] These, of
course, no more indicate general improvement than the steady reduction
of time in horse-racing suggests betterment in horses generally.
In Panhellenic games as well as at present, athleticism in its
manifold forms was one of the most characteristic expressions of
adolescent nature and needs. Not a single time or distance record of
antiquity has been preserved, although Grasberger[4] and other writers
would have us believe that in those that are comparable, ancient
youthful champions greatly excelled ours, especially in leaping and
running. While we are far from cultivating mere strength, our training
is very one-sided from the Greek norm of unity or of the ideals that
develop the body only for the salve of the soul. While gymnastics in
our sense, with apparatus, exercises, and measurements independently
of games was unknown, the ideal and motive were as different from ours
as was its method. Nothing, so far as is known, was done for
correcting the ravages of work, or for overcoming hereditary defects;
and until athletics degenerated there were Do exercises for the sole
purpose of developing muscle.
On the whole, while modern gymnastics has done more for the trunk,
shoulders, and arms than for the legs, it is now too selfish and
ego-centric, deficient on the side of psychic impulsion, and but
little subordinated to ethical or intellectual development. Yet it
does a great physical service to all who cultivate it, and is a
safeguard of virtue and temperance. Its need is radical revision and
coordination of various cults and theories in the light of the latest
psycho-physiological science.
Gymnastics allies itself to biometric work. The present academic zeal
for physical development is in great need of closer affiliation with
anthropometry. This important and growing department will be
represented in the ideal gymnasium of the future--First, by courses,
if not by a chair, devoted to the apparatus of measurements of human
proportions and symmetry, with a kinesological cabinet where young men
are instructed in the elements of auscultation, the use of calipers,
the sphygmograph, spirometer, plethysmograph, kinesometer to plot
graphic curves, compute average errors, and tables of percentile
grades and in statistical methods, etc. Second, anatomy, especially of
muscles, bones, heart, and skin, will be taught, and also their
physiology, with stress upon myology, the effects of exercise on the
flow of blood and lymph, not excluding the development of the upright
position, and all that it involves and implies. Third, hygiene will be
prominent and comprehensive enough to cover all that pertains to
body-keeping, regimen, sleep, connecting with school and domestic and
public hygiene--all on the basis of modern as distinct from the
archaic physiology of Ling, who, it is sufficient to remember, died in
1839, before this science was recreated, and the persistence of whose
concepts are an anomalous survival to-day. Mechanico-therapeutics, the
purpose and service of each chief kind of apparatus and exercise, the
value of work on stall bars with chest weights, of chinning, use of
the quarter-staff, somersaults, rings, clubs, dumb-bells, work with
straight and flexed knees on machinery, etc., will be taught. Fourth,
the history of gymnastics from the time of its highest development in
Greece to the present is full of interest and has a very high and not
yet developed culture value for youth. This department, both in its
practical and theoretical side, should have its full share of prizes
and scholarships to stimulate the seventy to seventy-five per cent of
students who are now unaffected by the influence of athletics. By
these methods the motivation of gymnastics, which now in large measure
goes to waste in enthusiasm, could be utilised to aid the greatly
needed intellectualization of those exercises which in their nature
are more akin to work than play. Indeed, Gutsmuths's first definition
of athletics was "work under the garb of youthful pleasure." So to
develop these courses that they could chiefly, if not entirely,
satisfy the requirements for the A.B. degree, would coordinate the
work of the now isolated curriculum of the training-schools with that
of the college and thus broaden the sphere of the latter; but besides
its culture value, which I hold very high, such a step would prepare
for the new, important, and, as we have seen, very inadequately manned
profession of physical trainers. This has, moreover, great but yet
latent and even unsuspected capacities for the morals of our academic
youth. Grote states that among the ancient Greeks one-half of all
education as devoted to the body, and Galton urges that they as much
excelled us as we do the African negro. They held that if physical
perfection was cultivated, moral and mental excellence would follow;
and that, without this, national culture rests on an insecure basis.
In our day there are many new reasons to believe that the best nations
of the future will be those which give most intelligent care to the
body.
[Footnote 1: See H.G. Beyer. The Influence of Exercise on Growth.
American Physical Education Review, September-December, 1896, vol. I,
pp. 76-87.]
[Footnote 2: J.H. McCurdy, Physical Training as a Profession.
Association Seminar, March, 1902, vol. 10, pp. 11-24.]
[Footnote 3: These records are taken from the World Almanac, 1906, and
Olympic Games of 1906 at Athens. Edited by J.E. Sullivan, Commissioner
from the United States to the Olympic Games. Spalding's Athletic
Library, New York, July, 1906.]
[Footnote 4: O.H. Jaeger, Die Gymnastik der Hellenen. Heitz,
Stuttgart 1881. L. Grasberger's great standard work, Erziehung und
Untericht im klassischen Alterthum. Würzburg, 1864-81, 3 vols.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER VI
PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES
The view of Groos partial and a better explanation of play proposed as
rehearsing ancestral activities--The glory of Greek physical training,
its ideals and results--The first spontaneous movements of infancy as
keys to the past--Necessity of developing basal powers before those
that are later and peculiar to the individual--Plays that interest due
to their antiquity--Play with dolls--Play distinguished by age--Play
preferences of children and their reasons--The profound
significance of rhythm--The value of dancing and also its
significance, history, and the desirability of re-introducing
it--Fighting--Boxing--Wrestling--Bushido--Foot-ball--Military
ideals--Showing off--Cold baths--Hill climbing--The playground
movement--The psychology of play--Its relation to work.
Play, sports, and games constitute a more varied, far older, and more
popular field. Here a very different spirit of joy and gladness rules.
Artifacts often enter but can not survive unless based upon pretty
purely hereditary momentum. Thus our first problem is to seek both the
motor tendencies and the psychic motives bequeathed to us from the
past. The view of Groos that play is practise for future adult
activities is very partial, superficial, and perverse. It ignores the
past where lie the keys to all play activities. True play never
practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial life often
calls for. It exercises many atavistic and rudimentary functions, a
number of which will abort before maturity, but which live themselves
out in play like the tadpole's tail, that must be both developed and
used as a stimulus to the growth of legs which will otherwise never
mature. In place of this mistaken and misleading view, I regard play
as the motor habits and spirit of the past of the race, persisting in
the present, as rudimentary functions sometimes of and always akin to
rudimentary organs. The best index and guide to the stated activities
of adults in past ages is found in the instinctive, untaught, and
non-imitative plays of children which are the most spontaneous and
exact expressions of their motor needs. The young grow up into the
same forms of motor activity, as did generations that have long
preceded them, only to a limited extent; and if the form of every
human occupation were to change to-day, play would be unaffected save
in some of its superficial imitative forms. It would develop the motor
capacities, impulses, and fundamental forms of our past heritage, and
the transformation of these into later acquired adult forms is
progressively later. In play every mood and movement is instinct with
heredity. Thus we rehearse the activities of our ancestors, back we
know not how far, and repeat their life work in summative and
adumbrated ways. It is reminiscent albeit unconsciously, of our line
of descent; and each is the key to the other. The psycho-motive
impulses that prompt it are the forms in which our forebears have
transmitted to us their habitual activities. Thus stage by stage we
reënact their lives. Once in the phylon many of these activities were
elaborated in the life and death struggle for existence. Now the
elements and combinations oldest in the muscle history of the race are
rerepresented earliest in the individual, and those later follow in
order. This is why the heart of youth goes out into play as into
nothing else, as if in it man remembered a lost paradise. This is why,
unlike gymnastics, play has as much soul as body, and also why it so
makes for unity of body and soul that the proverb "Man is whole only
when he plays" suggests that the purest plays are those that enlist
both alike. To address the body predominantly strengthens unduly the
fleshy elements, and to overemphasize the soul causes weakness and
automatisms. Thus understood, play is the ideal type of exercise for
the young, most favorable for growth, and most self-regulating in both
kind and amount. For its forms the pulse of adolescent enthusiasm
beats highest. It is unconstrained and free to follow any outer or
inner impulse. The zest of it vents and satisfies the strong passion
of youth for intense erethic and perhaps orgiastic states, gives an
exaltation of self-feeling so craved that with no vicarious outlet it
often impels to drink, and best of all realizes the watchword of the
Turners, _frisch, frei, fröhlich, fromm_ [Fresh, free, jovial,
pious.].
Ancient Greece, the history and literature of which owe their
perennial charm for all later ages to the fact that they represent the
eternal adolescence of the world, best illustrates what this
enthusiasm means for youth. Jäger and Guildersleeve, and yet better
Grasberger, would have us believe that the Panhellenic and especially
the Olympic games combined many of the best features of a modern prize
exhibition, a camp-meeting, fair, Derby day, a Wagner festival, a
meeting of the British Association, a country cattle show,
intercollegiate games, and medieval tournament; that they were the
"acme of festive life" and drew all who loved gold and glory, and that
night and death never seemed so black as by contrast with their
splendor. The deeds of the young athletes were ascribed to the
inspiration of the gods, whose abodes they lit up with glory; and in
doing them honor these discordant states found a bond of unity. The
victor was crowned with a simple spray of laurel; cities vied with
each other for the honor of having given him birth, their walls were
taken down for his entry and immediately rebuilt; sculptors, for whom
the five ancient games were schools of posture, competed in the
representation of his form; poets gave him a pedigree reaching back to
the gods, and Pindar, who sang that only he is great who is great with
his hands and feet, raised his victory to symbolize the eternal
prevalence of good over evil. The best body implied the best mind; and
even Plato, to whom tradition gives not only one of the fairest souls,
but a body remarkable for both strength and beauty, and for whom
weakness was perilously near to wickedness, and ugliness to sin,
argues that education must be so conducted that the body can be safely
entrusted to the care of the soul and suggests, what later became a
slogan of a more degenerate gladiatorial athleticism, that to be well
and strong is to be a philosopher--_valare est philosophari_. The
Greeks could hardly conceive bodily apart from psychic education, and
physical was for the sake of mental training. A sane, whole mind could
hardly reside in an unsound body upon the integrity of which it was
dependent. Knowledge for its own sake, from this standpoint, is a
dangerous superstition, for what frees the mind is disastrous if it
does not give self-control; better ignorance than knowledge that does
not develop a motor side. Body culture is ultimately only for the sake
of the mind and soul, for body is only its other ego. Not only is all
muscle culture at the same time brain-building, but a book-worm with
soft hands, tender feet, and tough rump from much sitting, or an
anemic girl prodigy, "in the morning hectic, in the evening electric,"
is a monster. Play at its best is only a school of ethics. It gives
not only strength but courage and confidence, tends to simplify life
and habits, gives energy, decision, and promptness to the will, brings
consolation and peace of mind in evil days, is a resource in trouble
and brings out individuality.
How the ideals of physical preformed those of moral and mental
training in the land and day of Socrates is seen in the identification
of knowledge and virtue, "_Kennen und Können_." [To know and to have
the power to do] Only an extreme and one-sided intellectualism
separates them and assumes that it is easy to know and hard to do.
From the ethical standpoint, philosophy, and indeed all knowledge, is
the art of being and doing good, conduct is the only real subject of
knowledge, and there is no science but morals. He is the best man,
says Xenophon, who is always studying how to improve, and he is the
happiest who feels that he is improving. Life is a skill, an art like
a handicraft, and true knowledge a form of will. Good moral and
physical development are more than analogous; and where intelligence
is separated from action the former becomes mystic, abstract, and
desiccated, and the latter formal routine. Thus mere conscience and
psychological integrity and righteousness are allied and mutually
inspiring.
Not only play, which is the purest expression of motor heredity, but
work and all exercise owe most of whatever pleasure they bring to the
past. The first influence of all right exercise for those in health is
feeling of well-being and exhilaration. This is one chief source of
the strange enthusiasm felt for many special forms of activity, and
the feeling is so strong that it animates many forms of it that are
hygienically unfit. To act vigorously from a full store of energy
gives a reflex of pleasure that is sometimes a passion and may fairly
intoxicate. Animals must move or cease growing and die. While to be
weak is to be miserable, to feel strong is a joy and glory. It gives a
sense of superiority, dignity, endurance, courage, confidence,
enterprise, power, personal validity, virility, and virtue in the
etymological sense of that noble word. To be active, agile, strong, is
especially the glory of young men. Our nature and history have so
disposed our frame that thus all physiological and psychic processes
are stimulated, products of decomposition are washed out by
oxygenation and elimination, the best reaction of all the ganglionic
and sympathetic activities is accused, and vegetative processes are
normalized. Activity may exalt the spirit almost to the point of
ecstasy, and the physical pleasure of it diffuse, irradiate, and
mitigate the sexual stress just at the age when its premature
localization is most deleterious. Just enough at the proper time and
rate contributes to permanent elasticity of mood and disposition,
gives moral self-control, rouses a love of freedom with all that that
great word means, and favors all higher human aspirations.
In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that
the race comes very close to the individual youth, and that ancestral
momenta animate motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the
combinations. Some of the elements speak with a still small voice
raucous with age. The first spontaneous movements of infancy are
hieroglyphs, to most of which we have as yet no good key. Many
elements are so impacted and felted together that we can not analyze
them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only hint
things we can not apprehend. Later the rehearsals are fuller, and
their significance more intelligible, and in boyhood and youth the
correspondences are plain to all who have eyes to see. Pleasure is
always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current
of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely ancestral
joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our
play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges
our life. Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its
traces in us. Some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from
play; but the play field broadens with succeeding generations youth is
prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of
youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible
characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of
play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and
muscles know it not.
Gulick[1] has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting
than others is to be found in the phylon. The power to throw with
accuracy and speed was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers
were eliminated. Those who could throw unusually well best overcame
enemies, killed game, and sheltered family. The nervous and muscular
systems are organized with certain definite tendencies and have back
of them a racial setting. So running and dodging with speed and
endurance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting and
fighting. Now that the need of these is leas urgent for utilitarian
purposes, they are still necessary for perfecting the organism. This
makes, for instance, baseball racially familiar, because it represents
activities that were once and for a long time necessary for survival.
We inherit tendencies of muscular coördination that have been of great
racial utility. The best athletic sports and games a composed of these
racially old elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of
great importance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so
loves to sit all day and fish! It is because this interest dates back
to time immemorial. We are the sons of fishermen, and early life was
by the water's side, and this is our food supply. This explains why
certain exercises are more interesting than others. It is because they
touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the race. Thus we see that
play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing
racial history. Plays and games change only in their external form,
but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic
content of them, are the same. Just as psychic states must be lived
out up through the grades, so the physical activities most be played
off, each in its own time.
The best exercise for the young should thus be more directed to
develop the basal powers old to the race than those peculiar to the
individual, and it should enforce those psycho-neural and muscular
forms which race habit has banded down rather than insist upon those
arbitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of
heredity. The best guide to the former is _interest_, zest, and
spontaneity. Hereditary moment, really determine, too, the order in
which nerve centers come into function. The oldest, racial parts come
first, and those which are higher and represent volition come in much
later.[2] As Hughlings Jackson has well shown, speech uses most of the
same organs as does eating, but those concerned with the former are
controlled from a higher level of nerve-cells. By right mastication,
deglutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. Thus not only
the kind but the time of forms and degrees of exercise is best
prescribed by heredity. All growth is more or less rhythmic. There are
seasons of rapid increment followed by rest and then perhaps succeeded
by a period of augmentation, and this may occur several times.
Roberts's fifth parliamentary report shows that systematic gymnastics,
which, if applied at the right age, produce such immediate and often
surprising development of lung capacity, utterly fail with boys of
twelve, because this nascent period has not yet come. Donaldson showed
that if the eyelid of a young kitten be forced open prematurely at
birth and stimulated with light, medullation was premature and
imperfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, we know
that little result is achieved. The sequence in which the maturation
of levels, nerve areas, and bundles of fibers develop may be, as
Flechsig thinks, causal; or, according to Cajal, energy, originally
employed in growth by cell division, later passes to fiber extension
and the development of latent cells; or as in young children, the
nascent period of finger movements may stimulate that of the thumb
which comes later, and the independent movement of the two eyes, their
subsequent coördination, and so on to perhaps a third and yet higher
level. Thus exercise ought to develop nature's first intention and
fulfil the law of nascent periods, or else not only no good but great
harm may be done. Hence every determination of these periods is of
great practical as well as scientific importance. The following are
the chief attempts yet made to fix them, which show the significance
of adolescence.
The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity between eight
and nine,[3] and it is nearly ended at fifteen, although it may
persist. Children can give no better reason why they stop playing with
dolls than because other things are liked better, or they are too old,
ashamed, love real babies, etc. The Roman girl, when ripe for
marriage, hung up her childhood doll as a votive offering to Venus.
Mrs. Carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a
four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre like Dido,
after speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself with a penknife
by way of Tyrian sword. At thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly
realized that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life or
feeling, yet many continue to play with them with great pleasure, in
secret, till well on in the teens or twenties. Occasionally single
women or married women with no children, and in rare cases even those
who have children, play dolls all their lives. Gales's[4] student
concluded that the girls who played with dolls up to or into pubescent
years were usually those who had the fewest number, that they played
with them in the most realistic manner, kept them because actually
most fond of them, and were likely to be more scientific, steady, and
less sentimental than those who dropped them early. But the instinct
that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle
points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls
are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always
children or babies. There is no longer a struggle between doubt and
reality in the doll cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but
where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the
height of the fever dolls are only in small part representatives of
future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is
probably false. Nor are doll and child comparable to first and second
dentition, and it is doubtful if children who play with dolls as
children with too great abandonment are those who make the best
mothers later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise of
motherhood. The number of motor activities that are both inspired and
unified by this form of play and that can always be given wholesome
direction is almost incredible, and has been too long neglected both
by psychologists and teachers. Few purer types of the rehearsal by the
individual of the history of the race can probably be found even
though we can not yet analyze the many elements involved and assign to
each its phyletic correlate.
In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick[5] divides play into three childish
periods, separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to
characterize the plays of early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and
of later adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. Of the first two
periods he says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously,
but often do so under the stimulus of older persons. From seven to
twelve, games are almost exclusively individualistic and competitive,
but in early adolescence "two elements predominate--first, the plays are
predominantly team games, in which the individual is more or less
sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in
which there is coöperation among a number for a given end, in which play
has a program and an end. The second characteristic of the period is
with reference to its plays, and there seems to be all of savage
out-of-door life--hunting, fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing,
fighting, hero-worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. This
characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." "The plays of
adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage,
endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm."
Croswell[6] found that among 2,000 children familiar with 700 kinds of
amusements, those involving physical exercises predominated over all
others, and that "at every age after the eighth year they were
represented as almost two to one and in the sixteenth year rose among
boys as four to one." The age of the greatest number of different
amusements is from ten to eleven, nearly fifteen being mentioned, but
for the next eight or nine years there is a steady decline of number,
and progressive specialisation occurs. The games of chase, which are
suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise from eleven per cent in
boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon after decline, and
at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. Toys and original
make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily
and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily
from ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys.
"A third or more of all the amusements of boys just entering their
teens are games of contest--games in which the end is in one way or
another to gain an advantage one's fellows, in which the interest is n
the struggle between peers." "As children approach the teens, a
tendency arises that is well expressed by one of the girls who no
longer makes playthings but things that are useful." Parents and
society must, therefore, provide the most favorable conditions for the
kind of amusement fitting at each age. As the child grows older,
society plays a larger rôle in all the child's amusements, and from
the thirteenth year "amusements take on a decidedly coöperative and
competitive character, and efforts are ore and more confined to the
accomplishments of some definite aim. The course for this period will
concentrate the effort upon fewer lines," and more time will be
devoted to each. The desire for mastery is now at its height. The
instinct is to maintain one's self independently and ask no odds. At
fourteen, especially, the impulse is, in manual training, to make
something and perhaps to coöperate.
McGhee[7] collected the play preferences of 15,718 children, and found
a very steady decline in running plays among girls from nine to
eighteen, but a far more rapid rise in plays of chance from eleven to
fifteen, and a very rapid rise from sixteen to eighteen. From eleven
onward with the most marked fall before fourteen, there was a distinct
decline in imitative games for girls and a slower one for boys. Games
involving rivalry increased rapidly among boys from eleven to sixteen
and still more rapidly among girls, their percentage of preference
even exceeding that of boys at eighteen, when it reached nearly
seventy per cent. With adolescence, specialization upon a few plays
was markedly increased in the teens among boys, whereas with girls in
general there were a large number of plays which were popular with
none preëminent. Even at this age the principle of organization in
games so strong with boys is very slight with girls. Puberty showed
the greatest increase of interest among pubescent girls for croquet,
and among boys for swimming, although baseball and football, the most
favored for boys, rose rapidly. Although the author does not state it,
it would seem from his data that plays peculiar to the different
seasons were most marked among boys, in part, at least, because their
activities are more out of doors.
Ferrero and others have shown that the more intense activities of
primitive people tend to be rhythmic and with strongly automatic
features. No form of activity is more universal than the dance, which
is not only intense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental
movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every
important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the life of man in
language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry themselves
seem to have arisen out of it. Before it became specialized much labor
was cast in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and
even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and
social principles. In the dark background of history there is now much
evidence that at some point, play, art, and work were not divorced.
They all may have sprung from rhythmic movement which is so
deep-seated in biology because it secures most joy of life with least
expense. By it Eros of old ordered chaos, and by its judicious use the
human soul is cadenced to great efforts toward high ideals. The many
work-songs to secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, stepping,
the use of flail, lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that
areas and thesis represent flexion and extension, that accent
originated in the acme of muscular stress, as well as how rhythm eases
work and also makes it social. Most of the old work-canticles are
lost, and machines have made work more serial, while rhythms are
obscured or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom they used
to express. Now all basal, central, or strength movements tend to be
oscillatory, automatically repetitive, or rhythmic like savage music,
as if the waves of the primeval sea whence we came still beat in them,
just as all fine peripheral and late movements tend to be serial,
special, vastly complex, end diversified. It is thus natural that
during the period of greatest strength increment in muscular
development, the rhythmic function of nearly all fundamental movements
should be strongly accentuated. At the dawn of this age boys love
marching; and, as our returns show, there is a very remarkable rise in
the passion for beating time, jigging, double shuffling, rhythmic
clapping, etc. The more prominent the factor of repetition the more
automatic and the less strenuous is the hard and new effort of
constant psychic adjustment and attention. College yells, cheers,
rowing, marching, processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war,
calisthenics and class gymnastics with counting, and especially with
music, horseback riding, etc., are rhythmic; tennis, baseball and
football, basketball, golf, polo, etc., are less rhythmic, but are
concerted and intense. These latter emphasise the conflict factor,
best brought out in fencing, boxing, and wrestling, and lay more
stress on the psychic elements of attention and skill. The effect of
musical accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly rejects, is to
make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to
proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the
neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine movements.
Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this
change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those
who march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised
time marking, experience a great broadening of the horizon of
consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental power and scope,
all-conditioning increase in the carrying power of attention and the
sentence-sense. The soul now feels the beauty of cadences, good
ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods--and all, as I
am convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements
which are predominantly rhythmic. Not only does music start in time
marking, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took
precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming
later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic
feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make
poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack,
gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows
its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive what war,
love, and religion would be without it. The old adage that "the parent
of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music
is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is God" seems borne out not only
in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not
move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on
stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging
as a compound pendulum.
Dancing is one of the best expressions of pure play and of the motor
needs of youth. Perhaps it is the most liberal of all forms of motor
education. Schopenhauer thought it the apex of physiological
irritability and that it made animal life most vividly conscious of
its existence and most exultant in exhibiting it. In very ancient
times China ritualised it in the spring and made it a large part of
the education of boys after the age of thirteen. Neale thinks it was
originally circular or orbicular worship, which he deems oldest. In
Japan, in the priestly Salic College of ancient Rome, in Egypt, in the
Greek Apollo cult, it was a form of worship. St. Basil advised it; St.
Gregory introduced it into religious services. The early Christian
bishops, called præsuls, led the sacred dance around the altar; and
only in 692, and again in 1617, was it forbidden in church. Neale and
others have shown how the choral processionals with all the added
charm of vestment and intonation have had far more to do in
Christianizing many low tribes, who could not understand the language
of the church, than has preaching. Savages are nearly all great
dancers, imitating every animal they know, dancing out their own
legends, with ritual sometimes so exacting that error means death. The
character of people is often learned from their dances, and Molière
says the destiny of nations depends on them. The gayest dancers are
often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some mysteries
can be revealed only in them, as holy passion-plays. If we consider
the history of secular dances, we find that some of them, when first
invented or in vogue, evoked the greatest enthusiasm. One writer says
that the polka so delighted France and England that statesmen forgot
politics. The spirit of the old Polish aristocracy still lives in the
polonaise. The gipsy dances have inspired a new school of music. The
Greek drama grew out of the evolution of the tragic chorus. National
dances like the hornpipe and reel of Scotland, the _Reihen_, of
Germany, the _rondes_ of France, the Spanish tarantella and
_chaconne_, the strathspey from the Spey Valley, the Irish jig, etc.,
express racial traits. Instead of the former vast repertory, the
stately pavone, the graceful and dignified saraband, the wild
_salterrelle_, the bourrée with song and strong rhythm, the light and
skippy bolero, the courtly bayedere, the dramatic plugge, gavotte, and
other peasant dances in costume, the fast and furious fandango, weapon
and military dances; in place of the pristine power to express love,
mourning, justice, penalty, fear, anger, consolation, divine service,
symbolic and philosophical conceptions, and every industry or
characteristic act of life in pantomime and gesture, we have in the
dance of the modern ballroom only a degenerate relict, with at best
but a very insignificant culture value, and too often stained with bad
associations. This is most unfortunate for youth, and for their sake a
work of rescue and revival is greatly needed; for it is perhaps, not
excepting even music, the completest language of the emotions and can
be made one of the best schools of sentiment and even will,
inculcating good states of mind and exorcising bad ones as few other
agencies have power to do. Right dancing can cadence the very soul,
give nervous poise and control, bring harmony between basal and finer
muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, body and mind. It can
serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence, predispose the
heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward virtue.
That its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance
aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although
even questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities
in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find
vent. Its utilization for and influence on the insane would be another
interesting chapter.
Very interesting scientifically and suggestive practically is another
correspondence which I believe to be new, between the mode of
spontaneous activity in youth and that of labor in the early history
of the race. One of the most marked distinctions between savage and
civilized races is in the longer rhythm of work and relaxation. The
former are idle and lazy for days, weeks, and perhaps months, and then
put forth intense and prolonged effort in dance, hunt, warfare,
migration, or construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and
manifesting remarkable endurance. As civilization and specialization
advance, hours become regular. The cultured man is less desultory in
all his habits, from eating and sleeping to performing social and
religious duties, although he may put forth no more aggregate energy
in a year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular work long
before men, and the difficulty of imposing civilization upon low races
is compared by Bücher[8] to that of training a eat to work when
harnessed to a dog-cart. It is not dread of fatigue but of the
monotony of method makes them hate labor. The effort of savages is
more intense and their periods of rest more prolonged and inert.
Darwin thinks all vital function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates
are descended from tidal ascidian.[9] There is indeed much that
suggests some other irregular rhythm more or less independent of day
and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature, but not lunar, and for
males. This mode of life not only preceded the industrial and
commercial period of which regularity is a prime condition, but it
lasted indefinitely longer than the latter has yet existed; during
this early time great exertion, sometimes to the point of utter
exhaustion and collapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative
existence. We see abundant traces of this psychosis in the muscle
habits of adolescents, and, I think, in student and particularly in
college life, which can enforce regularity only to a limited extent.
This is not reversion, but partly expression of the nature and perhaps
the needs of this stage of immaturity, and partly the same instinct of
revolt against uniformity imposed from without, which rob life of
variety and extinguish the spirit of adventure and untrammeled
freedom, and make the savage hard to break to the harness of
civilization. The hunger for fatigue, too, can become a veritable
passion and is quite distinct from either the impulse for activity for
its own sake or the desire of achievement. To shout and put forth the
utmost possible strength in crude ways is erethic intoxication at a
stage when every tissue can become erectile and seems, like the crying
of infants, to have a legitimate function in causing tension and
flushing, enlarging the caliber of blood vessels, and forcing the
blood perhaps even to the point of extravasation to irrigate newly
growing fibers, cells, and organs which atrophy if not thus fed. When
maturity is complete this need abates. If this be correct, the
phenomenon of second breath, so characteristic of adolescence, and one
factor in the inebriate's propensity, is ontogenetic expression of a
rhythm trait of a long racial period. Youth needs overexertion to
compensate for underexertion, to undersleep in order to offset
oversleep at times. This seems to be nature's provision to expand in
all directions its possibilities of the body and soul in this plastic
period when, without this occasional excess, powers would atrophy or
suffer arrest for want of use, or larger possibilities world not be
realized without this regimen peculiar to nascent periods. This is
treated more fully elsewhere.
Perhaps next to dancing in phyletic motivation come personal
conflicts, such as wrestling, fighting, boxing, dueling, and in some
sense, hunting. The animal world is full of struggle for survival, and
primitive warfare is a wager of battle, of personal combat of foes
contesting eye to eye and hand to hand, where victory of one is the
defeat and perhaps death of the other, and where life is often staked
against life. In its more brutal forms we see one of the most
degrading of all the aspects of human nature. Burk[10] has shown how
the most bestial of these instincts survive and crop out irresistibly
in boyhood, where fights are often engaged in with desperate abandon.
Noses are bitten, ears torn, sensitive places kicked, hair pulled,
arms twisted, the head stamped on and pounded on stones, fingers
twisted, and hoodlums sometimes deliberately try to strangle, gouge
out an eye, pull off an ear, pull out the tongue, break teeth, nose,
or bones, or dislocate jaws or other joints, wring the neck, bite off
a lip, and torture in utterly nameless ways. In unrestrained anger,
man becomes a demon in love with the blood of his victim. The face is
distorted, and there are yells, oaths, animal snorts and grunts,
cries, and then exultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised, dirty,
disheveled and panting with exhaustion. For coarser natures, the
spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, while some
morbid souls are scarred by a distinct phobia for everything
suggestive of even lower degrees of opposition. These instincts, more
or less developed in boyhood, are repressed in normal cases before
strength and skill are sufficiently developed to inflict serious
bodily injury, while without the reductives that orthogenetic growth
brings they become criminal. Repulsive as are these grosser and animal
manifestations of anger, its impulsion can not and should not be
eliminated, but its expression transformed and directed toward evils
that need all its antagonism. To be angry aright is a good part of
moral education, and non-resistance under all provocations is unmanly,
craven, and cowardly.[11] An able-bodied young man, who can not fight
physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is
generally a milksop, a lady-boy, or sneak. He lacks virility, his
masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the
core. Hence, instead of eradicating this instinct, one of the great
problems of physical and moral pedagogy is rightly to temper and
direct it.
Sparta sedulously cultivated it in boys; and in the great English
schools, where for generations it has been more or less tacitly
recognized, it is regulated by custom, and their literature and
traditions abound in illustrations of its man-making and often
transforming influence in ways well appreciated by Hughes and Arnold.
It makes against degeneration, the essential feature of which is
weakening of will and loss of honor. Real virtue requires enemies, and
women and effeminate and old men want placid, comfortable peace, while
a real man rejoices in noble strife which sanctifies all great causes,
casts out fear, and is the chief school of courage. Bad as is
overpugnacity, a scrapping boy is better than one who funks a fight,
and I have no patience with the sentimentality that would here "pour
out the child with the bath," but would have every healthy boy taught
boxing at adolescence if not before. The prize-ring is degrading and
brutal, but in lieu of better illustrations of the spirit of personal
contest I would interest a certain class of boys in it and try to
devise modes of pedagogic utilization of the immense store of interest
it generates. Like dancing it should be rescued from its evil
associations, and its educational force put to do moral work, even
though it be by way of individual prescriptions for specific defects
of character. At its best, it is indeed a manly art, a superb school
for quickness of eye and hand, decision, force of will, and
self-control. The moment this is lost stinging punishment follows.
Hence it is the surest of all cures for excessive irascibility and has
been found to have a most beneficent effect upon a peevish or unmanly
disposition. It has no mean theoretic side, of rules, kinds of blow
and counters, arts of drawing out and tiring an opponent, hindering
but not injuring him, defensive and offensive tactics, etc., and it
addresses chiefly the fundamental muscles in both training and
conflict. I do not underestimate the many and great difficulties of
proper purgation, but I know from both personal practise and
observation that they are not unconquerable.
This form of personal conflict is better than dueling even in its
comparatively harmless German student form, although this has been
warmly defended by Jacob Grimm, Bismarck, and Treitschke, while
Paulsen, Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy, and Schrempf, of
Theology, have pronounced it but a slight evil, and several Americans
have thought it better than hazing, which it makes impossible. The
dark side of dueling is seen in the hypertrophied sense of honor which
under the code of the corps becomes an intricate and fantastic thing,
prompting, according to Ziegler,[12] a club of sixteen students to
fight over two hundred duels in four weeks in Jena early in this
century. It is prone to degenerate to an artificial etiquette
demanding satisfaction for slight and unintended offenses. Although
this professor who had his own face scarred on the _mensur_, pleaded
for a student court of honor, with power to brand acts as infamous and
even to expel students, on the ground that honor had grown more
inward, the traditions in favor of dueling were too strong. The duel
had a religious romantic origin as revealing God's judgment, and means
that the victim of an insult is ready to stake body, or even life, and
this is still its ideal side. Anachronism as it now is and
degenerating readily to sport or spectacle, overpunishing what is
often mere awkwardness or ignorance, it still impresses a certain
sense of responsibility for conduct and gives some physical training,
slight and specialized though it be. The code is conventional, drawn
directly from old French military life, and is not true to the line
that separates real honor from dishonor, deliberate insult that wounds
normal self-respect from injury fancied by oversensitiveness or
feigned by arrogance; so that in its present form it is not the best
safeguard of the sacred shrine of personality against invasion of ifs
rights. If, as is claimed, it is some diversion from or fortification
against corrosive sensuality, it has generally allied itself with
excessive beer-drinking. Fencing, while an art susceptible of high
development and valuable for both pose and poise, and requiring great
quickness of eye, arm, and wrist, is unilateral and robbed of the vest
of inflicting real pain on an antagonist.
Bushido,[13] which means military-knightly ways, designates the
Japanese conception of honor in behavior and in fighting. The youth is
inspired by the ideal of Tom Brown "to leave behind him the name of a
fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big
one." It expresses the race ideal of justice, patriotism, and the duty
of living aright and dying nobly. It means also sympathy, pity, and
love, for only the bravest can be the tenderest, and those most in
love are most daring, and it includes politeness and the art of
poetry. Honor is a sense of personal dignity and worth, so the _bushi_
is truthful without an oath. At the tender age of five the _samurai_
is given a real sword, and this gives self-respect and responsibility.
At fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given
him, which must be his companions for life. They were made by a smith
whose shop is a sanctuary and who begins his work with prayer. They
have the finest hilts and scabbards, and are besung as invested with a
charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they
must never be drawn lightly. He is taught fencing, archery,
horsemanship, tactics, the spear, ethics and literature, anatomy, for
offence and defense; he must be indifferent to money, hold his life
cheap beside honor, and die if it is gone. This chivalry is called the
soul of Japan, and if it fades life is vulgarised. It is a code of
ethics and physical training.
Football is a magnificent game if played on honor. An English tennis
champion was lately playing a rubber game with the American champion.
They were even and near the end when the American made a bad fluke
which would have lost this country its championship. The English
player, scorning to win on an accident, intentionally made a similar
mistake that the best man might win. The chief evil of modern American
football which now threatens its suppression in some colleges is the
lust to win at any price, and results in tricks and secret practise.
These sneaky methods impair the sentiment of honor which is the best
and most potent of all the moral safeguards of youth, so that a young
man can not be a true gentleman on the gridiron. This ethical
degeneration is far worse than all the braises, sprains, broken bones
and even deaths it causes.
Wrestling is a form of personal encounter which in antiquity reached a
high development, and which, although now more known and practised as
athletics of the body than of the soul, has certain special
disciplinary capacities in its various forms. It represents the most
primitive type of the struggle of unarmed and unprotected man with
man. Purged of its barbarities, and in its Greco-Roman form and
properly subject to rules, it cultivates more kinds of movements than
any other form--for limbs, trunk, neck, hand, foot, and all in the
upright and in every prone position. It, too, has its manual of
feints, holds, tricks, and specialties, and calls out wariness,
quickness, strength, and shiftiness. Victory need involve no cruelty
or even pain to the vanquished. The very closeness of body to body,
emphasizing flexor rather than extensor arm muscles, imparts to it a
peculiar tone, gives it a vast variety of possible activities,
developing many alternatives at every stage, and tempts to many
undiscovered forms of permanent mayhem. Its struggle is usually longer
and less interrupted by pauses than pugilism, and its situations and
conclusions often develop slowly, so that all in all, its character
among contests is unique. As a school of posture for art, its
varieties are extremely manifold and by no means developed, for it
contains every kind of emphasis of every part and calls out every
muscle group and attitude of the human body; hence its training is
most generic and least specialized, and victories have been won by
very many kinds of excellence.
Perhaps nothing is more opposed to the idea of a gentleman than the
_sæva animi tempestas_ [Fierce tempest of the soul] of anger. A testy,
quarrelsome, mucky humor is antisocial, and an outburst of rage is
repulsive. Even non-resistance, turning the other cheek, has its
victories and may be a method of moral combat. A strong temper well
controlled and kept in leash makes a kinetic character; but in view of
bullying, unfair play, cruel injustice to the weak and defenseless, of
outrageous wrong that the law can not reach, patience and forbearance
may cease to be virtues, and summary redress may have a distinct
advantage to the ethical nature of man and to social order, and the
strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or flabby. If too
repressed, righteous indignation may turn to sourness and sulks, and
the disposition be spoiled. Hence the relief and exhilaration of an
outbreak that often clears the psychic atmosphere like a thunderstorm,
and gives the "peace that passeth understanding" so often dilated on
by our correspondents. Rather than the abject fear of making enemies
whatever the provocation, I would praise those whose best title of
honor is the kind of enemies they make. Better even an occasional nose
dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even
sometimes the sacrifice of the life of one of our best academic youth
than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and
psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it
sometimes is, its real alternative.
So closely are love and war connected that not only is individual
pugnacity greatly increased at the period of sexual maturity, when
animals acquire or develop horns, fangs, claws, spurs, and weapons of
offense and defense, but a new spirit of organization arises which
makes teams possible or more permanent. Football, baseball, cricket,
etc., and even boating can become schools of mental and moral
training. First, the rules of the game are often intricate, and to
master and observe them effectively is no mean training for the mind
controlling the body. These are steadily being revised and improved,
and the reasons for each detail of construction and conduct of the
game require experience and insight into human nature. Then the
subordination of each member to the whole and to a leader cultivates
the social and coöperative instincts, while the honor of the school,
college, or city, which each team represents, is confided to each and
all. Group loyalty in Anglo-Saxon games, which shows such a marked
increment in coördination and self-subordination at the dawn of
puberty as to constitute a distinct change in the character of sports
at this age, can be so utilized as to develop a spirit of service and
devotion not only to town, country, and race, but to God and the
church. Self must be merged and a sportsmanlike spirit cultivated that
prefers defeat to tricks and secret practise, and a clean game to the
applause of rooters and fans, intent only on victory, however won. The
long, hard fight against professionalism that brings in husky muckers,
who by every rule of true courtesy and chivalry belong outside
academic circles, scrapping and underhand advantages, is a sad comment
on the character and spirit of these games, and eliminates the best of
their educational advantages. The necessity of intervention, which has
imposed such great burdens on faculties and brought so much friction
with the frenzy of scholastic sentiment in the hot stage of seasonal
enthusiasms, when fanned to a white heat by the excessive interest of
friends and patrons and the injurious exploitation of the press, bears
sad testimony to the strength and persistence of warlike instincts
from our heredity. But even thus the good far predominates. The
elective system has destroyed the class games, and our institutions
have no units like the English colleges to be pitted against each
other, and so colleges grow, an ever smaller percentage of students
obtain the benefit of practise on the teams, while electioneering
methods often place second-best men in place of the best. But both
students and teachers are slowly learning wisdom in the dear school of
experience. On the whole, there is less license in "breaking training"
and in celebrating victories, and even at their worst, good probably
predominates, while the progress of recent years bids us hope.
Finally, military ideals and methods of psycho-physical education are
helpful regulations of the appetite for combat, and on the whole more
wholesome and robust than those which are merely esthetic. Marching in
step gives proper and uniform movement of legs, arms, and carriage of
body; the manual of arms, with evolution and involution of figures in
the ranks, gives each a corporate feeling of membership, and involves
care of personal appearance and accouterments, while the uniform
levels social distinction in dress. For the French and Italian and
especially the German and Russian adolescent of the lower classes, the
two or three years of compulsory military service is often compared to
an academic course, and the army is called, not without some
justification, the poor man's university. It gives severe drill,
strict discipline, good and regular hours, plain but wholesome fare
and out-of-door exercise, exposure, travel, habits of neatness, many
useful knacks and devices, tournaments and mimic or play battles;
these, apart from its other functions, make this system a great
promoter of national health and intelligence. Naval schools for
midshipmen, who serve before the mast, schools on board ship that
visit a wide curriculum of ports each year, cavalry schools, where
each boy is given a horse to care for, study and train, artillery
courses and even an army drill-master in an academy, or uniform, and a
few exterior features of soldierly life, all give a distinct character
to the spirit of any institution. The very fancy of being in any sense
a soldier opens up a new range of interests too seldom utilized; and
tactics, army life and service, military history, battles, patriotism,
the flag, and duties to country, should always erect a new standard of
honor. Youth should embrace every opportunity that offers in this
line, and instruction should greatly increase the intellectual
opportunities created by every interest in warfare. It would be easy
to create pregnant courses on how soldiers down the course of history
have lived, thought, felt, fought, and died, how great battles were
won and what causes triumphed in them, and to generalize many of the
best things taught in detail in the best schools of war in different
grades and lands.
A subtle but potent intersexual influence is among the strongest
factors of all adolescent sport. Male birds and beasts show off their
charms of beauty and accomplishment in many a liturgy of love antics
in the presence of the female. This instinct seems somehow continuous
with the growth of ornaments in the mating season. Song, tumbling,
balking, mock fights, etc., are forms of animal courtship. The boy who
turns cartwheels past the home of the girl of his fancy, is brilliant,
brave, witty, erect, strong in her presence, and elsewhere dull and
commonplace enough, illustrates the same principle. The true cake-walk
as seen in the South is perhaps the purest expression of this impulse
to courtship antics seen in man, but its irradiations are many and
pervasive. The presence of the fair sex gives tonicity to youth's
muscles and tension to his arteries to a degree of which he is rarely
conscious. Defeat in all contests is more humiliating and victory more
glorious thereby. Each sex is constantly passing the examination of
the other, and each judges the other by standards different from its
own. Alas for the young people who are not different with the other
sex from what they are with their own!--and some are transformed into
different beings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend,
bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good
point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and
glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even
though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt
and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men
and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is
ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong to the brave, strong,
and victorious. This stimulus is wholesome and refining. As is shown
later, a bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker and is
sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every movement by a
sense of her presence, stranger and apparently unnoticed though she
be, although in the intellectual work of coeducation girls are most
influenced thus. In athletics this motive makes for refinement and
good form. The ideal knight, however fierce and terrible, must not be
brutal, but show capacity for fine feeling, tenderness, magnanimity,
and forbearance. Evolutionists tell us that woman has domesticated and
educated savage man and taught him all his virtues by exercising her
royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those qualities that
pleased her for transmission to future generations and eliminating
others distasteful to her. If so, she is still engaged in this work as
much as ever, and in his dull, slow way man feels that her presence
enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to him to
compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most plays and games in which
both sexes participate have some of the advantages with some of the
disadvantages of coeducation. Where both are partners rather than
antagonists, there is less eviration. A gallant man would do his best
to help, but his worst not to beat a lady. Thus, in general, the
latter performs her best in her true rule of sympathetic spectator
rather than as fellow player, and is now an important factor in the
physical education of adolescents.
How pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly transforming our
schools, is strikingly seen in the church. Gulick holds that the
reason why only some seven per cent of the young men of the country
are in the churches, while most members and workers are women, is that
the qualities demanded are the feminine ones of love, rest, prayer,
trust, desire for fortitude to endure, a sense of atonement--traits
not involving ideals that most stir young men. The church has not yet
learned to appeal to the more virile qualities. Fielding Hall[14] asks
why Christ and Buddha alone of great religious teachers were rejected
by their own race and accepted elsewhere. He answers that these mild
beliefs of peace, nonresistance, and submission, rejected by virile
warrior races, Jews and ancient Hindus, were adopted where women were
free and led in these matters. Confucianism, Mohammedanism, etc., are
virile, and so indigenous, and in such forms of faith and worship
women have small place. This again suggests how the sex that rules the
heart controls men.
Too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths and swimming at
this age. Marro[15] quotes Father Kneipp, and almost rivals his
hydrotherapeutic enthusiasm. Cold bathing sends the blood inward
partly by the cold which contracts the capillaries of the skin and
tissue immediately underlying it, and partly by the pressure of the
water over all the dermal surface, quickens the activity of kidneys,
lungs, and digestive apparatus, and the reactive glow is the best
possible tonic for dermal circulation. It is the best of all
gymnastics for the nonstriated or involuntary muscles and for the
heart and blood vessels. This and the removal of the products of
excretion preserve all the important dermal functions which are so
easily and so often impaired in modern life, lessen the liability to
skin diseases, promote freshness of complexion; and the moral effects
of plunging into cold and supporting the body in deep water is not
inconsiderable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and reducing
overtenderness to sensory discomforts. The exercise of swimming is
unique in that nearly all the movements and combinations are such as
are rarely used otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and
liberal rather than directly preparatory for future avocations. Its
stimulus for heart and lungs is, by general consent of all writers
upon the subject, most wholesome and beneficial. Nothing so directly
or quickly reduces to the lowest point the plethora of the sex organs.
The very absence of clothes and running on the beach is exhilarating
and gives a sense of freedom. Where practicable it is well to dispense
with bathing suits, even the scantiest. The warm bath tub is
enfeebling and degenerative, despite the cold spray later, while the
free swim in cold water is most invigorating.
Happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly
realizing the great improvement in health and temper that comes from
bathing and are establishing beach and surf, spray, floating and
plunge summer baths and swimming pools; often providing instruction
even in swimming in clothes, undressing in the water, treading water,
and rescue work, free as well as fee days, bathing suits, and, in
London, places for nude bathing after dark; establishing time and
distance standards with certificates and even prizes; annexing
toboggan slides, swings, etc., realizing that in both the preference
of youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably nothing outranks
this form of exercise. Such is its strange fascination that, according
to one comprehensive census, the passion to get to the water outranks
all other causes of truancy, and plays an important part in the
motivation of runaways. In the immense public establishment near San
Francisco, provided by private munificence, there are accommodations
for all kinds of bathing in hot and cold and in various degrees of
fresh and salt water, in closed spaces and in the open sea, for small
children and adults, with many appliances and instructors, all in one
great covered arena with seats in an amphitheater for two thousand
spectators, and many adjuncts and accessories. So elsewhere the
presence of visitors is now often invited and provided for. Sometimes
wash-houses and public laundries are annexed. Open hours and longer
evenings and seasons are being prolonged.
Prominent among the favorite games of early puberty and the years just
before are those that involve passive motion and falling, like
swinging in its many forms, including the May-pole and single rope
varieties. Mr. Lee reports that children wait late in the evening and
in cold weather for a turn at a park swing. Psychologically allied to
these are wheeling and skating. Places for the latter are now often
provided by the fire department, which in many cities floods hundreds
of empty lots. Ponds are cleared of snow and horse-plowed, perhaps by
the park commission, which often provides lights and perhaps ices the
walks and streets for coasting, erects shelters, and devises space
economy for as many diamonds, bleachers, etc., as possible. Games of
hitting, striking, and throwing balls and other objects, hockey,
tennis, all the courts of which are usually crowded, golf and croquet,
and sometimes fives, cricket, bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have
great "thumogenic" or emotional power.
Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part.
Man is by definition an upright being, but only after a long
apprenticeship.[16] Thus the hand was freed from the necessity of
locomotion and made the servant of the mind. Locomotion overcomes the
tendency to sedentary habits in modern schools and life, and helps the
mind to helpful action, so that a peripatetic philosophy is more
normal than that of the easy chair and the study lamp. Hill-climbing
is unexcelled as a stimulus at once of heart, lungs, and blood. If
Hippocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a mountain-top.
Walking, running, dancing, skating, coasting are also alterative and
regulative of sex, and there is a deep and close though not yet fully
explained reciprocity between the two. Arm work is relatively too
prominent a feature in gymnasia. Those who lead excessively sedentary
lives are prone to be turbulent and extreme in both passion and
opinion, as witness the oft-adduced revolutionary disposition of
cobblers.
The play problem is now fairly open and is vast in its relation to
many other things. Roof playgrounds, recreation piers, schoolyards and
even school-buildings, open before and after school hours; excursions
and outings of many kinds and with many purposes, which seem to
distinctly augment growth; occupation during the long vacation when,
beginning with spring, most juvenile crime is committed; theatricals,
which according to some police testimony lessen the number of juvenile
delinquents; boys' clubs with more or less self-government of the
George Junior Republic and other types, treated in another chapter;
nature-study; the distinctly different needs and propensities of both
good and evil in different nationalities; the advantages of playground
fences and exclusion, their disciplinary worth, and their value as
resting places; the liability that "the boy without a playground will
become the father without a job"; the relation of play and its slow
transition to manual and industrial education at the savage age when a
boy abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting interest,
not by what is done for boys, but by what they do; the adjustment of
play to sex; the determination of the proper average age of maximal
zest in and good from sandbox, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg
top, charity, funeral play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the value and
right use of apparatus, and of rabbits, pigeons, bees, and a small
menagerie in the playground; tan-bark, clay, the proper alternation of
excessive freedom, that often turns boys stale through the summer,
with regulated activities; the disciplined "work of play" and
sedentary games; the value of the washboard rubbing and of the hand
and knee exercise of scrubbing, which a late writer would restore for
all girls with clever and Greek-named play apparatus; as well as
digging, shoveling, tamping, pick-chopping, and hod-carrying exercises
in the form of games for boys; the relations of women's clubs,
parents' clubs, citizens' leagues and unions, etc., to all this
work--such are the practical problems.
The playground movement encounters its chief obstacles in the most
crowded and slum districts, where its greatest value and success was
expected for boys in the early teens, who without supervision are
prone to commit abuses upon property and upon younger children,[17]
and are so disorderly as to make the place a nuisance, and who resent
the "fathering" of the police, without, at least, the minimum control
of a system of permits and exclusions. If hoodlums play at all, they
become infatuated with baseball and football, especially punting; they
do not take kindly to the soft large ball of the Hall House or the
Civic League, and prefer at first scrub games with individual
self-exhibition to organized teams. Lee sees the "arboreal instincts
of our progenitors" in the very strong propensity of boys from ten to
fourteen to climb in any form; to use traveling rings, generally
occupied constantly to their fullest extent; to jump from steps and
catch a swinging trapeze; to go up a ladder and slide down poles; to
use horizontal and parallel bars. The city boy has plenty of daring at
this age, but does not know what he can do and needs more supervision
than the country youth. The young tough is commonly present, and
though admired and copied by younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often
for his heroic as for his bad traits.
Dr. Sargent and others have well pointed out that athletics afford a
wealth of new and profitable topics for discussion and enthusiasm
which helps against the triviality and mental vacuity into which the
intercourse of students is prone to lapse. It prompts to discussion of
diet and regimen. It gives a new standard of honor. For a member of a
team to break training would bring reprobation and ostracism, for he
is set apart to win fame for his class or college. It supplies a
splendid motive against all errors and vices that weaken or corrupt
the body. It is a wholesome vent for the reckless courage that would
otherwise go to disorder or riotous excess. It supplies new and
advantageous topics for compositions and for terse, vigorous, and
idiomatic theme-writing, is a great aid to discipline, teaches respect
for deeds rather than words or promises, lays instructors under the
necessity of being more interesting, that their work be not jejune or
dull by contrast; again the business side of managing great contests
has been an admirable school for training young men to conduct great
and difficult financial operations, sometimes involving $100,000 or
more, and has thus prepared some for successful careers. It furnishes
now the closest of all links between high school and college, reduces
the number of those physically unfit for college, and should give
education generally a more real and vigorous ideal. Its obvious
dangers are distraction from study and overestimation of the value of
victory, especially in the artificial glamours which the press and the
popular furor give to great games; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and
methods, over-emphasis of combative and too stalwart impulses, and a
disposition to carry things by storm, by rush-line tactics; friction
with faculties, and censure or neglect of instructors who take
unpopular sides on hot questions; action toward license after games,
spasmodic excitement culminating in excessive strain for body and
mind, with alternations of reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of
the physical side of life, and, in some cases, premature features of
senility in later life, undergrowth of the accessory motor parts and
powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady and continued mental
toil seem monotonous, dull, and boresome.
The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of
their implements, and to reduce them to what Spencer calls
regimentation, is a outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against
that individuation which is one of the chief advantages of free play.
This, to be sure, has developed old-fashioned rounders to modern
baseball, and this is well, but it is seen in the elaborate Draconian
laws, diplomacy, judicial and legislative procedures, concerning
"eligibility, transfer, and even sale of players." In some games
international conformity is gravely discussed. Even where there is no
tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily hampering nature and the
free play of personality. Togs and targets, balls and bats, rackets
and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every
emergency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic martinet,
jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. All this
separates games from the majority and makes for specialism and
professionalism. Not only this, but men are coming to be sized up for
hereditary fitness in each point and for each sport. Runners,
sprinters, and jumpers,[18] we are told, on the basis of many careful
measurements, must be tall, with slender bodies, narrow but deep
chests, longer legs than the average for their height, the lower leg
being especially long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small arms,
narrow hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and thighs of
small girth. Every player must be studied by trainers for ever finer
individual adjustments. His dosage of work must be kept well within
the limits of his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his
recuperative power. His personal nascent periods must be noted, and
initial embarrassment carefully weeded out.
The field of play is as wide as life and its varieties far outnumber
those of industries and occupations in the census. Plays and games
differ in seasons, sex, and age. McGhee[19] has shown on the basis of
some 8,000 children, that running plays are pretty constant for boys
from six to seventeen, but that girls are always far behind boys and
run steadily less from eight to eighteen. In games of choice, boys
showed a slight rise at sixteen and seventeen, and girls a rapid
increase at eleven and a still more rapid one after sixteen. In games
of imitation girls excel and show a marked, as boys do a slight,
pubescent fall. In those games involving rivalry boys at first greatly
excel girls, but are overtaken by the latter in the eighteenth year,
both showing marked pubescent increment. Girls have the largest number
of plays and specialise on a few less than boys, and most of these
plays are of the unorganized kinds. Johnson[20] selected from a far
larger number 440 plays and games and arranged the best of them in a
course by school grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and
also according to their educational value as teaching observation,
reading and spelling, language, arithmetic, geography, history, and
biography, physical training, and specifically as training legs, hand,
arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles, chest, etc. Most of our best
games are very old and, Johnson thinks, have deteriorated. But
children are imitative and not inventive in their games, and easily
learn new ones. Since the Berlin Play Congress in 1894 the sentiment
has grown that these are of national importance and are preferable to
gymnastics both for soul and body. Hence we have play-schools,
teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value and also to
turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work.
Several have thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be
given by plays and games alone on the principle that there is no
profit where there is no pleasure or true euphoria.
Play is motor poetry. Too early distinction between play and work
should not be taught. Education perhaps should really begin with
directing childish sports aright. Froebel thought it the purest and
most spiritual activity of childhood, the germinal leaves of all later
life. Schooling that lacks recreation favors dulness, for play makes
the mind alert and its joy helps all anabolic activities. Says
Brinton, "the measure of value of work is the amount of play there is
in it, and the measure of value of play is the amount of work there is
in it." Johnson adds that "it is doubtful if a great man ever
accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in
it." Sully[21] deplores the increase of "agolasts" or "non-laughers"
in our times in merry old England[22] every one played games; and
laughter, their natural accompaniment, abounded. Queen Elizabeth's
maids of honor played tag with hilarity, but the spirit of play with
full abandon seems taking its departure from our overworked, serious,
and tons, age. To requote Stevenson with variation, as _laborari_, [To
labor] so _ludere, et joculari orare sunt_. [To play and to jest are
to pray] Laughter itself, as Kühne long ago showed, is one of the most
precious forms of exercise, relieving the arteries of their
tension.[23]
The antithesis between play and work is generally wrongly conceived,
for the difference is essentially in the degree of strength of the
psycho-physic motivations. The young often do their hardest work in
play. With interest, the most repellent tasks become pure sport, as in
the case Johnson reports of a man who wanted a pile of stone thrown
into a ditch and, by kindling a fire in the ditch and pretending the
stones were buckets of water, the heavy and long-shirked job was done
by tired boys with shouting and enthusiasm. Play, from one aspect of
it, is superfluous energy over and above what is necessary to digest,
breathe, keep the heart and organic processes going; and most children
who can not play, if they have opportunity, can neither study nor work
without overdrawing their resources of vitality. Bible psychology
conceives the fall of man as the necessity of doing things without
zest, and this is not only ever repeated but now greatly emphasized
when youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to grind in the mills
of modern industrial civilization. The curse is overcome only by those
who come to love their tasks and redeem their toil again to play.
Play, hardly less than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because
it draws upon older stores and strata of psycho-physic impulsion its
exhaustion may even more completely drain our kinetic resources, if it
is too abandoned or prolonged. Play can do just as hard and painful
tasks as work, for what we love is done with whole and undivided
personality. Work, as too often conceived, is all body and no soul,
and makes for duality and not totality. Its constraint is external,
mechanical, or it works by fear and not love. Not effort but zestless
endeavor is the tragedy of life. Interest and play are one and
inseparable as body and soul. Duty itself is not adequately conceived
and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too feeble and fitful
in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action. Play is from
within from congenital hereditary impulsion. It is the best of all
methods of organizing instincts. Its cathartic or purgative function
regulates irritability, which may otherwise be drained or vented in
wrong directions, exactly as Breuer[24] shows psychic traumata may, if
overtense, result in "hysterical convulsions." It is also the best
form of self-expression; and its advantage is variability, following
the impulsion of the idle, perhaps hyperemic, and overnourished
centers most ready to act. It involves play illusion and is the great
agent of unity and totalization of body and soul, while its social
function develops solidarity and unison of action between individuals.
The dances, feasts, and games of primitive people, wherein they
rehearse hunting and war and act and dance out their legends, bring
individuals and tribes together.[25] Work is menial, cheerless,
grinding, regular, and requires more precision and accuracy and,
because attended with less ease and pleasure and economy of movement,
is more liable to produce erratic habits. Antagonistic as the forms
often are, it may be that, as Carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse
work with the play spirit, and _vice versa_, that the present
distinction between work and play will vanish, the transition will be
less tragic and the activities of youth will be slowly systematised
into a whole that better fits his nature and needs; or, if not this,
we may at least find the true proportion and system between drudgery
and recreation.
The worst product of striving to do things with defective psychic
impulsion is fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace,
multiplies errors and inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits,
ennui, flitting will specters, velleities and caprices, and
neurasthenic symptoms generally. It brings restlessness, and a
tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering efforts that weaken
the will and leave the mind like a piece of well-used blotting paper,
covered with traces and nothing legible. All beginnings are easy, and
only as we leave the early stages of proficiency behind and press on
in either physical or mental culture and encounter difficulties, do
individual differences and the tendency of weak will, to change and
turn to something else increase. Perhaps the greatest disparity
between men is the power to make a long concentrative, persevering
effort, for _In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister_ [The master
shows himself in limitation]. Now no kind or line of culture is
complete till it issues in motor habits, and makes a well-knit soul
texture that admits concentration series in many directions and that
can bring all its resources to bear at any point. The brain
unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism,
saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder,
but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus
willed action is the language of complete men and the goal of
education. When things are mechanized by right habituation, there is
still further gain; for not only is the mind freed for further and
higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor association is a plexus
that determines not only conduct and character, but even beliefs. The
person who deliberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and
weighs alternatives is less completely organised than habits. All will
culture is intensive and should safeguard us against the chance
influence of life and the insidious danger of great ideas in small and
feeble minds. Now fatigue, personal and perhaps racial, is just what
arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or noetic stage. It makes
weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that obey. It divorces
knowing and doing, _Kennen_ and _Können_, a separation which the
Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or
was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that
the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked
over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and
still less with the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only
action repressed to be ripened to more practical form. Not only do
muscles come before mind, will before intelligence, and sound ideas
rest on a motor basis, but all really useless knowledge tends to be
eliminated as error or superstition. The roots of play lie close to
those of creative imagination and idealism.
The opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial motivation of
fear, prizes, examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and
penalties, which can only tattoo the mind and body with conventional
patterns pricked in, but which lead an unreal life in the soul because
they have no depth of soil in nature or heredity. However precious and
coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized are mere
lugs, crimps, and frills. All such culture is spurious, unreal, and
parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is
at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that
does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to
supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates
such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue
proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate
utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions
that have no other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin
says, all true work is praise, all true play is love and prayer.
Instil into a boy's soul learning which he sees and feels not to have
the highest worth and which can not become a part of his active life
and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of
play slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation.
The instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play,
are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is
only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its
best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best play is true
genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of
doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage
to be carried rather than the vital strength that carries burdens.
Grosswell says that children are young because they play, and not
_vice versa_; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop
playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at
the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research
from sheer love of truth. Home, school, church, state, civilization,
are measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how,
for they aid in bringing youth to its fullest maturity. Even vice,
crime, and decline are often only arrest or backsliding or reversion.
National and racial decline beginning in eliminating one by one the
last and highest styles of development of body and mind, mental
stimulus of excessive dosage lowers general nutrition. A psychologist
that turns his back on mere subtleties and goes to work in a life of
service has here a great opportunity, and should not forget, as Horace
Mann said, "that for all that grows, one former is worth one hundred
reformers."
[Footnote 1: Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise. American
Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 57-65.]
[Footnote 2: The Influence of Exercise upon Growth by Frederic Burk.
American Physical Education Review, December, 1899, vol. 4, pp.
340-349.]
[Footnote 3: A Study of Dolls, by G. Stanley Hall and A.C. Ellis.
Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 129-175.]
[Footnote 4: Studies in Imagination, by Lilian H. Chalmers.
Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 111-123.]
[Footnote 5: Some Psychical Aspects of Physical Exercise. Popular
Science Monthly, October, 1898, vol. 53, pp. 703-805.]
[Footnote 6: Amusements of Worcester School Children. Pedagogical
Seminary, September, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 314-371.]
[Footnote 7: A Study in the Play Life of Some South Carolina Children.
Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 439-478.]
[Footnote 8: Arbeit und Rythmus. Trubner, Leipzig, 1896.]
[Footnote 9: Descent of Man. D. Appleton and Co., 1872, vol. 1, chap.
vi, p. 204 _et seq_]
[Footnote 10: Teasing and Bullying. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1897,
vol. 4, pp. 336-371.]
[Footnote 11: See my Study of Anger. American Journal of Psychology,
July, 1899, vol. 10, pp. 516-591.]
[Footnote 12: Der deutsche Student am Ende des 19 Jahrhunderts, 6th
ed., Göschen, Leipzig, 1896. See also H. P. Shelden: History and
Pedagogy of American Student Societies, New York, 1901, p. 31 _et
seq_.]
[Footnote 13: Bushido: The Soul of Japan. An exposition of Japanese
thought, by Inazo Nitobé. New York, 1905, pp. 203 _et seq_.]
[Footnote 14: The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, 1901, chap. xxii.]
[Footnote 15: La Puberté. Schleicher Frères, éditeurs, Paris, 1902.]
[Footnote 16: See A.W. Trettien. Creeping and Walking. American
Journal of Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57.]
[Footnote 17: Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, by Joseph Lee.
Macmillan, New York, 1902, chaps. x and xi.]
[Footnote 18: C.O. Bernies. Physical Characteristics of the Runner and
Jumper. American Physical Education Review, September, 1900, vol. 5,
pp. 235-245.]
[Footnote 19: A Study in the Play Life of some South Carolina
Children. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 459-478.]
[Footnote 20: Education by Plays and Games. Pedagogical Seminary,
October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 97-133.]
[Footnote 21: An Essay on Laughter. Longmans, Green and Co., London,
1902, p. 427 _et seq_.]
[Footnote 22: See Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, 3
Vols., London, 1883.]
[Footnote 23: Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic, by G.
Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin. American Journal of Psychology,
October, 1897, vol. 9, pp. 1-41.]
[Footnote 24: I. Breuer and S. Freud. Studien über Hysterie. F.
Deuticke, Wien, 1895. See especially p. 177 _et seq_.]
[Footnote 25: See a valuable discussion by H. A. Carr. The Survival
Values of Play, Investigations of the Department of Psychology and
Education of the University of Colorado, Arthur Allin, Ph.D., Editor,
November, 1902, vol. 1, pp. 3-47]
* * * * *
CHAPTER VII
FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES
Classifications of children's faults--Peculiar children--Real faults
as distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease--Truancy,
its nature and effects--The genesis of crime--The lie, its classes and
relations to imagination--Predatory activities--Gangs--Causes of
crime--The effects of stories of crime--Temibility--Juvenile crime
and its treatment.
Siegert[1] groups children of problematical nature into the following
sixteen classes: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers,
scatter-brains, apathetic, misanthropic, doubters and investigators,
reverent, critical, executive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny,
anamnesic, disposed to learn, and _blasé_; patience, foresight, and
self-control, he thinks, are chiefly needed.
A unique and interesting study was undertaken by Közle[2] by
collecting and studying thirty German writers on pedagogical subjects
since Pestalozzi, and cataloguing all the words they use describing
the faults of children. In all, this gave 914 faults, far more in
number than their virtues. These were classified as native and of
external origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, greed,
perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness, frivolity, distraction,
precocity, timidity, envy and malevolence, ingratitude,
quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superstition; and the latter fifteen were
settled on as resultant groups, and the authors who describe them best
are quoted.
Bohannon[3] on the basis of _questionnaire_ returns classified
peculiar children as heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft,
agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, deformed, birthmarked, keen and
precocious, defective in sense, mind, and speech, nervous, clean,
dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing,
buoyant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, inquisitive,
lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, loquacious, courageous,
timid, whining, spoiled, gluttonous and only child.
Marro[4] tabulated the conduct of 3,012 boys in gymnasial and lyceal
classes in Italy from eleven to eighteen years of age (see table given
above). Conduct was marked as good, bad, and indifferent, according to
the teacher's estimate, and was good at eighteen in 74 per cent of the
cases; at eleven in 70 per cent; at seventeen in 69 per cent; and at
fourteen in only 58 per cent. In positively bad conduct, the age of
fifteen led, thirteen and fourteen were but little better, while it
improved at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. In general, conduct was
good at eleven; declined at twelve and thirteen; said, to its worst at
fourteen; and then improved in yearly increments that did not differ
much, and at seventeen was nearly as good as at eleven, and at
eighteen four points better.
[Illustration: Percentage x Age]
He computed also the following percentage table of the causes of
punishments in certain Italian schools for girls and boys near
pubescent ages:
Boys Girls
Quarrels and blows 53.90 17.4
Laziness, negligence 1.80 21.3
Untidiness 10.70 24.7
Improper language .41 14.6
Indecent acts and words 1.00 .24
Refusal to work .82 1.26
Various offenses against discipline 19.00 19.9
Truancy 9.60 .0
Plots to run away 1.70 .0
Running away .72 .0
Mr. Sears[5] reports in percentages statistics of the punishments
received by a thousand children for the following offenses: Disorder,
17-1/3; disobedience, 16; carelessness, 13-1/3; running away, 12-2/3;
quarreling, 10; tardiness, 6-2/3; rudeness, 6; fighting, 5-1/3; lying,
4; stealing, 1; miscellaneous, 7-1/3. He names a long list of
punishable offenses, such as malice, swearing, obscenity, bullying,
lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence, insult, conspiracy,
disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, ridicule; injury to
books, building, or other property; and analyzes at length the kinds
of punishment, modes of making it fit the offense and the nature of
the child, the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the
offense and its punishment, the principle of slight but sure tasks as
penalties, etc.
Triplett[6] attempted a census of faults and defeats named by the
teacher. Here inattention by far led all others. Defects of sense and
speech, carelessness, indifference, lack of honor and of
self-restraint, laziness, dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental
incapacity, lack of consideration for others, vanity, affectation,
disobedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. Inattention to
a degree that makes some children at the mercy of their environment
and all its changes, and their mental life one perpetual distraction,
is a fault which teachers, of course, naturally observe. Children's
views of their own faults and those of other children lay a very
different emphasis. Here fighting, bullying, and teasing lead all
others; then come stealing, bad manners, lying, disobedience, truancy,
cruelty to animals, untidiness, selfishness, etc. Parents' view of
this subject Triplett found still different. Here wilfulness and
obstinacy led all others with teasing, quarreling, dislike of
application and effort, and many others following. The vast number of
faults mentioned contrasts very strikingly with the seven deadly sins.
In a suggestive statistical study on the relations of the conduct of
children to the weather, Dexter[7] found that excessive humidity was
most productive of misdemeanors; that when the temperature was between
90 and 100 the probability of bad conduct was increased 300 per cent,
when between 80 and 90 it was increased 104 per cent. Abnormal
barometric pressure, whether great or small, was found to increase
misconduct 50 per cent; abnormal movements of the wind increased it
from 20 to 66 per cent; while the time of year and precipitation
seemed to have almost no effect. While the effect of weather has been
generally recognized by superintendents and teachers and directors of
prisons and asylums, and even by banks, which in London do not permit
clerks to do the more important bookkeeping during very foggy days,
the statistical estimates of its effect in general need larger numbers
for more valuable determinations. Temperature is known to have a very
distinct effect upon crime, especially suicide and truancy. Workmen do
less in bad weather, blood pressure is modified, etc.[8]
In his study of truancy, Kline[9] starts with the assumption that the
maximum metabolism is always consciously or unconsciously sought, and
that migrations are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold
toward an optimum temperature. The curve of truancies and runaways
increases in a marked ratio at puberty, which probably represents the
age of natural majority among primitive people. Dislike of school, the
passion for out-of-door life, and more universal interests in man and
nature now arise, so that runaways may be interpreted as an
instinctive rebellion against limitations of freedom and unnatural
methods of education as well as against poor homes. Hunger is one of
its most potent, although often unconscious causes. The habitual
environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in
impatience at restraint. Sometimes there is a mania for simply going
away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in
foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so
vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play at or in the
water is often strangely dominant. It seems so fine out of doors,
especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to
voluntarily incarcerate oneself in the schoolroom, that pubescent boys
and even girls often feel like animals in captivity. They long
intensely for the utter abandon of a wilder life, and very
characteristic is the frequent discarding of foot and head dress and
even garments in the blind instinct to realise again the conditions of
primitive man. The manifestations of this impulse, if read aright, are
grave arraignments of the lack of adaptability of the child's
environment to his disposition and nature, and with home restraints
once broken, the liabilities to every crime, especially theft, are
enormously increased. The truant, although a cording to Kline's
measurements slightly smaller than the average child, is more
energetic and is generally capable of the greatest activity and
usefulness in more out-of-door vocations. Truancy is augmented, too,
just in proportion as legitimate and interesting physical exercise is
denied.
The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis
has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted
being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and
generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier.
It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives "elsewhere" a special
charm. In the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and
perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change
of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the
moment his life becomes migratory all the restraints and
responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and
pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond
escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external
conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a
feral state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially
irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of
nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman
already developed. Adolescence is the normal time of emancipation from
the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but
the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the
best habitat in which to set up for himself. This is the spring season
of emigration; and it should be an indispensable part of every life
curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and wide, if
resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end in wisely
chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed,
and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has
been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic
vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal
stage.
Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only
does falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause
and are caused by it. The beginning of wisdom in treatment is to
discriminate between good and bad lies. My own study[10] of the lies
of 300 normal children, by a method carefully devised in order to
avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested the
following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch
when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things
that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a
weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made,
while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a
real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination. More
commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm
to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors,
ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear.
Idealising temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four
suddenly to assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a
cherry tree, and other Munchausen wonders, which really means merely
that they have had a new mental combination independently of
experience. Sometimes their fancy is almost visualisation and develops
into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests
in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer asserts of all mental
activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is
imagination. Its control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of
crass facts is what should be sought in the interests of the highest
truthfulness and of the evolution of thought as something above
reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature. The life
of Hartley Coleridge,[11] by his brother, is one of many
illustrations. He fancied cataract of what he named "jug-force" would
burst out in a certain field and flow between populous banks, where an
ideal government, long wars, and even a reform in spelling, would
prevail, illustrated in a journal devoted to the affairs of this
realm--all these developed in his imagination, where they existed with
great reality for years. The vividness of this fancy resembles the
pseudo-hallucinations of Kandinsky. Two sisters used to say, "Let us
play we are sisters," as if this made the relation more real.
Cagliostro found adolescent boys particularly apt for training for his
exhibition of phrenological impostures, illustrating his thirty-five
faculties. "He lied when he confessed he had lied," said a young
Sancho Panza, who had believed the wild tales of another boy who later
admitted their falsity. Sir James Mackintosh, near puberty, after
reading Roman history, used to fancy himself the Emperor of
Constantinople, and carried on the administration of the realm for
hours at a time. His fancies never quite became convictions, but
adolescence is the golden age of this kind of dreamery and reverie
which supplements reality and totalizes our faculties, and often gives
a special charm to dramatic activities and in morbid cases to
simulation and dissimulation. It is a state from which some of the
bad, but far more of the good qualities of life and mind arise. These
are the noble lies of poetry, art, and idealism, but their pedagogic
regime must be wise.
Again with children as with savages, truth depends largely upon
personal likes and dislikes. Truth is for friends, and lies are felt
to be quite right for enemies. The young often see no wrong in lies
their friends wish told, but may collapse and confess when asked if
they would have told their mother thus. Boys best keep up complotted
lies and are surer to own up if caught than girls. It is harder to
cheat in school with a teacher who is liked. Friendships are cemented
by confidences and secrets, and when they wane, promises not to tell
weaken in their validity. Lies to the priest, and above all to God,
are the worst. All this makes special attention to friendships,
leaders, and favorites important, and suggests the high value of
science for general veracity.
The worst lies, perhaps, are those of selfishness. They ease children
over many hard places in life, and are convenient covers for weakness
and vice. These lies are, on the whole, judging from our census, most
prevalent. They are also most corrupting and hard to correct. All bad
habits particularly predispose to the lie of concealment; for those
who do wrong are almost certain to have recourse to falsehood, and the
sense of meanness thus slowly bred, which may be met by appeals to
honor, for so much of which school life is responsible, is often
mitigated by the fact that falsehoods are frequently resorted to in
moments of danger and excitement, are easily forgotten when it is
over, and rarely rankle. These, even more than the pseudomaniac cases
mentioned later, grow rankly in those with criminal predispositions.
The lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble ends. Youth has
an instinct which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes.
Callow casualists are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to
state that their mother was out when she was in, if it would save her
life, although they perhaps would not lie to save their own. A doctor,
many suggested, might tell an overanxious patient or friend that there
was hope, saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there was
hope, although they had it while he had none. The end at first in such
cases may be very noble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse
lies for meaner objects may follow. Youth often describes such
situations with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of easement
from the monotonous and tedious obligation of rigorous literal
veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. The
youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may
reverently be referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the
need of keeping which as a private tribunal is now apparent.
Many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and
pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal
truth as alike heinous; and many systematized palliatives and
casuistic word-splittings, methods of whispering or silently
interpolating the words "not," "perhaps," or "I think," sometimes said
over hundreds of times to neutralize the guilt of intended or
unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a sad product of bad
methods.
Next to the selfish lie for protection--of special psychological
interest for adolescent crime--is what we may call pseudomania, seen
especially in pathological girls in their teens, who are honeycombed
with selfishness and affectation and have a passion for always acting
a part, attracting attention, etc. The recent literature of telepathy
and hypnotism furnishes many striking examples of this diathesis of
impostors of both sexes. It is a strange psychological paradox that
some can so deliberately prefer to call black white and find distinct
inebriation in flying diametrically in the face of truth and fact. The
great impostors, whose entire lives have been a fabric of lies, are
cases in point. They find a distinct pleasure not only in the sense of
power which their ability to make trouble gives, but in the sense of
making truth a lie, and of decreeing things into and out of existence.
Sheldon's interesting statistics show that among the institutional
activities of American children,[12] predatory organizations culminate
from eleven to fifteen, and are chiefly among boys. These include
bands of robbers, clubs for hunting and fishing, play armies,
organized fighting bands between separate districts, associations for
building forts, etc. This form of association is the typical one for
boys of twelve. After this age their interests are gradually
transferred to less loosely organized athletic clubs. Sheldon's
statistics are as follows:
Age 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Total
No. of
predatory 4 5 3 0 7 1 1 3 1 0 25 = Girls
societies 4 2 17 31 18 22 (11) 7 1 0 111 = Boys
Innocent though these predatory habits may be in small boys, if they
are not naturally and normally reduced at the beginning of the teens
and their energy worked off into athletic societies, they become
dangerous. "The robber knight, the pirate chief, and the marauder
become the real models." The stealing clubs gather edibles and even
useless things, the loss of which causes mischief, into some den,
cellar, or camp in the woods, where the plunder of their raids is
collected. An organized gang of boy pilferers for the purpose of
entering stores had a cache, where the stolen goods were brought
together. Some of these bands have specialized on electric bells and
connections, or golf sticks and balls. Jacob Riis says that on the
East Side of New York, every corner has its gang with a program of
defiance of law and order, where the young tough who is a coward alone
becomes dangerous when he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get
"pinched" or arrested and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate
common fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash
literature and "penny dreadfuls." Sometimes whole neighborhoods are
terrorized so that no one dares to testify against the atrocities they
commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that "a bare enumeration of
the names of the best-known gangs would occupy the pages of this
book."[13] The names are sufficiently suggestive--hell's kitchen gang,
stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the soup-house
gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters, and
roasters, hell benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners,
tough kids, sluggers, wild Indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight
howlers, junk club, crook gang, being some I have heard of. Some of
the members of these gangs never knew a home, were found perhaps as
babies wrapped in newspapers, survivors of the seventy-two dead
infants Riis says were picked up on the streets in New York in 1889,
or of baby farming. They grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the
driftwood of society, its flotsam and jetsam, or plankton, fighting
for a warn corner in their resorts or living in crowded
tenement-houses that rent for more than a house on Fifth Avenue.
Arrant cowards singly, they dare and do anything together. A gang
stole a team in East New York and drove down the avenue, shopping to
throw in supplies, one member sitting in the back of the wagon and
shooting at all who interfered. One gang specialized on stealing baby
carriages, depositing their inmates on the sidewalk. Another blew up a
grocery store because its owner refused a gift they demanded. Another
tried to saw off the head of a Jewish pedler. One member killed
another for calling him "no gent." Six murderous assaults were made at
one time by these gangs within a single week. One who is caught and
does his "bit" or "stretch" is a hero, and when a leader is hanged, as
has sometimes happened, he is almost envied for his notoriety. A
frequent ideal is to pound a policeman with his own club. The gang
federates all nationalities. Property is depreciated and may be ruined
if it is frequented by these gangs or becomes their lair or
"hang-out." A citizen residing on the Hudson procured a howitzer and
pointed it at a boat gang, forbidding them to land on his river
frontage. They have their calls, whistles, signs, rally suddenly from
no one knows where, and vanish in the alleys, basements, roofs, and
corridors they know so well. Their inordinate vanity is well called
the slum counterpart of self-esteem, and Riis calls the gang a club
run wild. They have their own ideality and a gaudy pinchbeck honor. A
young tough, when arrested, wrenched away the policeman's club, dashed
into the street, rescued a baby from a runaway, and came back and gave
himself up. They batten on the yellowest literature. Those of foreign
descent, who come to speak our language better than their parents,
early learn to despise them. Gangs emulate each other in hardihood,
and this is one cause of epidemics in crime. They passionately love
boundless independence, are sometimes very susceptible to good
influence if applied with great wisdom and discretion, but easily fall
away. What is the true moral antitoxin for this class, or at least
what is the safety-valve and how and when to pull it, we are now just
beginning to learn, but it is a new specialty in the great work of
salvage from the wreckage of city life. In London, where these groups
are better organised and yet more numerous, war is often waged between
them, weapons are used and murder is not so very infrequent. Normally
this instinct passes harmlessly over into associations for physical
training, which furnishes a safe outlet for these instincts, until the
reductives of maturer years have perfected their work.
The causation of crime, which the cure seeks to remove, is a problem
comparable with the origin of sin and evil. First, of course, comes
heredity, bad antenatal conditions, bad homes, unhealthful infancy and
childhood, overcrowded slums with their promiscuity and squalor, which
are always near the border of lawlessness, and perhaps are the chief
cause of crime. A large per cent of juvenile offenders, variously
estimated, but probably one-tenth of all, are vagrants or without
homes, and divorce of parents and illegitimacy seem to be nearly equal
as causative agencies. If whatever is physiologically wrong is morally
wrong, and whatever is physiologically right is morally right, we have
an important ethical suggestion from somatic conditions. There is no
doubt that conscious intelligence during a certain early stage of its
development tends to deteriorate the strength and infallibility of
instinctive processes, so that education is always beset with the
danger of interfering with ancestral and congenital tendencies. Its
prime object ought to be moralization, but it can not be denied that
in conquering ignorance we do not thereby conquer poverty or vice.
After the free schools in London were opened there was an increase of
juvenile offenders. New kinds of crime, such as forgery, grand
larceny, intricate swindling schemes, were doubled, while sneak
thieves, drunkards, and pick-pockets decreased, and the proportion of
educated criminals was greatly augmented.[14] To collect masses of
children and ram them with the same unassimilated facts is not
education in this sense, and we ought to confess that youthful crime
is an expression of educational failure. Illiterate criminals are more
likely to be detected, and also to be condemned, than are educated
criminals. Every anthropologist knows that the deepest poverty and
ignorance among primitive people are in nowise incompatible with
honesty, integrity, and virtue. Indeed there is much reason to suspect
that the extremes of wealth and poverty are more productive of crime
than ignorance, or even intemperance. Educators have no doubt vastly
overestimated the moral efficiency of the three R's and forgotten that
character in infancy is all instinct; that in childhood it is slowly
made over into habits; while at adolescence more than at any other
period of life, it can be cultivated through ideals. The dawn of
puberty, although perhaps marked by a certain moral hebetude, is soon
followed by a stormy period of great agitation, when the very worst
and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for
its possession, and when there is peculiar proneness to be either very
good or very bad. As the agitation slowly subsides, it is found that
there has been a renaissance of either the best or the worst elements
of the soul, if not indeed of both.
Although pedagogues make vast claims for the moralizing effect of
schooling, I cannot find a single criminologist who is satisfied with
the modern school, while most bring the severest indictments against
it for the blind and ignorant assumption that the three R's or any
merely intellectual training can moralize. By nature, children are
more or less morally blind, and statistics show that between thirteen
and sixteen incorrigibility is between two and three times as great as
at any other age. It is almost impossible for adults to realize the
irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia incidental to this stage
of development. If we reflect what a girl would do if dressed like a
boy and leading his life and exposed to the same moral contagion, or
what a boy would do if corseted and compelled to live like a girl,
perhaps we can realize that whatever rôle heredity plays, the youth
who go wrong are, in the vast majority of cases, victims of
circumstances or of immaturity, and deserving of both pity and hope.
It was this sentiment that impelled Zarnadelli to reconstruct the
criminal law of Italy, in this respect, and it was this sympathy that
made Rollet a self-constituted advocate, pleading each morning for the
twenty or thirty boys and eight or ten girls arrested every day in
Paris.
Those smitten with the institution craze or with any extreme
correctionalist views will never solve the problem of criminal youths.
First of all, they must be carefully and objectively studied, lived
with, and understood as in this country Gulick, Johnson, Forbush and
Yoder are doing in different ways, but each with success. Criminaloid
youth is more sharply individualized than the common good child, who
is less differentiated. Virtue is more uniform and monotonous than
sin. There is one right but there are many wrong ways, hence they need
to be individually studied by every paidological method, physical and
psychic. Keepers, attendants, and even sponsors who have to do with
these children should be educators with souls full of fatherhood and
motherhood, and they should understand that the darkest criminal
propensities are frequently offset by the very best qualities; that
juvenile murderers are often very tender-hearted to parents, sisters,
children, or pets;[15] they should understand that in the criminal
constitution there are precisely the same ingredients, although
perhaps differently compounded, accentuated, mutually controlled,
etc., by the environment, as in themselves, so that to know all would,
in the great majority of cases, be to pardon all; that the home
sentiments need emphasis; that a little less stress of misery to
overcome the effects of economic malaise and, above all, a friend,
mentor, adviser are needed.
I incline to think that many children would be better and not worse
for reading, provided it can be done in tender years, stories like
those of Captain Kidd, Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin, and other gory
tales, and perhaps later tales like Eugene Aram, and the ophidian
medicated novel, Elsie Venner, etc., on the principle of the
Aristotelian catharsis to arouse betimes the higher faculties which
develop later, and whose function it is to deplete the bad centers and
suppress or inhibit their activity. Again, I believe that judicious
and incisive scolding is a moral tonic, which is often greatly needed,
and if rightly administered would be extremely effective, because it
shows the instinctive reaction of the sane conscience against evil
deeds and tendencies. Special pedagogic attention should be given to
the sentiment of justice, which is almost the beginning of personal
morals in boys; and plays should be chosen and encouraged that hold
the beam even, regardless of personal wish and interest. Further yet
benevolence and its underlying impulse to do more than justice to our
associates; to do good in the world; to give pleasure to those about,
and not pain, can be directly cultivated. Truth-telling presents a far
harder problem, as we have seen. It is no pedagogical triumph to clip
the wings of fancy, but effort should be directed almost solely
against the cowardly lies, which cover evil; and the heroism of
telling the truth and taking the consequences is another of the
elements of the moral sense, so complex, so late in development, and
so often permanently crippled. The money sense, by all the many means
now used for its development in school, is the surest safeguard
against the most common juvenile crime of theft, and much can be
taught by precept, example, and moral regimen of the sacredness of
property rights. The regularity of school work and its industry is a
valuable moralizing agent, but entirely inadequate and insufficient by
itself. Educators must face the fact that the ultimate verdict
concerning the utility of the school will be determined, as Talleck
well says, by its moral efficiency in saving children from personal
vice and crime.
Wherever any source of pollution of school communities occurs, it must
be at once and effectively detected, and some artificial elements must
be introduced into the environment. In other words, there must be a
system of moral orthopedics. Garofalo's[16] new term and principle of
"temibility" is perhaps of great service. He would thus designate the
quantum of evil feared that is sufficient to restrain criminal
impulsion. We can not measure guilt or culpability, which may be of
all degrees from nothing to infinity perhaps, but we can to some
extent scale the effectiveness of restraint, if criminal impulse is
not absolutely irresistible. Pain then must be so organised as to
follow and measure the offense by as nearly a natural method as
possible, while on the other hand the rewards for good conduct must
also be more or less accentuated. Thus the problem of criminology for
youth can not be based on the principles now recognised for adults.
They can not be protective of society only, but must have marked
reformatory elements. Solitude[17] which tends to make weak, agitated,
and fearful, at this very gregarious age should be enforced with very
great discretion. There must be no personal and unmotivated clemency
or pardon in such scheme, for, according to the old saw, "Mercy but
murders, pardoning those who kill"; nor on the other hand should there
be the excessive disregard of personal adjustments, and the
uniformitarian, who perhaps celebrated his highest triumph in the old
sentence, "Kill all offenders and suspects, for God will know his
own," should have no part nor lot here. The philosopher Hartmann has a
suggestive article advocating that penal colonies made up of
transported criminals should be experimented upon by statesmen in
order to put various theories of self-government to a practical test.
However this may be, the penologist of youth must face some such
problem in the organization of the house of detention, boys' club,
farm, reformatory, etc. We must pass beyond the clumsy apparatus of a
term sentence., or the devices of a jury, clumsier yet, for this
purpose; we must admit the principle of regret, fear, penance,
material restoration of damage, and understand the sense in which, for
both society and for the individual, it makes no practical difference
whether experts think there is some taint of insanity, provided only
that irresponsibility is not hopelessly complete.
In few aspects of this theme do conceptions of and practises in regard
to adolescence need more radical reconstruction. A mere accident of
circumstance often condemns to criminal careers youths capable of the
highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of
temperamental outbreak or obstreperousness exposes them to all the
infamy to which ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those
who have once been detected on the wrong side of the invisible and
arbitrary line of rectitude. The heart of criminal psychology is here;
and not only that, but I would conclude with a most earnest personal
protest against the current methods of teaching and studying ethics in
our academic institutions as a speculative, historical, and abstract
thing. Here in the concrete and saliently objective facts of crime it
should have its beginning, and have more blood and body in it by
getting again close to the hot battle line between vice and virtue,
and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich ballast of facts,
can it with advantage slowly work its way over to the larger and
higher philosophy of conduct, which, when developed from this basis,
will be a radically different thing from the shadowy phantom,
schematic speculations of many contemporary moralists, taught in our
schools and colleges.
[Footnote 1: Problematische Kindesnaturen. Eine Studie für Schule und
Haus. Voigtländer, Leipzig, 1889.]
[Footnote 2: Die pädagogische Pathologie in der Erziehungskunde des 19
Jahrhunderts. Bertelsman, Gütersloh, 1893, p. 494.]
[Footnote 3: Peculiar and Exceptional Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 3-60.]
[Footnote 4: La Puberté. Schleicher Frères, Paris, 1902, p. 72.]
[Footnote 5: Home and School Punishments. Pedagogical Seminary, March,
1899, vol. 6, pp. 159-187.]
[Footnote 6: A Study of the Faults of Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
June, 1903, vol. 10, p. 200 _et seq._]
[Footnote 7: The Child and the Weather, by Edwin G. Dexter.
Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 512-522.]
[Footnote 8: Psychic Effects of the Weather, by J.S. Lemon. American
Journal of Psychology, January, 1894, vol. 6, pp. 277-279.]
[Footnote 9: Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct, by L.W.
Kline. Pedagogical Seminary, January, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 381-420.]
[Footnote 10: Children's Lies. American Journal of Psychology,
January, 1890, vol. 3, pp. 59-70.]
[Footnote 11: Poems. With memoir by his brother, 2 vols., London,
1851.]
[Footnote 12: American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, pp.
425-448.]
[Footnote 13: How the Other Half Lives. Scribner's Sons, New York,
1890, p. 229.]
[Footnote 14: The Curse in Education, by Rebecca Harding Davis. North
American Review, May, 1899, vol. 168, pp. 609-614.]
[Footnote 15: Holtzendorff: Psychologie des Mordes. C. Pfeiffer,
Berlin, 1875]
[Footnote 16: La Criminologie. Paris, Alcan, 1890, p. 332]
[Footnote 17: See its psychology and dangers well pointed out by M.H.
Small: Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude. Pedagogical
Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69]
* * * * *
CHAPTER VIII
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH
Knightly ideals and honor--Thirty adolescents from
Shakespeare--Goethe--C.D. Warner--Aldrich--The fugitive nature of
adolescent experience--Extravagance of autobiographies--Stories that
attach to great names--Some typical crazes--Illustrations from George
Eliot, Edison, Chatterton, Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley,
Lyell, Byron, Heine, Napoleon, Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, Madame
Roland, Louisa Alcott, F.H. Burnett, Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff,
Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey, Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and
scores of others.
The knightly ideals and those of secular life generally during the
middle ages and later were in striking contrast to the ascetic ideals
of the early Christian Church; in some respects they were like those
of the Greeks. Honor was the leading ideal, and muscular development
and that of the body were held in high respect; so that the spirit of
the age fostered conceptions not unlike those of the Japanese Bushido.
Where elements of Christianity were combined with this we have the
spirit of the pure chivalry of King Arthur and the Knights of the
Round Table, which affords perhaps the very best ideals for youth to
be found in history, as we shall see more fully later.
In a very interesting paper, entitled "Shakespeare and Adolescence,"
Dr. M.F. Libby[1] very roughly reckons "seventy-four interesting
adolescents among the comedies, forty-six among the tragedies, and
nineteen among the histories." He selects "thirty characters who,
either on account of direct references to their age, or because of
their love-stories, or because they show the emotional and
intellectual plasticity of youth, may be regarded as typical
adolescents." His list is as follows: Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Ophelia,
Imogen, Perdita, Arviragus, Guiderius, Palamon, Arcite, Emilia,
Ferdinand, Miranda, Isabella, Mariana, Orlando, Rosalind, Biron,
Portia, Jessica, Phebe, Katharine, Helena, Viola, Troilus, Cressida,
Cassio, Marina, Prince Hal, and Richard of Gloucester. The proof of
the youth of these characters, as set forth, is of various kinds, and
Libby holds that besides these, the sonnets and poems perhaps show a
yet greater, more profound and concentrated knowledge of adolescence.
He thinks "Venus and Adonis" a successful attempt to treat sex in a
candid, naive way, if it be read as it was meant, as a catharsis of
passion, in which is latent a whole philosophy of art. To some extent
he also finds the story of the Passionate Pilgrim "replete with the
deepest knowledge of the passions of early adolescence" The series
culminates in Sonnet 116, which makes love the sole beacon of
humanity. It might be said that it is connected by a straight line
with the best teachings of Plato, and that here humanity picked up the
clue, lost, save with some Italian poets, in the great interval.
In looking over current autobiographies of well-known modern men who
deal with their boyhood, one finds curious extremes. On the one hand
are those of which Doctor's is a type, where details are dwelt upon at
great length with careful and suggestive philosophic reflections. The
development of his own tastes, capacities, and his entire adult
consciousness was assumed to be due to the incidents of childhood and
youth, and especially the latter stage was to him full of the most
serious problems essential to his self-knowledge; and in the story of
his life he has exploited all available resources of this genetic
period of storm and stress more fully perhaps than any other writer.
At the other extreme, we have writers like Charles Dudley Warner,[2] a
self-made man, whose early life was passed on the farm, and who holds
his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps any other
reputable writer of such reminiscences. All the incidents are treated
not only with seriousness, but with a forced drollery and catchy
superficiality which reflect unfavorably at almost every point upon
the members of his household, who are caricatured; all the precious
associations of early life on a New England farm are not only made
absurd, but from beginning to end his book has not a scintilla of
instruction or suggestion for those that are interested in child life.
Aldrich[3] is better, and we have interesting glimpses of the pet
horse and monkeys, of his fighting the boy bully, running way, and
falling in love with an older girl whose engagement later blighted his
life. Howells,[4] White,[5] Mitter,[6] Grahame,[7] Heidi,[8] and Mrs.
Barnett,[9] might perhaps represent increasing grades of merit in this
field in this respect.
Yoder,[10] in his interesting study of the boyhood of great men, has
called attention to the deplorable carelessness of their biographers
concerning the facts and influences of their youth. He advocates the
great pedagogic influence of biography, and would restore the high
appreciation of it felt by the Bolandists, which Comte's positivist
calendar, that renamed all the days of the year from three hundred and
sixty-five such accounts in 1849, also sought to revive. Yoder
selected fifty great modern biographies, autobiographies preferred,
for his study. He found a number of lives whose equipment and momentum
have been strikingly due to some devoted aunt, and that give many
glimpses of the first polarization of genius in the direction in which
fame is later achieved. He holds that, while the great men excelled in
memory, imagination is perhaps still more a youthful condition of
eminence; magnifies the stimulus of poverty, the fact that elder sons
become prominent nearly twice as often as younger ones; and raises the
question whether too exuberant physical development does not dull
genius and talent.
One striking and cardinal fact never to be forgotten considering its
each and every phenomenon and stage is that the experiences of
adolescence are extremely transitory and very easily forgotten, so
that they are often totally lost to the adult consciousness.
Lancaster[11] observes that we are constantly told by adults past
thirty that they never had this and that experience, and that those
who have had them are abnormal; that they are far more rare than
students of childhood assert, etc. He says, "Not a single young person
with whom I have had free and open conversation has been free from
serious thoughts of suicide," but these are forgotten later. A typical
case of many I could gather is that of a lady, not yet in middle life,
precise and carefully trained, who, on hearing a lecture on the
typical phases of adolescence, declared that she must have been
abnormal, for she knew nothing of any of these experiences. Her
mother, however, produced her diary, and there she read for the first
time since it was written, beginning in the January of her thirteenth
year, a long series of resolutions which revealed a course of conduct
that brought the color to her face, that she should have found it
necessary to pledge not to swear, lie, etc., and which showed
conclusively that she had passed through about all the phases
described. These phenomena are sometimes very intense and may come
late in life, but it is impossible to remember feelings and emotions
with definiteness, and these now make up a large part of life. Hence
we are prone to look with some incredulity upon the immediate records
of the tragic emotions and experiences typical and normal at this
time, because development has scored away their traces from the
conscious soul.
There is a wall around the town of Boyville, says White,[12] in
substance, which is impenetrable when its gates have once shut upon
youth. An adult may peer over the wall and try to ape the games
inside, but finds it all a mockery and himself banished among the
purblind grown-ups. The town of Boyville was old when Nineveh was a
hamlet; it is ruled by ancient laws; has its own rulers and idols; and
only the dim, unreal noises of the adult world about it have changed.
In exploring such sources we soon see how few writers have given true
pictures of the chief traits of this developmental period, which can
rarely be ascertained with accuracy. The adult finds it hard to recall
the emotional and instinctive life of the teens which is banished
without a trace, save as scattered hints may be gathered from diaries,
chance experiences, or the recollections of others. But the best
observers see but very little of what goes on in the youthful soul,
the development of which is very largely subterranean. Only when the
feelings erupt in some surprising way is the process manifest. The
best of these sources are autobiographies, and of these only few are
full of the details of this stage. Just as in the mythic prehistoric
stage of many nations there is a body of legendary matter, which often
reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating
plankton-like mass of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to
eminence wherever it emerges and is repeated over and over again,
concerning the youth of men who later achieve distinction, which
biographers often incorporate and attach to the time, place, and
person of their heroes.
As Burnham[13] well intimates, many of the literary characterizations
of adolescence are so marked by extravagance, and sometimes even by
the struggle for literary effects, that they are not always the best
documents, although often based on personal experience.
Confessionalism is generally overdrawn, distorted, and especially the
pains of this age are represented as too keen. Of George Eliot's types
of adolescent character, this may best be seen in Maggie Tulliver,
with her enthusiastic self-renunciation, with "her volcanic upheavings
of imprisoned passions," with her "wide, hopeless yearning for that
something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth,"
and in Gwendolen, who, from the moment she caught Deronda's eye, was
"totally swayed in feeling and action by the presence of a person of
the other sex whom she had never seen before." There was "the resolute
action from instinct and the setting at defiance of calculation and
reason, the want of any definite desire to marry, while all her
conduct tended to promote proposals." Exaggeration, although not the
perversions of this age often found in adult characterizations, is
marked trait of the writings of adolescents, whose conduct meanwhile
may appear rational, so that this suggests that consciousness may at
this stage serve as a harmless vent for tendencies that would
otherwise cause great trouble if turned to practical affairs. If
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the adolescent tyrant slayers of Greece,
had been theorists, they might have been harmless on the principle
that its analysis tends to dissipate emotion.
Lancaster[14] gathered and glanced over a thousand biographies, from
which he selected 200 for careful study, choosing them to show
different typical directions of activity. Of these, 120 showed a
distinct craze for reading in adolescence; 109 became great lovers of
nature; 58 wrote poetry, 58 showed a great and sudden development of
energy; 55 showed great eagerness for school; 53 devoted themselves
for a season to art and music; 53 became very religious; 51 left home
in the teens; 51 showed dominant instincts of leadership; 49 had great
longings of many kinds; 46 developed scientific tastes; 41 grew very
anxious about the future; 34 developed increased keenness of sensation
or at least power of observation; in 32 cases health was better; 31
were passionately altruistic; 23 became idealists; 23 showed powers of
invention; 17 were devoted to older friends; 15 would reform society;
7 hated school. These, like many other statistics, have only
indicative value, as they are based on numbers that are not large
enough and upon returns not always complete.
A few typical instances from Lancaster must here suffice. Savonarola
was solitary, pondering, meditating, felt profoundly the evils of the
world and need of reform, and at twenty-two spent a whole night
planning his career. Shelley during these years was unsocial, much
alone, fantastic, wandered much by moonlight communing with stars and
moon, was attached to an older man. Beecher was intoxicated with
nature, which he declared afterward to have been the inspiration of
his life. George Eliot at thirteen had a passion for music and became
a clever pianist. At sixteen she was religious, founded societies for
the poor and for animals, and had fitting spells of misanthropy.
Edison undertook to read the Detroit Free Library through, read
fifteen solid feet as the books stand on the shelves, was stopped, and
says he has read comparatively little since. Tolstoi found the aspect
of things suddenly changed. Nature put on a new appearance. He felt he
might commit the most dreadful crimes with no purpose save curiosity
and the need of action. The future looked gloomy. He became furiously
angry without cause; thought he was lost, hated by everybody, was
perhaps not the son of his father, etc. At seventeen he was solitary,
musing about immortality, human destiny, feeling death at hand, giving
up his studies, fancying himself a great man with new truths for
humanity. By and by he took up the old virtuous course of life with
fresh power, new resolutions, with the feeling that he had lost much
time. He had a deep religious experience at seventeen and wept for joy
over his new life. He had a period before twenty when he told
desperate lies, for which he could not account, then a passion for
music, and later for French novels. Rousseau at this age was
discontented, immensely in love, wept often without cause, etc. Keats
had a great change at fourteen, wrestling with frequent obscure and
profound stirrings of soul, with a sudden hunger for knowledge which
consumed his days with fire, and "with passionate longing to drain the
cup of experience at a draft." He was "at the morning hour when the
whole world turns to gold." "The boy had suddenly become a poet."
Chatterton was too proud to eat a gift dinner, though nearly starved,
and committed suicide at seventeen for lack of appreciation. John
Hunter was dull and hated study, but at twenty his mind awoke as did
that of Patrick Henry, who before was a lonely wanderer, sitting idly
for hours under the trees. Alexander Murray awoke to life at fifteen
and acquired several languages in less than two years. Gifford was
distraught for lack of reading, went to sea at thirteen, became a
shoemaker, studying algebra late at night, was savagely unsociable,
sunk into torpor from which he was roused to do splenetic and
vexatious tricks, which alienated his friends. Rittenhouse at fourteen
was a plowboy, covering the fences with figures, musing on infinite
time and space. Benjamin Thompson was roused to a frenzy for sciences
at fifteen; at seventeen walked nine miles daily to attend lectures at
Cambridge; and at nineteen married a widow of thirty-three. Franklin
had a passion for the sea; at thirteen read poetry all night; wrote
verses and sold them on the streets of Boston; doubted everything at
fifteen; left home for good at seventeen; started the first public
library in Philadelphia before he was twenty-one. Robert Fulton was
poor, dreamy, mercurial, devoted to nature, art, and literature. He
became a painter of talent, then a poet, and left home at seventeen.
Bryant was sickly till fourteen and became permanently well
thereafter; was precociously devoted to nature, religion, prayed for
poetic genius and wrote Thanatopsis before he was eighteen. Jefferson
doted on animals and nature at fourteen, and at seventeen studied
fifteen hours a day. Garfield, though living in Ohio, longed for the
sea, and ever after this period the sight of a ship gave him a strange
thrill. Hawthorne was devoted to the sea and wanted to sail on and on
forever and never touch shore again. He would roam through the Maine
woods alone; was haunted by the fear that he would die before
twenty-five. Peter Cooper left home at seventeen; was passionately
altruistic; and at eighteen vowed he would build a place like his New
York Institute. Whittier at fourteen found a copy of Burns, which
excited him and changed the current of his life. Holmes had a passion
for flowers, broke into poetry at fifteen, and had very romantic
attachments to certain trees. J. T. Trowbridge learned German, French,
and Latin alone before twenty-one; composed poetry at the plow and
wrote it out in the evening. Henry followed a rabbit under the Public
Library at Albany, found a hole in the floor that admitted him to the
shelves, and, unknown to any one, read all the fiction the library
contained, then turned to physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and
developed a passion for the sciences. He was stage-struck, and became
a good amateur actor. H. H. Boyesen was thrilled by nature and by the
thought that he was a Norseman. He had several hundred pigeons,
rabbits, and other pets; loved to be in the woods at night; on leaving
home for school was found with his arms around the neck of a calf to
which he was saying good-by. Maxwell, at sixteen, had almost a horror
of destroying a leaf, flower, or fly. Jahn found growing in his heart,
at this age, an inextinguishable feeling for right and wrong--which
later he thought the cause of all his inner weal and outer woe. When
Nansen was in his teens he spent weeks at a time alone in the forest,
full of longings, courage, altruism, wanted to get away from every one
and live like Crusoe. T. B. Reed, at twelve and thirteen, had a
passion for reading; ran away at seventeen; painted, acted, and wrote
poetry. Cartwright, at sixteen, heard voices from the sky saying,
"Look above, thy sins are forgiven thee." Herbert Spencer became an
engineer at seventeen, after one idle year. He never went to school,
but was a private pupil of his uncle. Sir James Mackintosh grew fond
of history at eleven; fancied he was the Emperor of Constantinople;
loved solitude at thirteen; wrote poetry at fourteen; and fell in love
at seventeen. Thomas Buxton loved dogs, horses, and literature, and
combined these while riding on an old horse. At sixteen be fell in
love with an older literary woman, which aroused every latent power to
do or die, and thereafter he took all the school prizes. Scott began
to like poetry at thirteen. Pascal wrote treatises on conic sections
at sixteen and invented his arithmetical machine at nineteen. Nelson
went to sea at twelve; commanded a boat in peril at fifteen, which at
the same age he left to fight a polar bear. Banks, the botanist, was
idle and listless till fourteen, could not travel the road marked out
for him; when coming home from bathing, he was struck by the beauty of
the flowers and at once began his career. Montcalm and Wolfe both
distinguished themselves as leaders in battle at sixteen. Lafayette
came to America at nineteen, thrilled by our bold strike for liberty.
Gustavus Adolphus declared his own majority at seventeen and was soon
famous. Ida Lewis rescued four men in a boat at sixteen. Joan of Arc
began at thirteen to have the visions which were the later guide of
her life.
Mr. Swift has collected interesting biographical material[15] to show
that school work is analytic, while life is synthetic, and how the
narrowness of the school enclosure prompts many youth in the wayward
age to jump fences and seek new and more alluring pastures. According
to school standards, many were dull and indolent, but their nature was
too large or their ideals too high to be satisfied with it. Wagner at
the Nikolaischule at Leipzig was relegated to the third form, having
already attained to the second at Dresden, which so embittered him
that he lost all taste for philology and, in his own words, "became
lazy and slovenly." Priestley never improved by any systematic course
of study. W.H. Gibson was very slow and was rebuked for wasting his
time in sketching. James Russell Lowell was reprimanded, at first
privately and then publicly, in his sophomore year "for general
negligence in themes, forensics, and recitations," and finally
suspended in 1838 "on account of continued neglect of his college
duties." In early life Goldsmith's teacher thought him the dullest boy
she had ever taught. His tutor called him ignorant and stupid. Irving
says that a lad "whose passions are not strong enough in youth to
mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his
inclinations, have chalked out, by four or five years' perseverance,
will probably obtain every advantage and honor his college can bestow.
I would compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the
tranquility of dispassionate prudence, to liquors that never ferment,
and, consequently, continue always muddy." Huxley detested writing
till past twenty. His schooling was very brief, and he declared that
those set over him "cared about as much for his intellectual and moral
welfare as if they were baby farmers." Humphry Davy was faithful but
showed no talent in school, having "the reputation of being an idle
boy, with a gift for making verses, but with no aptitude for studies
of a graver sort." Later in life he considered it fortunate that he
was left so much to himself. Byron was so poor a scholar that he only
stood at the head of the class when, as was the custom, it was
inverted, and the bantering master repeatedly said to him, "Now,
George, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot." Schiller's
negligence and lack of alertness called for repeated reproof, and his
final school thesis was unsatisfactory. Hegel was a poor scholar, and
at the university it was stated "that he was of middling industry and
knowledge but especially deficient in philosophy." John Hunter nearly
became a cabinetmaker. Lyell had excessive aversion to work. George
Combe wondered why he was so inferior to other boys in arithmetic.
Heine agreed with the monks that Greek was the invention of the devil.
"God knows what misery I suffered with it." He hated French meters,
and his teacher vowed he had no soul for poetry. He idled away his
time at Bonn, and was "horribly bored" by the "odious, stiff,
cut-and-dried tone" of the leathery professors. Humboldt was feeble as
a child and "had less facility in his studies than most children."
"Until I reached the age of sixteen," he says, "I showed little
inclination for scientific pursuits." He was essentially self-taught,
and acquired most of his knowledge rather late in life. At nineteen he
had never heard of botany. Sheridan was called inferior to many of his
schoolfellows. He was remarkable for nothing but idleness and winning
manners, and was "not only slovenly in construing, but unusually
defective in his Greek grammar." Swift was refused his degree because
of "dulness and insufficiency," but given it later as a special favor.
Wordsworth was disappointing. General Grant was never above
mediocrity, and was dropped as corporal in the junior class and served
the last year as a private. W. H. Seward was called "too stupid to
learn." Napoleon graduated forty-second in his class. "Who," asks
Swift, "were the forty-one above him?" Darwin was singularly incapable
of mastering any language. "When he left school," he says, "I was
considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy,
rather below the common standard in intellect. To my deep
mortification, my father once said to me, 'You care for nothing but
shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to
yourself and to all your family.'" Harriet Martineau was thought very
dull. Though a horn musician, she could do absolutely nothing in the
presence of her irritable master. She wrote a cramped, untidy scrawl
until past twenty. A visit to some very brilliant cousins at the age
of sixteen had much to do in arousing her backward nature. At this age
J. Pierpont Morgan wrote poetry and was devoted to mathematics. Booker
T. Washington, at about thirteen or fourteen (he does not know the
date of his birth), felt the new meaning of life and started off on
foot to Hampton, five hundred miles away, not knowing even the
direction, sleeping under a sidewalk his first night in Richmond.
Vittorino da Feltre,[16] according to Dr. Burnham, had a low, tardy
development, lingering on a sluggish dead level from ten to fourteen,
which to his later unfoldment was as the barren, improving years
sometimes called the middle ages, compared with the remainder which
followed when a new world-consciousness intensified his personality.
Lancaster's summaries show that of 100 actors, the average age of
their first great success was exactly 18 years. Those he chose had
taken to the stage of their own accord, for actors are more born than
made. Nearly half of them were Irish, the unemotional American stock
having furnished far less. Few make their first success on the stage
after 22, but from 16 to 20 is the time to expect talent in this line,
although there is a second rise in his curve before and still more
after 25, representing those whose success is more due to intellect.
Taking the average age of 100 novelists when their first story met
with public approval, the curve reaches its highest point between 30
and 35. Averaging 53 poets, the age at which most first poems were
published falls between 15 and 20. The average age at which first
publication showed talent he places at 18, which is in striking
contrast with the average age of inventors at time of the first
patent, which is 33 years.
A still more striking contrast is that between 100 musicians and 100
professional men. Music is by far the most precocious and instinctive
of all talents. The average age when marked talent was first shown is
a little less than 10 years, 95 per cent showed rare talent before 16,
while the professional men graduated at an average age of 24 years and
11 months, and 10 years must be added to mark the point of recognized
success. Of 53 artists, 90 per cent showed talent before 20, the
average age being 17.2 years. Of 100 pioneers who made their mark in
the Far West, leaving home to seek fortunes near the frontier, the
greatest number departed before they were 18. Of 118 scientists,
Lancaster estimates that their life interest first began to glow on
the average a little before they were 19. In general, those whose
success is based on emotional traits antedate by some years those
whose renown is more purely in intellectual spheres, and taking all
together, the curves of the first class culminate between 18 and 20.
While men devoted to physical science, and their biographers, give us
perhaps the least breezy accounts of this seething age, it may be,
because they mature late, nearly all show its ferments and its
circumnutations, as a few almost random illustrations clearly show:
Tycho Brahe, born in 1596 of illustrious Danish stock, was adopted by
an uncle, and entered the University of Copenhagen at thirteen, where
multiplication, division, philosophy, and metaphysics were taught.
When he was fourteen, an eclipse of the sun occurred, which aroused so
much interest that he decided to devote himself to the study of the
heavenly bodies. He was able to construct a series of interesting
instruments on a progressive scale of size, and finally to erect the
great Observatory of Uraniberg on the Island of Hven. Strange to say,
his scientific conclusions had for him profound astrological
significance. An important new star he declared was "at first like
Venus and Jupiter and its effects will therefore first be pleasant;
but as it then became like Mars, there will next come a period of
wars, seditions, captivity, and death of princes, and destruction of
cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the air,
pestilence, and venomous snakes. Lastly, the star became like Saturn,
and thus will finally come a time of want, death, imprisonment, and
all kinds of sad things!" He says that "a special use of astronomy is
that it enables us to draw conclusions from the movements in the
celestial regions as to human fate." He labored on his island twenty
years. He was always versifying, and inscribed a poem over the
entrance of his underground observatory expressing the astonishment of
Urania at finding in the interior of the earth a cavern devoted to the
study of the heavens.
Galileo[17] was born in 1564 of a Florentine noble, who was poor. As a
youth he became an excellent lutist, then thought of devoting himself
to painting, but when he was seventeen studied medicine, and at the
University of Pisa fell in love with mathematics.
Isaac Newton,[18] born in 1642, very frail and sickly, solitary, had a
very low piece in the class lists of his school; wrote poetry, and at
sixteen tried farming. In one of his university examinations in Euclid
be did so poorly as to incur special censure. His first incentive to
diligent study came from being severely kicked by a high class boy. He
then resolved to pass him in studies, and soon rose to the head of the
school. He made many ingenious toys and windmills; a carriage, the
wheels of which were driven by the hands of the occupants, and a clock
which moved by water; curtains, kites, lanterns, etc.; and before he
was fourteen fell in love with Miss Storey, several yeas older than
himself. He entered Trinity College at Cambridge at eighteen.
William Herschel, born in 1738, at the outbreak of the Seven Years'
War, when he was eighteen, was a performer in the regimental band, and
after a battle passed a night in a ditch and escaped in disguise, to
England, where he eked out a precarious livelihood by teaching music.
He supported himself until middle age as an organist. In much of his
later work he was greatly aided by his sister Caroline. When he
discovered a sixth planet he became famous, and devoted himself
exclusively to astronomy, training his only son to follow in his
footsteps, and dying in 1822.
Agassiz[19] at twelve had developed a mania for collecting. He
memorized Latin names, of which he accumulated "great volumes of
MSS.", and "modestly expressed the hope that in time he might be able
to give the name of every known animal." At fourteen he revolted at
mercantile life, for which he was designed, and issued a manifesto
planning to spend four years at a Cermem university, then in Paris,
when he could begin to write. Rooks were scarce, and a little later he
copied, with the aid of his brother, several large volumes, and had
fifty live birds in his room at one time.
At twelve Huxley[20] became an omnivorous reader, and two or three
years later devoured Hamilton's Logic and became deeply interested in
metaphysics. At fourteen he saw and participated in his first
post-mortem examination, was left in a strange state of apathy by it,
and dates his life-long dyspepsia to this experience. His training was
irregular; he taught himself German with a book in one hand while he
made hay with the other; speculated about the basis of matter, soul,
and their relations, on radicalism and conservatism; and reproached
himself that he did not work and get on enough. At seventeen he
attempted a comprehensive classification of human knowledge, and
having finished his survey, resolved to master the topics one after
another, striking them out from his table with ink as soon us they
were done. "May the list soon get black, although at present I shall
hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the paper." Beneath the top
skimmings of these years he afterward conceived seething depths
working beneath the froth, but could give hardly any account of it. He
undertook the practise of pharmacy, etc.
Women with literary gifts perhaps surpass men in their power to
reproduce and describe the great but so often evanescent ebullitions
of this age; perhaps because their later lives, on account of their
more generic nature, depart less from this totalizing period, or
because, although it is psychologically shorter than in men, the
necessities of earning a livelihood less frequently arrest its full
development, and again because they are more emotional, and feeling
constitutes the chief psychic ingredient of this stage of life, or
they dwell more on subjective states.
Manon Philipon (Madame Roland) was born in 1754. Her father was an
engraver in comfortable circumstances. Her earliest enthusiasm was for
the Bible and Lives of the Saints, and she had almost a mania for
reading books of any kind. In the corner of her father's workshop she
would read Plutarch for hours, dream of the past glories of antiquity,
and exclaim, weeping, "Why was I not born a Greek?" She desired to
emulate the brave men of old.
Books and flowers aroused her to dreams of enthusiasm, romantic
sentiment, and lofty aspiration. Finding that the French society
afforded no opportunity for heroic living, in her visionary fervor she
fell back upon a life of religious mysticism, and Xavier, Loyola, St.
Elizabeth, and St. Theresa became her new idols. She longed to follow
even to the stake those devout men and women who had borne obloquy,
poverty, hunger, thirst, wretchedness, and the agony of a martyr's
death for the sake of Jesus. Her capacities for self-sacrifice became
perhaps her leading trait, always longing after a grand life like
George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke. She was allowed at the age of eleven
to enter a convent, where, shunning her companions, she courted
solitude apart, under the trees, reading and thinking. Artificial as
the atmosphere was here, it no doubt inspired her life with permanent
tenderness of feeling and loftiness of purpose, and gave a mystic
quality to her imagination. Later she experienced to the full
revulsion of thought and experience which comes when doubt reacts upon
youthful credulity. It was the age of the encyclopedia, and now she
came to doubt her creed and even God and the soul, but clung to the
Gospels as the best possible code of morals, and later realized that
while her intellect had wandered her heart had remained constant. At
seventeen she was, if not the moat beautiful, perhaps the noblest
woman in all France, and here the curtain moat drop upon her girlhood.
All her traits were, of course, set off by the great life she lived
and the yet greater death she died.
Gifted people seem to conserve their youth and to be all the more
children, and perhaps especially all the more intensely adolescents,
because of their gifts, and it is certainly one of the marks of genius
that the plasticity and spontaneity of adolescence persists into
maturity. Sometimes even its passions, reveries, and hoydenish freaks
continue. In her "Histoire de Ma Vie," it is plain that George Sand
inherited at this age an unusual dower of gifts. She composed many and
interminable stories, carried on day after day, so that her confidants
tried to tease her by asking if the prince had got out of the forest
yet, etc. She personated an echo and conversed with it. Her day-dreams
and plays were so intense that she often came back from the world of
imagination to reality with a shock. She spun a weird zoological
romance out of a rustic legend of _la grande bête_.
When her aunt sent her to a convent, she passed a year of rebellion
and revolt, and was the leader of _les diables_, or those who refused
to be devout, and engaged in all wild pranks. At fifteen she became
profoundly interested in the lives of the saints, although ridiculing
miracles. She entered one evening the convent church for service,
without permission, which was an act of disobedience. The mystery and
holy charm of it penetrated her; she forgot everything outward and was
left alone, and some mysterious change stole over her. She "breathed
an atmosphere of ineffable sweetness" more with the mind than the
senses; had a sudden indescribable perturbation; her eyes swam; she
was enveloped in a white glimmer, and heard a voice murmur the words
written under a convent picture of St. Augustine, _Tolle, lege,_ and
turned around thinking Mother Alicia spoke, but she was alone. She
knew it was an hallucination, but saw that faith had laid hold of her,
as she wished, by the heart, and she sobbed and prayed to the unknown
God till a nun heard her groaning. At first her ardor impelled her not
only to brave the jeers of her madcap club of harum-scarums and
tomboys, but she planned to become a nun, until this feverish longing
for a recluse life passed, but left her changed.[21]
When she passed from the simple and Catholic faith of her grisette
mother to the atmosphere of her cynical grandmother at Nohant, who was
a disciple of Voltaire, she found herself in great straits between the
profound sentiments inspired by the first communion and the concurrent
contempt for this faith, instilled by her grandmother for all those
mummeries through which, however, for conventional reasons she was
obliged to pass. Her heart was deeply stirred, and yet her head
holding all religion to be fiction or metaphor, it occurred to her to
invent a story which might be a religion or a religion which might be
a story into any degree of belief in which she could lapse at will.
The name and the form of her new deity was revealed to her in a dream.
He was Corambé, pure as Jesus, beautiful as Gabriel, as graceful as
the nymphs and Orpheus, less austere than the Christian God, and as
much woman as man, because she could best understand this sex from her
love for her mother. He appeared in many aspects of physical and moral
beauty; was eloquent, master of all arts, and above all of the magic
of musical improvisation; loved as a friend and sister, and at the
same time revered as a god; not awful and remote from impeccability,
but with the fault of excess of indulgence. She estimated that she
composed about a thousand sacred books or songs developing phases of
his mundane existence. In each of these he became incarnate man on
touching the earth, always in a new group of people who were good, yet
suffering martyrdoms from the wicked known only by the effects of
their malice. In this "gentle hallucination" she could lose herself in
the midst of friends, and turn to her hero deity for comfort. There
must be not only sacred books, but a temple and ritual, and in a
garden thicket, which no eye could penetrate, in a moss-carpeted
chamber she built an altar against a tree-trunk, ornamented with a
wreath hung over it. Instead of sacrificing, which seemed barbaric,
she proceeded to restore life and liberty to butterflies, lizards,
green frogs, and birds, which she put in a box, laid on the altar, and
"after having invoked the good genius of liberty and protection,"
opened it. In these mimic rites and delicious reveries she found the
germs of a religion that fitted her heart. From the instant, however,
that a boy playmate discovered and entered this sanctuary, "Corambé
ceased to dwell in it. The dryads and the cherubim deserted it," and
it seemed unreal. The temple was destroyed with great care, and the
garlands and shells were buried under the tree.[22]
Louisa Alcott's romantic period opened at fifteen, when she began to
write poetry, keep a heart journal, and wander by moonlight, and
wished to be the Bettine of Emerson, in whose library she foraged;
wrote him letters which were never sent; sat in a tall tree at
midnight; left wild flowers on the doorstep of her master; sang
Mignon's song under his window; and was refined by her choice of an
idol. Her diary was all about herself.
If she looked in the glass at her long hair and well-shaped head, she
tried to keep down her vanity; her quick tongue, moodiness, poverty,
impossible longings, made every day a battle until she hardly wished
to live, only something must be done, and waiting is so hard. She
imagined her mind a room in confusion which must be put in order; the
useless thought swept out; foolish fancies dusted away; newly
furnished with good resolutions. But she was not a good housekeeper;
cobwebs got in, and it was hard to rule. She was smitten with a mania
for the stage, and spent most of her leisure in writing and acting
plays of melodramatic style ad high-strung sentiment, improbable
incidents, with no touch of common life or sense of humor, full of
concealments and surprises, bright dialogues, and lofty sentiments.
She had much dramatic power and loved to transform herself into Hamlet
and declaim in mock heroic style. From sixteen to twenty-three was her
apprenticeship to life. She taught, wrote for the papers, did
housework for pay as a servant, and found sewing a pleasant resource
because it was tranquillizing, left her free, and set her thoughts
going.
Mrs. Burnett,[23] like most women who record their childhood and
adolescent memories, is far more subjective and interesting than most
men. In early adolescence she was never alone when with flowers, but
loved to "speak to them, to bend down and say caressing things, to
stoop and kiss them, to praise them for their pretty ways of looking
up at her as into the eyes of a friend and beloved. There were certain
little blue violets which always seemed to lift their small faces
childishly, as if they were saying, 'Kiss me; don't go by like that.'"
She would sit on the porch, elbows on knees and chin on hands, staring
upward, sometimes lying on the grass. Heaven was so high and yet she
was a part of it and was something even among the stars. It was a
weird, updrawn, overwhelming feeling as she stared so fixedly and
intently that the earth seemed gone, left far behind. Every hour and
moment was a wonderful and beautiful thing. She felt on speaking terms
with the rabbits. Something was happening in the leaves which waved
and rustled as she passed. Just to walk, sit, lie around out of doors,
to loiter, gaze, watch with a heart fresh as a young dryad, following
birds, playing hide-and-seek with the brook-these were her halcyon
hours.
With the instability of genius, Beth[24] did everything suddenly. When
twelve or thirteen, she had grown too big to be carried, pulled or
pushed; she suddenly stood still one day, when her mother, commanded
her to dress. She had been ruled before by physical force, but her
will and that of her mother were now in collision, and the latter
realised she could make her do nothing unless by persuasion or moral
influence. Being constantly reproved, scolded, and even beaten by her
mother, Beth one day impulsively jumped into the sea, and was rescued
with difficulty. She had spells of being miserable with no cause. She
was well and happy, but would burst into tears suddenly, which seemed
often to surprise her. Being very sensitive herself, she was morbidly
careful of the feelings of others and incessantly committed grave sins
of insincerity without compunction in her effort to spare them. To
those who confided in her abilities, praised her, and thought she
could do things, her nature expanded, but her mother checked her
mental growth over and over, instead of helping her by saying, "Don't
try, you can't do it," etc.
Just before the dawn of adolescence she had passed through a long
period of abject superstition, largely through the influence of a
servant. All the old woman's signs were very dominant in her life. She
even invented methods of divination, as, "if the boards do not creak
when I walk across the room I shall get through my lessons without
trouble." She always preferred to see two rooks together to one and
became expert in the black arts. She used to hear strange noises at
night for a time, which seemed signs and portents of disaster at sea,
fell into the ways of her neighbors, and had more faith in
incantations than in doctors' doses. She not only heard voices and
very ingeniously described them, but claimed to know what was going to
happen and compared her forebodings with the maid. She "got religion"
very intensely under the influence of her aunt, grew thin, lost her
appetite and sleep, had heartache to think of her friends burning in
hell, and tried to save them.
Beth never thought at all of her personal appearance until she
overheard a gentleman call her rather nice-looking, when her face
flushed and she had a new feeling of surprise and pleasure, and took
very clever ways of cross-examining her friends to find if she was
handsome. All of a sudden the care of her person became of great
importance, and every hint she had heard of was acted on. She aired
her bed, brushed her hair glossy, pinched her waist and feet, washed
in buttermilk, used a parasol, tortured her natural appetite in every
way, put on gloves to do dirty work, etc.
The house always irked her. Once stealing out of the school by night,
she was free, stretched herself, drew a long breath, bounded and waved
her arms in an ecstasy of liberty, danced around the magnolia, buried
her face in the big flowers one after another and bathed it in the dew
of the petals, visited every forbidden place, was particularly
attracted to the water, enjoyed scratching and making her feet bleed
and eating a lot of green fruit. This liberty was most precious and
all through a hot summer she kept herself healthy by exercise in the
moonlight. This revived her appetite, and she ended these night
excursions by a forage in the kitchen. Beth had times when she
hungered for solitude and for nature. Sometimes she would shut herself
in her room, but more often would rove the fields and woods in
ecstasy. Coming home from school, where she had long been, she had to
greet the trees and fields almost before she did her parents. She had
a great habit of stealing out often by the most dangerous routes over
roofs, etc., at night in the moonlight, running and jumping, waving
her arms, throwing herself on the ground, rolling over, walling on
all-fours, turning somersaults, hugging trees, playing hide-and-seek
with the shadow fairy-folk, now playing and feeling fear and running
away. She invoked trees, stars, etc.
Beth's first love affair was with a bright, fair-haired, fat-faced
boy, who sat near her pew Sundays. They looked at each other once
during service, and she felt a glad glow in her chest spread over her,
dwelt on his image, smiled, and even the next day felt a new desire to
please. She watched for him to pass from school. When he appeared,
"had a most delightful thrill shoot through her." The first impulse to
fly was conquered; she never thought a boy beautiful before. They
often met after dark, wrote; finally she grew tired of him because she
could not make him feel deeply, sent him off, called him an idiot, and
then soliloquized on the "most dreadful grief of her life." The latter
stages of their acquaintance she occasionally used to beat him, but
his attraction steadily waned. Once later, as she was suffering from a
dull, irresolute feeling due to want of a companion and an object, she
met a boy of seventeen, whose face, like her own, brightened as they
approached. It was the first appearance of nature's mandate to mate.
This friendly glance suffused her whole being with the "glory and
vision of love." Religion and young men were her need. They had stolen
interviews by night and many an innocent embrace and kiss, and almost
died once by being caught. They planned in detail what they would do
after they were married, but all was taken for granted without formal
vows. Only when criticized did they ever dream of caution and
concealment, and then they made elaborate parades of ignoring each
other in public and fired their imaginations with thoughts of
disguises, masks, etc. This passion was nipped in the bud by the boy's
removal from his school.
In preparing for her first communion, an anonymous writer[25] became
sober and studious, proposing to model her life on that of each fresh
saint and to spend a week in retreat examining her conscience with
vengeance. She wanted to revive the custom of public confession and
wrote letters of penitence and submission, which she tore up later,
finding her mind not "all of a piece." She lay prostrate on her
prie-dieu weeping from ecstasy, lying on the rim of heaven held by
angels, wanting to die, now bathed in bliss or aching intolerably with
spiritual joy, but she was only twelve and her old nature often
reasserted itself. Religion at that time became an intense emotion
nourished on incense, music, tapers, and a feeling of being tangible.
It was rapturous and sensuous. While under its spell, she seemed to
float and touch the wings of angels. Here solemn Gregorian chants are
sung, so that when one comes back to earth there is a sense of hunger,
deception, and self-loathing. Now she came to understand how so many
sentimental and virtuous souls sought oblivion in the narcotic of
religious excitement. Here, at the age of twelve, youth began and
childhood ended with her book.
Pathetic is the account of Helen Keller's effort to understand the
meaning of the word "love" in its season.[26]
Is it the sweetness of flowers? she asked. No, said her teacher. Is it
the warm sun? Not exactly. It can not be touched, "'but you feel the
sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love, you would not
be happy or want to play.' The beautiful truth burst upon my mind. I
felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and
the spirit of others." This period seems to have came gradually and
naturally to this wonderful child, whose life has been perhaps the
purest ever lived and one of the sweetest. None has ever loved every
aspect of nature accessible to her more passionately, or felt more
keenly the charm of nature or of beautiful sentiments. The unhappy
Frost King episode has been almost the only cloud upon her life, which
unfortunately came at about the dawn of this period, that is perhaps
better marked by the great expansion of mind which she experienced at
the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, when she was thirteen. About this
time, too, her great ambition of going to college and enjoying all the
advantages that other girls did, which, considering her handicap, was
one of the greatest human resolutions, was strengthened and deepened.
The fresh, spontaneous, and exquisite reactions of this pellucid mind,
which felt that each individual could comprehend all the experiences
and emotions of the race and that chafed at every pedagogical and
technical obstacle between her soul and nature, and the great
monuments of literature, show that she has conserved to a remarkable
degree, which the world will wish may be permanent, the best impulses
of this golden age.
Marie Bashkirtseff,[27] who may be taken as one of the best types of
exaggerated adolescent confessionalists, was rich and of noble birth,
and began in 1873, at the age of twelve, to write a journal that
should be absolutely true and frank, with no pretense, affectation, or
concealment. The journal continues until her death, October, 1884, at
the age of twenty-three. It may be described as in some sense a
feminine counterpart of Rousseau's confessions, but is in some
respects a more precious psychological document than any other for the
elucidation of the adolescent ferment in an unusually vigorous and
gifted soul. Twice I have read it from cover to cover and with growing
interest.
At twelve she is passionately in love with a duke, whom she sometimes
saw pass, but who had no knowledge of her existence, and builds many
air castles about his throwing himself at her feet and of their life
together. She prays passionately to see him again, would dazzle him on
the stage, would lead a perfect life, develop her voice, and would be
an ideal wife. She agonizes before the glass on whether or not she is
pretty, and resolves to ask some young man, but prefers to think well
of herself even if it is an illusion; constantly modulates over into
passionate prayer to God to grant all her wishes; is oppressed with
despair; gay and melancholy by turn; believes in God because she
prayed Him for a set of croquet and to help her to learn English, both
of which He granted. At church some prayers and services seem directly
aimed at her; Paris now seems a frightful desert, and she has no
motive to avoid carelessness in her appearance. She has freaky and
very changeable ideas of arranging the things in her room. When she
hears of the duke's marriage she almost throws herself over a bridge,
prays God for pardon of her sins, and thinks all is ended; finds it
horrible to dissemble her feelings in public; goes through the torture
of altering her prayer about the duke. She is disgusted with common
people, harrowed by jealousy, envy, deceit and every hideous feeling,
yet feels herself frozen in the depth, and moving only on the surface.
When her voice improves she welcomes it with tears and feels an
all-powerful queen. The man she loves should never speak to another.
Her journal she resolves to make the most instructive book that ever
was or ever will be written. She esteems herself so great a treasure
that no one is worthy of her; pities those who think they can please
her; thinks herself a real divinity; prays to the moon to show her in
dreams her future husband, and quarrels with her photographs.
In some moods she feels herself beautiful, knows she shall succeed,
everything smiles upon her and she is absolutely happy and yet in the
next paragraph the fever of life at high pressure palls upon her and
things seem asleep and unreal. Her attempts to express her feelings
drive her to desperation because words are inadequate. She loves to
weep, gives up to despair to think of death, and finds everything
transcendently exquisite. She comes to despise men and wonder whether
the good are always stupid and the intelligent always false and
saturated with baseness, but on the whole believes that some time or
other she is destined to meet one true good and great man. Now she is
inflated with pride of her ancestry, her gifts, and would subordinate
everybody and everything; she would never speak a commonplace word,
and then again feels that her life has been a failure and she is
destined to be always waiting. She falls on her knees sobbing, praying
to God with outstretched hands as if He were in her room; almost vows
to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem one-tenth of the way on foot; to
devote her money to good works; lacks the pleasures proper to her age;
wonders if she can ever love again. On throwing a bouquet from a
window into a crowd in the Corso a young man choked so beautifully a
workman who caught it that by that one act of strangling and snatching
the bouquet she fell in love. The young man calls and they see each
other often. Now she is clad from head to foot in an armor of cold
politeness, now vanity and now passion seem uppermost in their
meetings. She wonders if a certain amount of sin, like air, is
necessary to a man to sustain life. Finally they vow mutual love and
Pietro leaves, and she begins to fear that she has cherished illusions
or been insulted; is torments at things unsaid or of her spelling in
French. She coughs and for three days has a new idea that she is going
to die; prays and prostrates herself sixty times, one for each bead in
her rosary, touching the floor with her forehead every time; wonders
if God takes intentions into account; resolves to read the New
Testament, but can not find one and reads Dumas instead. In
novel-reading she imagines herself the heroine of every scene; sees
her lover and they plan their mode of life together and at last kiss
each other, but later she feels humiliated, chilled, doubts if it is
real love; studies the color of her lips to see if they have changed;
fears that she has compromised herself; has eye symptoms that make her
fear blindness. Once on reading the Testament she smiled and clasped
her hands, gazed upward, was no longer herself but in ecstasy; she
makes many programs for life; is haunted by the phrase "We live but
once"; wants to live a dozen lives in one, but feels that she does not
live one-fourth of a life; has several spells of solitary
illumination. At other times she wishes to be the center of a salon
and imagines herself to be so. She soars on poets' wings, but often
has hell in her heart; slowly love is vowed henceforth to be a word
without meaning to her. Although she suffers from _ennui_, she
realizes that women live only from sixteen to forty and cannot bear
the thought of losing a moment of her life; criticizes her mother;
scorns marriage and child-bearing, which any washerwoman can attain,
but pants for glory; now hates, now longs to see new faces; thinks of
disguising herself as a poor girl and going out to seek her fortunes;
thinks her mad vanity is her devil; that her ambitions are justified
by no results; hates moderation in anything, would have intense and
constant excitement or absolute repose; at fifteen abandons her idea
of the duke but wants an idol, and finally decides to live for fame;
studies her shoulders, hips, bust, to gauge her success in life; tries
target-shooting, hits every time and feels it to be fateful; at times
despises her mother because she is so easily influenced by her; meets
another man whose affection for her she thinks might be as reverent as
religion and who never profaned the purity of his life by a thought,
but finally drops him because the possible disappointment would be
unbearable; finds that the more unhappy any one is for love of us the
happier we are; wonders why she has weeping spells; wonders what love
that people talk so much about really is, and whether she is ever to
know. One night, at the age of seventeen, she has a fit of despair
which vents itself in moans until arising, she seizes the dining-room
clock, rushes out and throws it into the sea, when she becomes happy.
"Poor clock!"
At another time she fears she has used the word love lightly and
resolves to no longer invoke God's help, yet in the next line prays
Him to let her die as everything is against her, her thoughts are
incoherent, she hates herself and everything is contemptible; but she
wishes to die peacefully while some one is singing a beautiful air of
Verdi. Again she thinks of shaving her head to save the trouble of
arranging her hair; is crazed to think that every moment brings her
nearer death; to waste a moment of life is infamous, yet she can trust
no one; all the freshness of life is gone; few things affect her now;
she wonders how in the past she could have acted so foolishly and
reasoned so wisely; is proud that no advice in the world could ever
keep her from doing anything she wished. She thinks the journal of her
former years exaggerated and resolves to be moderate; wants to make
others feel as she feels; finds that the only cure for disenchantment
with life is devotion to work; fears her face is wearing an anxious
look instead of the confident expression which was its chief charm.
"Impossible" is a hideous, maddening word; to think of dying like a
dog as most people do and leaving nothing behind is a granite wall
against which she every instant dashes her head. If she loved a man,
every expression of admiration for anything, or anybody else in her
presence would be a profanation. Now she thinks the man she loves must
never know what it is to be in want of money and must purchase
everything he wishes; must weep to see a woman want for anything, and
find the door of no palace or club barred to him. Art becomes a great
shining light in her life of few pleasures and many griefs, yet she
dares hope for nothing.
At eighteen all her caprices are exhausted; she vows and prays in the
name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for her wishes. She would like
to be a millionaire, get back her voice, obtain the _prix de Rome_
under the guise of a man and marry Napoleon IV. On winning a medal for
her pictures she does nothing but laugh, cry, and dream of greatness,
but the next day is scolded and grows discouraged. She has an immense
sense of growth and transformation, so that not a trace of her old
nature remains; feels that she has far too much of some things, and
far too little of others in her nature; sees defects in her mother's
character, whose pertinacity is like a disease; realizes that one of
her chief passions is to inspire rather than to feel love; that her
temper is profoundly affected by her dress; deplores that her family
expect her to achieve greatness rather than give her the stimulus of
expecting nothing; declares that she thanks a million thoughts for
every word that she writes; is disgusted with and sometimes absolutely
hates herself. At one time she coquets with Kant, and wonders if he is
right that all things exist only in the imagination; has a passion for
such "abracadabrante follies" that seem so learned and logical, but is
grieved to feel them to be false; longs to penetrate the intellectual
world, to see, learn, and know everything; admires Balzac because he
describes so frankly all that he has felt; loves Fleury, who has shown
her a wider horizon; still has spells of admiring her dazzling
complexion and deploring that she can not go out alone; feels that she
is losing her grip on art and also on God, who no longer hears her
prayers, and resolves to kill herself if she is not famous at thirty.
At nineteen, and even before, she has spells of feeling inefficient
cries, calls on God, feels exhausted; is almost stunned when she hears
that the young French prince about whom she has spun romances was
killed by the Kaffirs; feels herself growing serious and sensible;
despises death; realizes that God is not what she thought, but is
perhaps Nature and Life or is perhaps Chance; she thinks out possible
pictures she might paint; develops a Platonic friendship for her
professor; might marry an old man with twenty-seven millions, but
spurns the thought; finds herself growing deaf gradually, and at
nineteen finds three grey hairs; has awful remorse for days, when she
cannot work and so loses herself in novels and cigarettes; makes many
good resolutions and then commits some folly as if in a dream; has
spells of reviewing the past. When the doctor finds a serious lung
trouble and commands iodine, cod-liver oil, hot milk, and flannel, she
at first scorns death and refuses all, and is delighted at the terror
of her friends, but gradually does all that is necessary; feels
herself too precocious and doomed; deplores especially that
consumption will cost her her good looks; has fits of intense anger
alternating with tears; concludes that death is annihilation; realizes
the horrible thought that she has a skeleton within her that some time
or other will come out; reads the New Testament again and returns to
belief in miracle, and prayer to Jesus and the Virgin; distributes one
thousand francs to the poor; records the dreamy delusions that flow
through her brain at night and the strange sensations by day. Her eye
symptoms cause her to fear blindness again; she grows superstitious,
believing in signs and fortune-tellers; is strongly impelled to
embrace and make up with her mother; at times defies God and death;
sees a Spanish bull-fight and gets from it a general impression of
human cowardice, but has a strange intoxication with blood and would
like to thrust a lance into the neck of every one she meets; coquets a
great deal with the thought of marriage; takes up her art and paints a
few very successful pictures; tries to grapple with the terrible
question, "What is my unbiased opinion concerning myself?" pants
chiefly for fame. When the other lung is found diseased the diary
becomes sometimes more serious, sometimes more fevered; she is almost
racked to find some end in life; shall she marry, or paint? and at
last finds much consolation in the visits of Bastien-Lepage, who comes
to see her often while he is dying of some gastric trouble. She keeps
up occasional and often daily entries in her journal until eleven days
before her death, occurring in October, 1884, at the age of
twenty-three, and precipitated by a cold incurred while making an
open-air sketch.
The confessional outpourings of Mary MacLane[28] constitute a unique
and valuable adolescent document, despite the fact that it seems
throughout affected and written for effect; however, it well
illustrates a real type, although perhaps hardly possible save in this
country, and was inspired very likely by the preceding.
She announces at the outset that she is odd, a genius, an extreme
egotist; has no conscience; despises her father, "Jim MacLane of
selfish memory"; loves scrubbing the floor because it gives her
strength and grace of body, although her daily life is an "empty
damned weariness." She is a female Napoleon passionately desiring
fame; is both a philosopher and a coward; her heart is wooden;
although but nineteen, she feels forty; desires happiness even more
than fame, for an hour of which she would give up at once fame, money,
power, virtue, honor, truth, and genius to the devil, whose coming she
awaits. She discusses her portrait, which constitutes the
frontispiece; is glad of her good strong body, and still awaits in a
wild, frenzied impatience the coming of the devil to take her
sacrifice, and to whom she would dedicate her life. She loves but one
in all the world, an older "anemone" lady, once her teacher. She ran
not distinguish between right and wrong; love is the only thing real
which will some day bring joy, but it is agony to wait. "Oh, dame!
damn! damn! damn! every living thing in the world!--the universe be
damned!" herself included. She is "marvelously deep," but thanks the
good devil who has made her without conscience and virtue so that she
may take her happiness when it comes. Her soul seeks but blindly, for
nothing answers. How her happiness will seethe, quiver, writhe, shine,
dance, rush, surge, rage, blare, and wreak with love and light when it
comes!
The devil she thinks fascinating and strong, with a will of steel,
conventional clothes, whom she periodically falls in love with and
would marry, and would love to be tortured by him. She holds imaginary
conversations with him. If happiness does not come soon she will
commit suicide, and she finds rapture in the thought of death. In
Butte, Montana, where she lives, she wanders among the box rustlers,
the beer jerkers, biscuit shooters, and plunges out into the sand and
barrenness, but finds everything dumb. The six toothbrushes in the
bathroom make her wild and profane. She flirts with death at the top
of a dark, deep pit, and thinks out the stages of decomposition if she
yielded herself to Death, who would dearly love to have her. She
confesses herself a thief on several occasions, but comforts herself
because the stolen money was given to the poor. Sometimes her "very
good legs" carry her out into the country, where she has imaginary
love confabs with the devil, but the world is so empty, dreary, and
cold, and it is all so hard to bear when one is a woman and nineteen.
She has a litany from which she prays in recurrent phrases "Kind
devil, deliver me"--as, e.g., from musk, boys with curls, feminine
men, wobbly hips, red note-paper, codfish-balls, lisle-thread
stockings, the books of A.C. Gunter and Albert Ross, wax flowers, soft
old bachelors and widowers, nice young men, tin spoons, false teeth,
thin shoes, etc. She does not seem real to herself everything is a
blank. Though she doubts everything else, she will keep the one atom
of faith in love and the truth that is love and life in her heart.
When something shrieks within her, she feels that all her anguish is
for nothing and that she is a fool. She is exasperated that people
call her peculiar, but confesses that she loves admiration; she can
fascinate and charm company if she tries; imagines an admiration for
Messalina. She most desires to cultivate badness when there is lead in
the sky. "I would live about seven years of judicious badness, and
then death if you will." "I long to cultivate the of badness in me."
She describes the fascination of making and eating fudge; devotes a
chapter to describing how to eat an olive; discusses her figure. "In
the front of my shirt-waist there are nine cambric handkerchiefs
cunningly distributed." She discusses her foot, her beautiful hair,
her hips; describes each of the seventeen little engraved portraits of
Napoleon that she keeps, with each of which she falls in love; vows
she would give up even her marvelous genius far one dear, bright day
free from loneliness. When her skirts need sewing, she simply pins
them; this lasts longer, and had she mended them with needle and
thread she would have been sensible, which she hates. As she walks
over the sand one day she vows that she would like a man to come so be
that he was strong and a perfect villain and she would pray him to
lead her to what the world calls her ruin. Nothing is of consequence
to her except to be rid of unrest and pain. She would be positively
and not merely negatively wicked. To poison her soul would rouse her
mental power. "Oh, to know just once what it is to be loved!" "I know
that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived," yet she often
thinks herself a small vile creature for whom no one cares. The world
is ineffably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she is starving
for love.
Ada Negri illustrates the other extreme of genuineness and is
desperately in earnest.[29] She began to teach school in a squalid,
dismal Italian village, and at eighteen to write the poetry that has
made her famous. She lived in a dim room back of a stable, up two
flights, where the windows were not glass but paper, and where she
seems to have been, like her mother, a mill head before she was a
teacher. She had never seen a theater, but had read of Duse with
enthusiasm; had never seen the sea, mountain, or even a hill, lake, or
large city, but she had read of them. After she began to write,
friends gave her two dream days in the city. Then she returned, put on
her wooden shoes, and began to teach her eighty children to spell. The
poetry she writes is from the heart of her own experience.
She craved "the kiss of genius and of light;" but the awful figure of
misfortune with its dagger stood by her bed at night. She writes:
"I have no name--my home a hovel damp;
I grew up from the mire;
Wretched and outcast folk my family,
And yet within me burns a flame of fire."
There is always a praying angel and an evil dwarf on either side. The
black abyss attracts her yet she is softened by a child's caress. She
laughs at the blackest calamities that threaten her, but weeps over
thin, wan children without bread. Her whole life goes into song. The
boy criminal on the street fascinates her and she would kiss him. She
writes of jealousy as a ghost of vengeance. If death comes, she fears
"that the haggard doctor will dissect my naked corpse," and pictures
herself dying on the operating-table like a stray dog and her
well-made body "disgraced by the lustful kiss of the too eager blade"
as, "with sinister smile untiring, they tear my bowels out and still
gloat over my sold corpse, go on to bare my bones, and veins at will,
wrench out my heart," probe vainly for the secrets of hunger and the
mystery of pain, until from her "dead breast gurgles a gasp of
malediction." Much of her verse is imprecation. "A crimson rain of
crying blood dripping from riddled chests" of those slain for liberty
falls, on her heart; the sultry factories where "monsters, of steel,
huge engines, snort all day," and where the pungent air poisons the
blood of the pale weaver girls; the fate of the mason who felt from a
high roof and struck the stone flagging, whose funeral she attends,
all inspire her to sing occasionally the songs of enfranchised labor.
Misery as a drear, toothless ghost visits her, as when gloomy pinions
had overspread her dying mother's bed, to wrench with sharp nails all
the hope from her breast with which she had defied it. A wretched old
man on the street inspires her to sing of what she imagines is his
happy though humble prime. There is the song of the pickaxe brandished
in revolution when mobs cry "Peace, labor bread," and in mines of
industry beneath the earth. She loves the "defeated" in whose house no
fire glows, who live in caves and dens, and writes of the mutilation
of a woman in the factory machinery. At eighteen years "a loom, two
handsome eyes that know no tears, a cotton dress, a love, belong to
me." She is inspired by a master of the forge beating a red-hot bar,
with his bare neck swelled. He is her demon, her God, and her pride in
him is ecstasy. She describes jealousy of two rival women, so intense
that they fight and bite, and the pure joy of a guileless,
intoxicating, life-begetting first kiss. She longs for infinite
stretches of hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop wildly on
her steed; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles; revels in the
hurricane, and would rise in and fly and whirl with it adrift far out
in the immensity of space. She tells us, "Of genius and light I'm a
blithe, millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the everlasting ice
of lofty mountains, the immortal silence of the Alps; sings of her
"sad twenty years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and spent."
She imagines herself springing into the water which closes over her,
while her naked soul, ghostly pale, whirls past through the lonely
dale. She imprecates the licentious world of crafty burghers,
coquettes, gamblers, well-fed millionaires, cursed geese and serpents
that make the cowardly vile world, and whom she would smite in the
face with her indignant verse. "Thou crawlest and I soar." She chants
the champions of the spade, hammer, pick, though they are ground and
bowed with toil, disfigured within, with furrowed brows. She pants for
war with outrage and with wrong; questions the abyss for its secret;
hears moans and flying shudders; and sees phantoms springing from
putrid tombs. The full moon is an old malicious spy, peeping
stealthily with evil eye. She is a bird caught in a cursed cage, and
prays some one to unlock the door and give her space and light, and
let her soar away in ecstasy and glory. Nothing less than infinite
space will satisfy her. Even the tempest, the demon, or a malevolent
spirit might bear her away on unbridled wings. In one poem she
apostrophizes Marie Bashkirtseff as warring with vast genius against
unknown powers, but who now is in her coffin among worms, her skull
grinning and showing its teeth. She would be possessed by her and
thrilled as by an electric current. A dwarf beggar wrings her heart
with pity, but she will not be overwhelmed. Though a daring peasant,
she will be free and sing out her pæan to the sun, though amid the
infernal glow of furnaces, forges, and the ringing noise of hammers
and wheels.
Literary men who record their experiences during this stage seem to
differ from women in several important respects. First, they write with
less abandon. I can recall no male MacLanes. A Bashkirtseff would be
less impossible, and a Negri with social reform in her heart is still
less so. But men are more prone to characterize their public
metamorphoses later in life, when they are a little paled, and perhaps
feel less need of confessionalism for that reason. It would, however, be
too hazardous to elaborate this distinction too far. Secondly and more
clearly, men tend to vent their ephebic calentures more in the field of
action. They would break the old moorings of home and strike out new
careers, or vent their souls in efforts and dreams of reconstructing the
political, industrial, or social world. Their impracticabilities are
more often in the field of practical life and remoter from their own
immediate surroundings. This is especially true in our practical
country, which so far lacks subjective characterizations of this age of
eminent literary merit, peculiarly intense as it is here. Thirdly, they
erupt in a greater variety of ways, and the many kinds of genius and
talent that now often take possession of their lives like fate are more
varied and individual. This affords many extreme contrasts, as, e.g.,
between Trollope's pity for, and Goethe's apotheosis of his youth;
Mill's loss of feeling, and Jefferies's unanalytic, passionate outbursts
of sentiment; the esthetic ritualism of Symonds, and the progressive
religious emancipation of Fielding Hall; the moral and religious
supersensitiveness of Oliphant, who was a reincarnation of medieval
monkhood, and the riotous storminess of Müller and Ebers; the
abnormalities and precocity of De Quincey, and the steady, healthful
growth of Patterson; the simultaneity of a fleshly and spiritual love in
Keller and Goethe, and the duality of Pater, with his great and
tyrannical intensification of sensation for nature and the sequent
mysticity and symbolism. In some it is fulminating but episodic, in
others gradual and lifelong like the advent of eternal spring. Fourth,
in their subjective states women outgrow less in their consciousness,
and men depart farther from their youth, in more manifold ways. Lastly,
in its religious aspects, the male struggles more with dogma, and his
enfranchisement from it is more intellectually belabored. Yet, despite
all these differences, the analogies between the sexes are probably yet
more numerous, more all-pervasive. All these biographic facts reveal
nothing not found in _questionnaire_ returns from more ordinary youth,
so that for our purposes they are only the latter, writ large because
superior minds only utter what all more inwardly feel. The arrangement
by nationality which follows gives no yet adequate basis for inference
unless it be the above American peculiarity.
In his autobiography from 1785-1803, De Quincey[30] remembered feeling
that life was finished and blighted for him at the age of six, up to
which time the influence of his sister three years older had brooded
over him.
His first remembrance, however, is of a dream of terrific grandeur
before he was two, which seemed to indicate that his dream tendencies
were constitutional and not due to morphine, but the chill was upon
the first glimpse that this was a world of evil. He had been brought
up in great seclusion from all knowledge of poverty and oppression in
a silent garden with three sisters, but the rumor that a female
servant had treated one of them rudely just before her death plunged
him into early pessimism. He felt that little Jane would come back
certainly in the spring with the roses, and he was glad that his utter
misery with the blank anarchy confusion which her death brought could
not be completely remembered. He stole into the chamber where her
corpse lay, and as he stood, a solemn wind, the saddest he ever heard,
that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand
centuries, blew, and that same hollow Memnonian wind he often had
heard since, and it brought back the open summer window and the
corpse. A vault above opened into the sky, and he slept and dreamed
there, standing by her, he knew not how long; a worm that could not
die was at his heart, for this was the holy love between children that
could not perish. The funeral was full of darkness and despair for
him, and after it he sought solitude, gazed into the heavens to see
his sister till he was tired, and realized that he was alone. Thus,
before the end of his sixth year, with a mind already adolescent,
although with a retarded body, the minor tone of life became dominant
and his awakening to it was hard.
As a penniless schoolboy wandering the streets of London at night, he
was on familiar and friendly terms of innocent relationship with a
number of outcast women. In his misery they were to him simply sisters
in calamity, but he found in them humanity, disinterested generosity,
courage, and fidelity. One night, after he had walked the streets for
weeks with one of these friendless girls who had not completed her
sixteenth year, as they sat on the steps of a house, he grew very ill,
and had she not rushed to buy from her slender purse cordials and
tenderly ministered to and revived him, he would have died. Many years
later he used to wander past this house, and he recalled with real
tenderness this youthful friendship; he longed again to meet the
"noble-minded Ann ----" with whom he had so often conversed familiarly
"_more Socratico_," whose betrayer he had vainly sought to punish, and
yearned to hear from her in order to convey to her some authentic
message of gratitude, peace, and forgiveness.
His much older brother came home in his thirty-ninth year to die. He
had been unmanageable in youth and his genius for mischief was an
inspiration, yet he was hostile to everything pusillanimous, haughty,
aspiring, ready to fasten a quarrel on his shadow for running before,
at first inclined to reduce his boy brother to a fag, but finally
before his death became a great influence in his life. Prominent were
the fights between De Quincey and another older brother on the one
hand, and the factory crowd of boys on the other, a fight incessantly
renewed at the close of factory hours, with victory now on one and now
on the other side; fought with stones and sticks, where thrice he was
taken prisoner, where once one of the factory women kissed him, to the
great delight of his heart. He finally invented a kingdom like Hartley
Coleridge, called Gom Broon. He thought first that it had no location,
but finally because his brother's imaginary realm was north and he
wanted wide water between them, his was in the far south. It was only
two hundred and seventy miles in circuit, and he was stunned to be
told by his brother one day that his own domain swept south for eighty
degrees, so that the distance he had relied on vanished. Here,
however, he continued to rule for well or ill, raising taxes, keeping
an imaginary standing army, fishing herring and selling the product of
his fishery for manure, and experiencing how "uneasy lies the head
that wears a crown." He worried over his obligations to Gom Broon, and
the shadow froze into reality, and although his brother's kingdom
Tigrosylvania was larger, his was distinguished for eminent men and a
history not to be ashamed of. A friend had read Lord Monboddo's view
that men had sprung from apes, and suggested that the inhabitants of
Gom Broon had tails, so that the brother told him that his subjects
had not emerged from apedom and he must invent arts to eliminate the
tails. They must be made to sit down for six hours a day as a
beginning. Abdicate he would not, though all his subjects had three
tails apiece. They had suffered together. Vain was his brother's
suggestion that they have a Roman toga to conceal their ignominious
appendages. He was greatly interested in two scrofulous idiots, who
finally died, and feared that his subjects were akin to them.
John Stuart Mill's Autobiography presents one of the most remarkable
modifications of the later phases of adolescent experience. No boy
ever had more diligent and earnest training than his father gave him
or responded better. He can not remember when he began to learn Greek,
but was told that it was at the age of three. The list of classical
authors alone that he read in the original, to say nothing of history,
political, scientific, logical, and other works before he was twelve,
is perhaps unprecedented in all history. He associated with his father
and all his many friends on their own level, but modestly ascribes
everything to his environment, insists that in natural gifts he is
other below than above par, and declares that everything he did could
be done by every boy of average capacity and healthy physical
constitution. His father made the Greek virtue of temperance or
moderation cardinal, and thought human life "a poor thing at best
after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by."
He scorned "the intense" and had only contempt for strong emotion.
In his teens Mill was an able debater and writer for the quarterlies,
and devoted to the propagation of the theories of Bentham, Ricardo,
and associationism. From the age of fifteen he had an object in life,
viz., to reform the world. This gave him happiness, deep, permanent,
and assured for the future, and the idea of struggling to promote
utilitarianism seemed an inspiring program for life. But in the autumn
of 1826, when he was twenty years of age, he felt into "a dull state
of nerves," where he could no longer enjoy and what had produced
pleasure seemed insipid; "the state, I should think, in which converts
to Methodism usually are when smitten by their first 'conviction of
sin.' In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question
directly to myself; 'Suppose that all your objects in life were
realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you
are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very
instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an
irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No.' At this my
heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was
constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the
continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how
could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have
nothing left to live for. At first I hoped that the cloud would pass
away of itself, but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy
for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a
renewed consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all
companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me
even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed
to grow thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's 'Dejection'--I
was not then acquainted with them--exactly described my case:
"'A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.'
"In vain I sought relief from my favorite books, those memorials of
past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn
strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the
accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded that my
love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself
out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I
had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a
necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too,
that mine was not an interesting or in anyway respectable distress.
There was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known
where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words of Macbeth
to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. But there was no one
on whom I could build the faintest hope of such assistance. My father,
to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any
practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as
this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no
knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that
even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician
who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been
conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this
result, and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his
plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at
all event, beyond the power of his remedies. Of other friends, I had
at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition
intelligible. It was, however, abundantly intelligible to myself, and
the more I dwelt upon it the more hopeless it appeared."
He now saw what had hitherto seemed incredible, that the habit of
analysis tends to wear away the feelings. He felt "stranded at the
commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but
no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so
carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general
good, but also just as little in anything else. The fountains of
vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me as completely as
those of benevolence." His vanity had been gratified at too early an
age, and, like all premature pleasures, they had caused indifference,
until he despaired of creating any fresh association of pleasure with
any objects of human dire. Meanwhile, dejected and melancholy as he
was through the winter, he went on mechanically with his tasks;
thought he found in Coleridge the first description of what he was
feeling; feared the idiosyncrasies of his education had made him a
being unique and apart. "I asked myself if I could or if I was bound
to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally
answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it
beyond a year." But within about half that time, in reading a pathetic
page of how a mere boy felt that he could save his family and take the
place of all they had lost, a vivid conception of the scene came over
him and he was moved to tears. From that moment, his burden grew
lighter. He saw that his heart was not dead and that he still had some
stuff left of which character and happiness are made; and although
there were several later lapses, some of which lasted many months, he
was never again as miserable as he had been.
These experience left him changed in two respects. He had a new theory
of life, having much in common with the anti-consciousness theory of
Carlyle. He still held happiness the end of life, but thought it must
be aimed at indirectly and taken incidentally. The other change was
that for the first time he gave its proper place to internal culture
of the individual, especially the training of the feelings which
became now cardinal. He relished and felt the power of poetry and art;
was profoundly moved by music; fell in love with Wordsworth and with
nature, and his later depressions were best relieved by the power of
rural beauty, which wrought its charm not because of itself but by the
states and feelings it aroused. His ode on the intimations of
immortality showed that he also had felt that the first freshness of
youthful joy was not lasting, and had sought and found compensation.
He had thus come to a very different standpoint from that of his
father, who had up to this time formed his mind and life, and
developed on this basis his unique individuality.
Jefferies, when eighteen, began his "Story of My Heart,"[31] which he
said was an absolutely true confession of the stages of emotion in a
soul from which all traces of tradition and learning were erased, and
which stood face to face with nature and the unknown.
His heart long seemed dusty and parched for want of feeling, and he
frequented a hill, where the pores of his soul opened to a new air.
"Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun,
the air and the distant sea.... I desired to have its strength, its
mystery and glory. I addressed the sun, desiring the sole equivalent
of his light and brilliance, his endurance, and unwearied race. I
turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its
exquisite color and sweetness. The rich blue of the unobtainable
flower of the sky drew my soul toward it, and there it rested, for
pure color is the rest of the heart. By all these I prayed. I felt an
emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to
it." He prayed by the thyme; by the earth; the flowers which he
touched; the dust which he let fall through his fingers; was filled
with "a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus I
prayed.... I hid my face in the grass; I was wholly prostrated; I lost
myself in the wrestle.... I see now that what I labored for was soul
life, more soul learning." After gazing upward he would turn his face
into the grass, shutting out everything with hands each side, till he
felt down into the earth and was absorbed in it, whispering deep down
to its center. Every natural impression, trees, insects, air, clouds,
he used for prayer, "that my soul might be more than the cosmos of
life." His "Lyra" prayer was to live a more exalted and intense soul
life; enjoy more bodily pleasure and live long and find power to
execute his designs. He often tried, but failed for years to write at
least a meager account of these experiences. He felt himself immortal
just as he felt beauty. He was in eternity already; the supernatural
is only the natural misnamed. As he lay face down on the grass,
seizing it with both hands, he longed for death, to be burned on a
pyre of pine wood on a high hill, to have his ashes scattered wide and
broadcast, to be thrown into the space he longed for while living, but
he feared that such a luxury of resolution into the elements would be
too costly. Thus his naked mind, close against naked mother Nature,
wrested from her the conviction of soul, immortality, deity, under
conditions as primitive as those of the cave man, and his most
repeated prayer was "Give me the deepest soul life."
In other moods he felt the world outré-human, and his mind could by no
twist be fitted to the cosmos. Ugly, designless creatures caused him
to cease to look for deity in nature, where all happens by chance. He
at length concluded there is something higher than soul and above
deity, and better than God, for which he searched and labored. He
found favorite thinking places, to which he made pilgrimages, where he
"felt out into the depths of the ether." His frame could not bear the
labor his heart demanded. Work of body was his meat and drink. "Never
have I had enough of it. I wearied long before I was satisfied, and
weariness did not bring a cessation of desire, the thirst was still
there. I rode; I used the ax; I split tree-trunks with wedges; my arms
tired, but my spirit remained fresh and chafed against the physical
weariness." Had he been indefinitely stronger, he would have longed
for more strength. He was often out of doors all day and often half
the night; wanted more sunshine; wished the day was sixty hours long;
took pleasure in braving the cold so that it should be not life's
destroyer but its renewer. Yet he abhorred asceticism. He wrestled
with the problem of the origin of his soul and destiny, but could find
no solution; revolted at the assertion that all is designed for the
best; "a man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to
happen in an infinitely superior manner." He discovered that no one
ever died of old age, but only of disease; that we do not even know
what old age would be like; found that his soul is infinite, but lies
in abeyance; that we are murdered by our ancestors and must roll back
the tide of death; that a hundredth part of man's labor would suffice
for his support; that idleness is no evil; that in the future
nine-tenths of the time will be leisure, and to that end he will work
with all his heart. "I was not more than eighteen when an inner and
esoteric meaning began to come to me from all the visible universe,
and indefinable aspirations filled me."
Interesting as is this document, it is impossible to avoid the
suspicion that the seventeen years which intervened between the
beginning of these experiences and their final record, coupled with
the perhaps unconscious tendency toward literary effect, detract more
or less from their value as documents of adolescent nature.
Mr. H. Fielding Hall, author of "The Soul of a People," has since
written a book[32] in which, beginning with many definitions of
Christianity, weighing the opinion of those who think all our advance
is made because of, against those who think it in spite of
Christianity, he proceeds to give the story of a boy, probably
himself, who till twelve was almost entirely reared by women and with
children younger than himself.
He was sickly, and believed not in the Old but in the New Testament;
in the Sermon on the Mount, which he supposed all accepted and lived
by; that war and wealth were bad and learning apt to be a snare; that
the ideal life was that of a poor curate, working hard and unhappy. At
twelve, he went to a boarding-school, passed from a woman's world into
a man's, out of the New Testament into the Old, out of dreams into
reality. War was a glorious opportunity, and all followed the British
victories, which were announced publicly. Big boys were going to
Sandhurst or Woolwich; there were parties; and the school code never
turned the other cheek. Wars were God's storms, stirring stagnant
natures to new life; wealth was worshiped; certain lies were an honor;
knowledge was an extremely desirable thing--all this was at first new
and delightful, but extremely wicked. Sunday was the only other Old
Testament rule, but was then forgotten. Slowly a repugnance of
religion in all its forms arose. He felt his teachers hypocrites; he
raised no alarm, "for he was hardly conscious that his anchor had
dragged or that he had lost hold" of it forever. At eighteen, he read
Darwin and found that if he were right, Genesis was wrong; man had
risen, not fallen; if a part was wrong, the whole was. If God made the
world, the devil seemed to rule it; prayer can not influence him; the
seven days of creation were periods, Heaven knows how long. Why did
all profess and no one believe religion? Why is God so stern and yet
so partial, and how about the Trinity? Then explanations were given.
Heaven grew repulsive, as a place for the poor, the maimed, the
stupid, the childish, and those unfit for earth generally.
Faiths came from the East. "The North has originated only Thor, Odin,
Balder, Valkyres." The gloom and cold drive man into himself; do not
open him. In the East one can live in quiet solitude, with no effort,
close to nature. The representatives of all faiths wear ostentatiously
their badges, pray in public, and no one sneers at all religions.
Oriental faiths have no organization; there is no head of Hinduism,
Buddhism, or hardly of Mohammedanism. There are no missions, but
religion grows rankly from a rich soil, so the boy wrote three
demands: a reasonable theory of the universe, a workable and working
code of conduct, and a promise of something desirable hereafter. So he
read books and tried to make a system.
On a hill, in a thunder-storm in the East, he realized how Thor was
born. Man fears thunder; it seems the voice of a greater man. Deny
eyes, legs, and body of the Deity, and nothing is left. God as an
abstract spirit is unthinkable, but Buddhism offers us no God, only
law. Necessity, blind force, law, or a free personal will--that is the
alternative. Freedom limits omnipotence; the two can never mix. "The
German Emperor's God, clanking round the heavenly mansions wearing a
German _Pickelhaube_ and swearing German oaths," is not satisfactory.
Man's God is what he admires most in himself; he can be propitiated,
hence atonement; you can not break a law, but you can study it.
Inquiry, not submission, is the attitude. Perhaps both destiny and
freedom are true, but truth is for the sake of light.
Thor had no moral code; the Greeks were unmoral. Jehovah at first
asked only fear, reverence, and worship. This gives no guide to life.
Most codes are directed against a foe and against pain. Truth, mercy,
courtesy--these were slowly added to reverence; then sanitary rules,
hence castes. Two codes, those of Christ and Buddha, tower above all
others. They are the same in praising not wealth, greatness, or power,
but purity, renunciation of the world, as if one fitted one's self for
one by being unfitted for the other world.
Is heaven a bribe? Its ideals are those of children, of girl angels,
white wings, floating dresses, no sheep, but lambs. "Surely there is
nothing in all the world so babyish." One can hardly imagine a man
with a deep voice, with the storm of life beating his soul, amid those
baby faces. If happiness in any act or attitude is perfect, it will
last forever. Where is due the weariness or satiety? But if happiness
be perfect, this is impossible; so life would be monotony akin to
annihilation. But life is change, and change is misery. There is
effort here; but there will be none in the great peace that passes
understanding; no defeat, therefore no victory; no friends, because no
enemies; no joyous meetings, because no farewells. It is the shadows
and the dark mysteries that sound the depths of our hearts. No man
that ever lived, if told that he could be young again or go to any
heaven, would choose the latter. Men die for many things, but all fear
the beyond. Thus no religion gives us an intelligible First Cause, a
code or a heaven that we want. The most religious man is the peasant
listening to the angelus, putting out a little _ghi_ for his God; the
woman crying in the pagoda. Thus we can only turn to the hearts of men
for the truth of religion.
Biographies and autobiographies furnish many photographic glimpses of
the struggles and experiences of early adolescent years.
Anthony Trollope's autobiography[33] is pitiful. He was poor and
disliked by most of his masters and treated with ignominy by his
fellow pupils. He describes himself as always in disgrace. At fifteen
he walked three miles each way twice a day to and from school. As a
sizar he seemed a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from the dunghill,
sitting next the sons of big peers. All were against him, and he was
allowed to join no games, and learned, he tells us, absolutely nothing
but a little Greek and Latin. Once only, goaded to desperation, he
rallied and whipped a bully. The boy was never able to overcome the
isolation of his school position, and while he coveted popularity with
an eagerness which was almost mean, and longed exceedingly to excel in
cricket or with the racquet, was allowed to know nothing of them. He
remembers at nineteen never to have had a lesson in writing,
arithmetic, French, or German. He knew his masters by their ferules
and they him. He believes that he has "been flogged oftener than any
human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in
one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I have obtained
them all." Prizes were distributed prodigally, but he never got one.
For twelve years of tuition, he says, "I do not remember that I ever
knew a lesson."
At this age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger on ...
without an idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he was
tolerably happy because he could fancy himself in love with pretty
girls and had been removed from the real misery of school, but had not
a single aspiration regarding his future. Three of his household were
dying of consumption, and his mother was day nurse, night nurse, and
divided her time between pill-boxes and the ink-bottle, for when she
was seventy-six she had written one hundred and forty volumes, the
first of which was not written till she was fifty.
Gradually the boy became alive to the blighted ambition of his
father's life and the strain his mother was enduring, nursing the
dying household and writing novels to provide a decent roof for them
to die under. Anthony got a position at the post-office without an
examination. He knew no French nor science; was a bad speller and
worse writer and could not have sustained an examination on any
subject. Still he could not bear idleness, and was always going about
with some castle in the air finely built in his mind, carrying on for
weeks and years the same continuous story; binding himself down to
certain laws, proprieties, and unities; always his own hero, excluding
everything violently improbable. To this practise, which he calls
dangerous and which began six or seven years before he went to the
post-office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a
fictitious story and to live in a entirely outside imaginative life.
During these seven years he acquired a character of irregularity and
grew reckless.
Mark Pattison[34] shows us how his real life began in the middle
teens, when his energy was "directed to one end, to improve myself";
"to form my own mind; to sound things thoroughly; to be free from the
bondage of unreason and the traditional prejudices which, when I first
began to think, constituted the whole of my mental fabric." He entered
upon life with a "hide-bound and contracted intellect," and depicts
"something of the steps by which I emerged from that frozen
condition." He believes that to "remember the dreams and confusions of
childhood and never to lose the recollection of the curiosity and
simplicity of that age, is one of the great gifts of the poetic
character," although this, he tells us, was extraordinarily true of
George Sand, but not of himself. From the age of twelve on, a
Fellowship at Oriel was the ideal of his life, and although he became
a commoner there at seventeen, his chief marvel is that he was so
immature and unimpressionable.
William Hale White[35] learned little at school, save Latin and good
penmanship, but his very life was divided into halves--Sundays and
week days--and he reflects at some length upon the immense dangers of
the early teens; the physiological and yet subtler psychic penalties
of error; callousness to fine pleasures; hardening of the conscience;
and deplores the misery which a little instruction might have saved
him. At fourteen he underwent conversion, understood in his sect to be
a transforming miracle, releasing higher and imprisoning lower powers.
He compares it to the saving of a mind from vice by falling in love
with a woman who is adored, or the reclamation of a young woman from
idleness and vanity by motherhood. But as a boy he was convinced of
many things which were mere phrases, and attended prayer-meetings for
the clanship of being marked off from the world and of walking home
with certain girls. He learned to say in prayer that there was nothing
good in him, that he was rotten and filthy and his soul a mass of
putrefying sores; but no one took him at his word and expelled him
from society, but thought the better of him. Soon he began to study
theology, but found no help in suppressing tempestuous lust, in
understanding the Bible, or getting his doubts answered, and all the
lectures seemed irrelevant chattering. An infidel was a monster whom
he had rarely ever seen. At nineteen he began to preach, but his heart
was untouched till he read Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, and this
recreated a living God for him, melted his heart to tears, and made
him long for companionship; its effect was instantly seen in his
preaching, and soon made him slightly suspected as heretical.[36]
John Addington Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his
"insect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In
his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half
sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed
censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted
glass for their windows and illuminated crucifixes with gold dust and
vermilion. When he was confirmed, this was somewhat of an epoch.
Preparation was like a plowshare, although it turned up nothing
valuable, and stimulated esthetic and emotional ardor. In a dim way he
felt God near, but he did not learn to fling the arms of the soul in
faith around the cross of Christ. Later the revelation he found in
Plato removed him farther from boyhood. He fell in love with gray
Gothic churches, painted glass, organ lofts, etc.
Walter Pater has described phases of ferment, perhaps largely his own,
in the character of Florian Deleal; his rapture of the red hawthorn
blossoms, "absolutely the reddest of all things"; his times of
"seemingly exclusive predominance of interest in beautiful physical
things, a kind of tyranny of the senses"; and his later absorbing
efforts to estimate the proportion of the sensuous and ideal,
assigning most importance to sensible vehicles and occasions;
associating all thoughts with touch and sight as a link between
himself and things, till he became more and more "unable to care for
or think of soul but as in an actual body"; comforted in the
contemplation of death by the thought of flesh turning to violets and
almost oppressed by the pressure of the sensible world, his longings
for beauty intensifying his fear of death. He loved to gaze on dead
faces in the Paris Morgue although the haunt of them made the sunshine
sickly for days, and his long fancy that they had not really gone nor
were quite motionless, but led a secret, half fugitive life, freer by
night, and perhaps dodging about in their old haunts with no great
good-will toward the living, made him by turns pity and hate the
ghosts who came back in the wind, beating at the doors. His religious
nature gradually yielded to a mystical belief in Bible personages in
some indefinite place as the reflexes and patterns of our nobler self,
whose companionship made the world more satisfying. There was "a
constant substitution of the typical for the actual," and angels might
be met anywhere. "A deep mysticity brooded over real things and
partings," marriages and many acts and accidents of life. "The very
colors of things became themselves weighty with meanings," or "full of
penitence and peace." "For a time he walked through the world in a
sustained, not unpleasurable awe generated by the habitual
recognition, beside every circumstance and event of life, of its
celestial correspondent."
In D. C. Boulger's Life of General Charles Gordon[37] he records how,
like Nelson Clive, his hero was prone to boys' escapades and outbreaks
that often made him the terror of his superiors. He was no bookworm,
but famous as the possessor of high spirits, very often involved in
affairs that necessitated discipline, and seemed greatly out of
harmony with the popular idea of the ascetic of Mount Carmel. As a
schoolboy he made wonderful squirts "that would wet you through in a
minute." One Sunday twenty-seven panes of glass in a large storehouse
were broken with screws shot through them by his cross-bow "for
ventilation." Ringing bells and pushing young boys in, butting an
unpopular officer severely in the stomach with his head and taking the
punishment, hitting a bully with a clothes-brush and being put back
six months in the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich; these are the
early outcrops of one side of his dual character. Although more
soldier than saint, he had a very cheery, genial side. He was always
ready to take even the severest punishment for all his scrapes due to
excessive high spirits. When one of his superiors declared that he
would never make an officer, he felt his honor touched, and his
vigorous and expressive reply was to tear the epaulets from his
shoulders and throw them at his superior's feet. He had already
developed some of the rather moody love of seclusion that was marked
later, but religion did not strike him deeply enough to bring him into
the church until he was twenty-one, when he took his first sacrament.
On one occasion he declined promotion within his reach because he
would have had to pass a friend to get it. He acted generally on his
impulses, which were perhaps better than his judgments, took great
pleasure in corresponding on religious topics with his elder sister,
and early formed the habit of excessive smoking which gravely affected
his health later. His was the rare combination of inner repose and
confidence, interrupted by spells of gaiety.
Williamson, in his "Life of Holman Hunt,"[38] tells us that at
thirteen he was removed from school as inapt in study. He began to
spend his time in drawing in his copybooks. He was made clerk to an
auctioneer, who fortunately encouraged his passion, and at sixteen was
with a calico printer. Here he amused himself by drawing flies on the
window, which his employer tried to brush off. There was the greatest
home opposition to his studying art. After being rejected twice, he
was admitted at seventeen to the Academy school as a probationer, and
the next year, in 1845, as a student. Here he met Millais and Rossetti
and was able to relieve the strain on his mind, which the worry of his
father concerning his course caused him, and very soon his career
began.
At thirteen Fitzjames Stephen[39] roused himself to thrash a big boy
who had long bullied him, and became a fighter. In his sixteenth year,
he grew nearly five inches, but was so shy and timid at Eton that he
says, "I was like a sensible grown-up woman among a crowd of rough
boys"; but in the reaction to the long abuse his mind was steeled
against oppression, tyranny, and every kind of unfairness. He read
Paine's "Age of Reason," and went "through the Bible as a man might go
through a wood, cutting down trees. The priests can stick them in
again, but they will not make them grow."
Dickens has given us some interesting adolescents. Miss Dingwall in
"Sketches by Boz," "very sentimental and romantic"; the tempery young
Nickleby, who, at nineteen, thrashed Squeers; Barnaby Rudge, idiotic
and very muscular; Joe Willet, persistently treated as a boy till he
ran away to join the army and married Dolly Varden, perhaps the most
exuberant, good-humored, and beautiful girl in all the Dickens
gallery; Martin Chuzzlewit, who also ran away, as did David
Copperfield, perhaps the most true to adolescence because largely
reminiscent of the author's own life; Steerforth, a stranger from
home, and his victim, Little Emily; and to some extent Sam Weller,
Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, young Podsnap, the Artful Dodger, and
Charley Bates; while Oliver Twist, Little Nell, and Little Dorrit, Joe
and Turveydrop in Bleak House, and Paul Dombey, young as they were,
show the beginning of the pubescent change. Most of his characters,
however, are so overdrawn and caricatured as to be hardly true to
life.[40]
In the "Romance of John Inglesant,"[41] by J. H. Shorthouse, we have
a remarkable picture of an unusually gifted youth, who played an
important rôle in the days of Cromwell and King Charles, and who was
long poised in soul between the Church of Rome and the English party.
He was very susceptible to the fascination of superstition, romance,
and day-dreaming, and at eleven absorbed his master's Rosicrucian
theories of spiritual existence where spirits held converse with each
other and with mankind. A mystic Platonism, which taught that Pindar's
story of the Argo was only a recipe for the philosopher's stone,
fascinated him at fourteen. The philosophy of obedience and of the
subjection of reason to authority was early taught him, and he sought
to live from within, hearing only the divine law, as the worshipers of
Cybele heard only the flutes. His twin brother Eustace was an active
worldling, and soon he followed him to court as page to the Queen, but
delighted more and more in wandering apart and building air castles.
For a time he was entirely swayed, and his life directed, by a Jesuit
Father, who taught him the crucifix and the rosary. At sixteen the
doctrine of divine illumination fascinated him. He struggled to find
the path of true devotion; abandoned himself to extremely ritualistic
forms of worship; dabbled a little in alchemy and astrology to help
develop the divine nature within him and to attain the beatific
vision. Soon he was introduced to the "Protestant nunnery," as it was
called, where the venerable Mr. Ferran, a friend of George Herbert's,
was greatly taken by Inglesant's accomplishments and grace of manner.
Various forms of extremely High Church yet Protestant worship were
celebrated here each day with great devotion, until he became
disgusted with Puritanism and craved to participate in the office of
mass. At this point, however, he met Mr. Hobbes, whose rude but
forcible condemnation of papacy restrained him from casting his lot
with it. At seventeen, he saw one night a real apparition of the just
executed Strafford. The last act of his youth, which we can note here,
was soon after he was twenty, when he fell in love with the charming
and saintly Mary Collet. The rough Puritan Thorne had made her
proposals at which she revolted, but she and Inglesant confessed love
to each other; she saw, however, that they had a way of life marked
out for themselves by an inner impulse and light. This calling they
must follow and abandon love, and now John plunged into the war on the
side of the King.
W. J. Stillman[42] has written with unusual interest and candor the
story of his own early life.
As a boy he was frenzied at the first sight of the sea; caught the
whip and lashed the horses in an unconscious delirium, and always
remembered this as one of the most vivid experiences of his life. He
had a period of nature worship. His first trout was a delirium, and he
danced about wildly and furiously. He relates his very vivid
impressions of the religious orthodoxy in which he was reared,
especially revival sermons; his occasional falsehoods to escape severe
punishment; his baptism at ten or eleven in a river in midwinter; the
somberness of his intellectual life, which was long very apathetic;
his phenomenal stupidity for years; his sudden insurrections in which
he thrashed bullies at school; his fear that he should be sent home in
disgrace for bad scholarship; and how at last, after seven years of
dulness, at the age of fourteen, "the mental fog broke away suddenly,
and before the term ended I could construe the Latin in less time than
it took to recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain
and clear as a fairy story. My memory came back so distinctly that I
could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member of the
class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term than
I; and, at the end of the second term, I could recite the whole of
Legendre's geometry, plane and spherical, from beginning to end
without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the most
remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. I have
never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon,
which I record only as of possible interest to some one interested in
psychology."
A. Bronson Alcott[43] was the son of a Connecticut farmer. He began a
diary at twelve; aspired vainly to enter Yale, and after much
restlessness at the age of nineteen left home with two trunks for
Virginia to peddle on foot, hoping to teach school. Here he had a
varying and often very hard experience for years.
Hornes Bushnell's[44] parents represented the Episcopal and liberal
Congregational Church. His early life was spent on a farm and in
attending a country academy. He became profoundly interested in
religion in the early teens and developed extreme interest in nature.
At seventeen, while tending a carding machine, he wrote a paper on
Calvinism. At nineteen he united with the church, and entered Yale
when he was twenty-one, in 1823. Later he tried to teach school, but
left it, declaring he would rather lay stone wall; worked on a
journal, but withdrew, finding it a terrible life; studied law for a
year, became a tutor at Yale, experienced a reconversion and entered
the ministry.
A well-known American, who wishes his name withheld, writes me of his
youth as follows:
"First came the love of emotion and lurid romance reading. My mind was
full of adventure, dreams of underground passages, and imprisoned
beauties whom I rescued. I wrote a story in red ink, which I never
read, but a girl friend did, and called it magnificent. The girl
fever, too, made me idealize first one five years older than I, later
another three years older, and still later one of my own age. I would
have eaten dirt for each of them for a year or two; was extremely
gallant and the hero of many romances for two, but all the time so
bashful that I scarcely dared speak to one of them, and no schoolmate
ever suspected it all. Music also became a craze at fourteen. Before,
I had hated lessons, now I was thrilled and would be a musician,
despite my parents' protests. I practised the piano furiously; wrote
music and copied stacks of it; made a list of several hundred pieces
and tunes, including everything musical I knew; would imagine a
crowded hall, where I played and swayed with fine airs. The vast
assembly applauded and would not let me go, but all the time it was a
simple piece and I was a very ordinary player. At fifty years, this is
still a relic. I now in hours of fatigue pound the piano and dreamily
imagine dazed and enchanted audiences. Then came oratory, and I glowed
and thrilled in declaiming Webster's "Reply to Hayne," "Thanatopsis,"
Byron's "Darkness," Patrick Henry, and best of all "The Maniac," which
I spouted in a fervid way wearing a flaming red necktie. I remember a
fervid scene with myself on a high solitary hill with a bald summit
two miles from home, where I once went because I had been blamed. I
tried to sum myself up, inventory my good and bad points. It was
Sunday, and I was keyed up to a frenzy of resolve, prayer,
idealization of life; all grew all in a jumble. My resolve to go to
college was clinched then and there, and that hill will always remain
my Pisgah and Moriah, Horeb and Sinai all in one. I paced back and
forth in the wind and shouted, 'I will make people know and revere me;
I will do something'; and called everything to witness my vow that I
never again would visit this spot till all was fulfilled." "Alas!" he
says, "I have never been there since. Once, to a summer party who
went, I made excuse for not keeping this rendezvous. It was too
sacramental. Certainly it was a very deep and never-to-be-forgotten
experience there all alone, when something of great moment to me
certainly took place in my soul."
In the biography of Frederick Douglas[45] we are told that when he was
about thirteen he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of slavery and
to seek means of escaping it. He became interested in religion, was
converted, and dreamed of and prayed for liberty. With great ingenuity
he extracted knowledge of the alphabet and reading from white boys of
his acquaintance. At sixteen, under a brutal master he revolted and
was beaten until he was faint from loss of blood, and at seventeen he
fought and whipped the brutal overseer Covey, who would have invoked
the law, which made death the punishment for such an offense, but for
shame of having been worsted by a negro boy and from the reflection
that there was no profit from a dead slave. Only at twenty did he
escape into the new world of freedom.
Jacob Riis[46] "fell head over heels in love with sweet Elizabeth"
when he was fifteen and she thirteen. His "courtship proceeded at a
tumultuous pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of
patience and made some staid matrons express the desire to box my ears
soundly." She played among the lumber where he worked, and he watched
her so intently that he scarred his shinbone with an adze he should
have been minding. He cut off his forefinger with an ax when she was
dancing on a beam near by, and once fell off a roof when craning his
neck to see her go round a corner. At another time he ordered her
father off the dance-floor, because he tried to take his daughter home
a few minutes before the appointed hour of midnight. Young as he was,
he was large and tried to run away to join the army, but finally went
to Copenhagen to serve his apprenticeship with a builder, and here had
an interview with Hans Christian Andersen.
Ellery Sedgwick tells as that at thirteen the mind of Thomas Paine ran
on stories of the sea which his teacher had told him, and that he
attempted to enlist on the privateer _Terrible_. He was restless at
home for years, and shipped on a trading vessel at nineteen.
Indeed, modern literature in our tongue abounds in this element, from
"Childe Harold" to the second and third long chapters in Mrs. Ward's
"David Grieve," ending with his engagement to Lucy Purcell;
Thackeray's Arthur Pendennis and his characteristic love of the far
older and scheming Fanny Fotheringay; David in James Lane Allen's
"Reign of Law," who read Darwin, was expelled from the Bible College
and the church, and finally was engaged to Gabriella; and scores more
might be enumerated. There is even Sonny,[47] who, rude as he was and
poorly as he did in all his studies, at the same age when he began to
keep company, "tallered" his hair, tied a bow of ribbon to the buggy
whip, and grew interested in manners, passing things, putting on his
coat and taking off his hat at table, began to study his menagerie of
pet snakes, toads, lizards, wrote John Burroughs, helped him and got
help in return, took to observing, and finally wrote a book about the
forest and its occupants, all of which is very _bien trouvé_ if not
historic truth.
Two singular reflections always rearise in reading Goethe's
autobiographical writings: first, that both the age and the place,
with its ceremonies, festivals, great pomp and stirring events in
close quarters in the little province where he lived, were especially
adapted to educate children and absorb them in externals; and, second,
that this wonderful boy had an extreme propensity for moralizing and
drawing lessons of practical service from all about him. This is no
less manifest in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels, which
supplements the autobiography. Both together present a very unique
type of adolescence, the elaborate story of which defies epitome. From
the puppet craze well on into his precocious university life it was
his passion to explore the widest ranges of experience and then to
reflect, moralize, or poetize upon them. Perhaps no one ever studied
the nascent stages of his own life and elaborated their every incident
with such careful observation and analysis. His peculiar diathesis
enabled him to conserve their freshness on to full maturity, when he
gave them literary form. Most lack power to fully utilize their own
experience even for practical self-knowledge and guidance, but with
Goethe nothing was wasted from which self-culture could be extracted.
Goethe's first impression of female loveliness was of a girl named
Gretchen, who served wine one evening, and whose face and form
followed him for a long time. Their meetings always gave him a thrill
of pleasure, and though his love was like many first loves, very
spiritual and awakened by goodness and beauty, it gave a new
brightness to the whole world, and to be near her seemed to him an
indispensable condition of his being. Her _fiancé_ was generally with
her, and Goethe experienced a shock in finding that she had become a
milliner's assistant for although, like all natural boys of
aristocratic families, he loved common people, this interest was not
favored by his parents. The night following the coronation day several
were compelled to spend in chairs, and he and his Gretchen, with
others, slept, she with her head upon his shoulder, until all the
others had awakened in the morning. At last they parted at her door,
and for the first and last time they kissed but never met again,
although he often wept in thinking of her. He was terribly affronted
to fully realize that, although only two years older than himself, she
should have regarded him as a child. He tried to strip her of all
loving qualities and think her odious, but her image hovered over him.
The sanity of instinct innate in youth prompted him to lay aside as
childish the foolish habit of weeping and railing, and his
mortification that she regarded him somewhat as a nurse might,
gradually helped to work his cure.
He was very fond of his own name, and, like young and uneducated
people, wrote or carved it anywhere; later placed near it that of a
new love, Annette, and afterward on finding the tree he shed tears,
melted toward her, and made an idyl. He was also seized with a passion
of teasing her and dominating over her devotedness with wanton and
tyrannical caprice, venting upon her the ill humor of his
disappointments, and grew absurdly jealous and lost her after she had
borne with him with incredible patience and after terrible scenes with
her by which he gained nothing. Frenzied by his loss, he began to
abuse his physical nature and was only saved from illness by the
healing power of his poetic talent; the "Lover's Caprice" was written
with the impetus of a boiling passion. In the midst of many serious
events, a reckless humor, which was due to the excess of life,
developed which made him feel himself superior to the moment, and even
to court danger. He played tricks, although rarely with premeditation.
Later he mused much upon the transient nature of love and the
mutability of character; the extent to which the senses could be
indulged within the bounds of morality; he sought to rid himself of
all that troubled him by writing song or epigram about it, which made
him seem frivolous and prompted one friend to seek to subdue him by
means of church forms, which he had severed on coming to Leipzig. By
degrees he felt an epoch approaching when all respect for authority
was to vanish, and he became suspicious and even despairing with
regard to the best individuals he had known before and grew chummy
with a young tutor whose jokes and fooleries were incessant. His
disposition fluctuated between gaiety and melancholy, and Rousseau
attracted him. Meanwhile his health declined until a long illness,
which began with a hemorrhage, caused him to oscillate for days
between life and death; and convalescence, generally so delightful,
was marred by a serious tumor. His father's disposition was stern, and
he could become passionate and bitter, and his mother's domesticity
made her turn to religion, so that on coming home he formed the
acquaintance of a religious circle. Again Goethe was told by a hostile
child that he was not the true son of his father. This inoculated him
with a disease that long lurked in his system and prompted various
indirect investigations to get at the truth, during which he compared
all distinguished guests with his own physiognomy to detect his own
likeness.
Up to the Leipzig period he had great joy in wandering unknown,
unconscious of self; but he soon began to torment himself with an
almost hypertrophied fancy that he was attracting much attention, that
others' eyes were turned on his person to fix it in their memories,
that he was scanned and found fault with; and hence he developed a
love of the country, of the woods and solitary places, where he could
be hedged in and separated from all the world. Here he began to throw
off his former habit of looking at things from the art standpoint and
to take pleasure in natural objects for their own sake. His mother had
almost grownup to consciousness in her two oldest children, and his
first disappointment in love turned his thought all the more
affectionately toward her and his sister, a year younger. He was long
consumed with amazement over the newly awakening sense impulse that
took intellectual forms and the mental needs that clothed themselves
in sense images. He fell to building air castles of opposition lecture
courses and gave himself up to many dreams of ideal university
conditions. He first attended lectures diligently, but suffered much
harm from being too advanced; learned a great deal that he could not
regulate, and was thereby made uncomfortable; grew interested in the
fit of his clothes, of which hitherto he had been careless. He was in
despair at the uncertainty of his own taste and judgment, and almost
feared he must make a complete change of mind, renouncing what he had
hitherto learned, and so one day in great contempt for his past burned
up his poetry, sketches, etc.
He had learned to value and love the Bible, and owed his moral culture
to it. Its events and symbols were deeply stamped upon him, so without
being a pietist he was greatly moved at the scoffing spirit toward it
which he met at the university. From youth he had stood on good terms
with God, and at times he had felt that he had some things to forgive
God for not having given better assistance to his infinite good-will.
Under all this influence he turned to cabalism and became interested
in crystals and the microcosm and macrocosm, and fell into the habit
of despair over what he had been and believed just before. He
conceived a kind of hermetical or neoplatonic godhead creating in more
and more eccentric circles, until the last, which rose in
contradiction, was Lucifer to whom creation was committed. He first of
all imagined in detail an angelic host, and finally a whole theology
was wrought out _in petto_. He used a gilt ornamented music-stand as a
kind of altar with fumigating pastils for incense, where each morning
God was approached by offerings until one day a conflagration put a
sudden end to these celebrations.
Hans Anderson,[48] the son of a poor shoemaker, taught in a charity
school at the dawn of puberty; vividly animated Bible stories from
pictures painted on the wall; was dreamy and absent-minded; told
continued stories to his mates; at confirmation vowed he would be
famous and finally, at fourteen, left home for Copenhagen, where he
was violently stage-struck and worked his way from friendship with the
bill-poster to the stage as page, shepherd, etc.; called on a famous
dancer, who scorned him, and then, feeling that he had no one but God
to depend on, prayed earnestly and often. For nearly a year, until his
voice broke, he was a fine singer. He wet with his tears the eyes of a
portrait of a heartless man that he might feel for him. He played with
a puppet theater and took a childish delight in decking the characters
with gay remnants that he begged from shops; wrote several plays which
no one would accept; stole into an empty theater one New Year's day to
pray aloud on the middle of the stage; shouted with joy; hugged and
kissed a beech-tree till people thought him insane; abhorred the
thought of apprenticeship to Latin as he did to that of a trade, which
was a constant danger; and was one of the most dreamy and sentimental,
and by spells religious and prayerful, of youth.
George Ebers[49] remembered as a boy of eleven the revolution of '48
in Berlin, soon after which he was placed in Froebel's school at
Keilhau. This great teacher with his noble associates, Middendorf,
Barop, and Langekhal, lived with the boys; told the stirring stories
of their own lives as soldiers in the war of liberation; led their
pupils on long excursions in vacation, often lasting for months, and
gave much liberty to the boys, who were allowed to haze not only their
new mates, but new teachers. This transfer from the city to the
country roused a veritable passion in the boy, who remained here till
he was fifteen. Trees and cliffs were climbed, collections made, the
Saale by moonlight and the lofty Steiger at sunset were explored.
There were swimming and skating and games, and the maxim of the
school, "_Friede, Freude, Freiheit_,"[Peace, joy, freedom] was lived up
to. The boys hung on their teachers for stories. The teachers took
their boys into their confidence for all their own literary aims,
loves, and ideals. One had seen the corpse of Körner and another knew
Prohaska. "The Roman postulate that knowledge should be imparted to
boys according to a thoroughly tested method approved by the mature
human intellect and which seems most useful to it for later life" was
the old system of sacrificing the interests of the child for those of
the man. Here childhood was to live itself out completely and
naturally into an ever renewed paradise. The temperaments,
dispositions, and characters of each of the sixty boys were carefully
studied and recorded. Some of these are still little masterpieces of
psychological penetration, and this was made the basis of development.
The extreme Teutonism cultivated by wrestling, shooting, and fencing,
giving each a spot of land to sow, reap, and shovel, and all in an
atmosphere of adult life, made an environment that fitted the
transition period as well as any that the history of education
affords. Every tramp and battle were described in a book by each boy.
When at fifteen Ebers was transferred to the Kottbus Gymnasium, he
felt like a colt led from green pastures to the stable, and the period
of effervescence made him almost possessed by a demon, so many sorts
of follies did he commit. He wrote "a poem of the world," fell in love
with an actress older than himself, became known as foolhardy for his
wild escapades, and only slowly sobered down.
In Gottfried Kelley's "Der grüne Heinrich,"[50] the author, whom R.M.
Meyer calls "the most eminent literary German of the nineteenth
century," reviews the memories of his early life. This autobiography
is a plain and very realistic story of a normal child, and not
adulterated with fiction like Goethe's or with psychoses like Rousseau
or Bashkirtseff. He seems a boy like all other boys, and his childhood
and youth were in no wise extraordinary. The first part of this work,
which describes his youth up to the age of eighteen, is the most
important, and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and
minuteness. It is a tale of little things. All the friendships and
loves and impulses are there, and he is fundamentally selfish and
utilitarian; God and nature were one, and only when his beloved Army
died did he wish to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child, found
two kinds of love in his heart--the idea and the sensual, very
independent--the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a
superb young woman years older than he, pure, although the
personification of sense. He gives a rich harvest of minute and
sagacious observations about his strange simultaneous loves; the
peculiar tastes of food; his day-dream period; and his rather
prolonged habit of lying, the latter because he had no other vent for
invention. He describes with great regret his leaving school at so
early an age; his volcanic passion of anger; his self-distrust; his
periods of abandon; his passion to make a success of art though he did
not of life; his spells of self-despair and cynicism; his periods of
desolation in his single life; his habit of story-telling; his
wrestling with the problem of theology and God; the conflict between
his philosophy and his love of the girls, etc.
From a private school in Leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's tact
in finding what his masters thought the value of each subject they
taught; where he had joined in the vandalism of using a battering-ram
to break a way to the hated science apparatus and to destroy it;
feeling that the classical writers were overpraised; and where at the
age of sixteen he had appeared several times in public as a reciter of
his own poems, Max Müller returned to Leipzig and entered upon the
freedom of university life there at the age of seventeen. For years
his chief enjoyment was music.[51] He played the piano well, heard
everything he could in concert or opera, was an oratorio tenor, and
grew more and more absorbed in music, so that he planned to devote
himself altogether to it and also to enter a musical school at Dessau,
but nothing came of it. At the university he saw little of society,
was once incarcerated for wearing a club ribbon, and confesses that
with his boon companions he was guilty of practises which would now
bring culprits into collision with authorities. He fought three duels,
participated in many pranks and freakish escapades, but nevertheless
attended fifty-three different courses of lectures in three years.
When Hegelism was the state philosophy, he tried hard to understand
it, but dismissed it with the sentiments expressed by a French officer
to his tailor, who refused to take the trousers he had ordered to be
made very tight because they did not fit so closely that he could not
get into them. Darwin attracted him, yet the wildness of his followers
repelled. He says, "I confess I felt quite bewildered for a time and
began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers." He wonders how
young minds in German universities survive the storms and fogs through
which they pass. With bated breath he heard his elders talk of
philosophy and tried to lay hold of a word here and there, but it all
floated before his mind like mist. Later he had an Hegelian period,
but found in Herbart a corrective, and at last decided upon Sanskrit
and other ancient languages, because he felt that he must know
something that no other knew, and also that the Germans had then heard
only the after-chime and not the real striking of the bells of Indian
philosophy. From twenty his struggles and his queries grew more
definite, and at last, at the age of twenty-two, he was fully launched
upon his career in Paris, and later went to Oxford.
At thirteen Wagner[52] translated about half the "Odyssey"
voluntarily; at fourteen began the tragedy which was to combine the
grandeur of two of Shakespeare's dramas; at sixteen he tried "his
new-fledged musical wings by soaring at once to the highest peaks of
orchestral achievement without wasting any time on the humble
foot-hills." He sought to make a new departure, and, compared to the
grandeur of his own composition, "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony appeared
like a simple Pleyel Sonata." To facilitate the reading of his
astounding score, he wrote it in three kinds of ink--red for strings,
green for the wood-wind, and black for the brass instruments. He
writes that this overture was the climax of his absurdities, and
although the audience before which an accommodating orchestra played
it were disgusted and the musicians were convulsed with laughter, it
made a deep impression upon the author's mind. Even after
matriculating at the university he abandoned himself so long to the
dissipations common to student life before the reaction came that his
relatives feared that he was a good-for-nothing.
In his "Hannele," Hauptmann, the dramatist, describes in a kind of
dream poem what he supposed to pass through the mind of a dying girl
of thirteen or fourteen, who does not wish to live and is so absorbed
by the "Brownies of her brain" that she hardly knows whether she is
alive on earth or dead in heaven, and who sees the Lord Jesus in the
form of the schoolmaster whom she adores. In her closing vision there
is a symbolic representation of her own resurrection. To the
passionate discussions in Germany, England, and France, as to whether
this character is true to adolescence, we can only answer with an
emphatic affirmative; that her heaven abounds in local color and in
fairy tale items, that it is very material, and that she is troubled
by fears of sin against the Holy Ghost, is answer enough in an
ill-used, starving child with a fevered brain, whose dead mother
taught her these things.
Saint-Pierre's "Paul and Virginia" is an attempt to describe budding
adolescence in a boy and girl born on a remote island and reared in a
state of natural simplicity The descriptions are sentimental after the
fashion of the age in France, and the pathos, which to us smacks of
affectation and artificiality, nevertheless has a vein of truth in it.
The story really begins when the two children were twelve; and the
description of the dawn of love and melancholy in Virginia's heart,
for some time concealed from Paul, of her disquiet and piety, of the
final frank avowal of eternal love by each, set of by the pathetic
separation, and of the undying love, and finally the tragic death and
burial of each--all this owes its charm, for its many generations of
readers, to its merits as an essentially true picture of the human
heart at this critical age. This work and Rousseau[53] have
contributed to give French literature its peculiar cast in its
description of this age.
"The first explosions of combustible constitution" in Rousseau's,
precocious nature were troublesome, and he felt premature sensations
of erotic voluptuousness, but without any sin. He longed "to fall at
the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates or implore
pardon." He only wanted a lady, to become a knight errant. At ten he
was passionately devoted to a Mlle. Vulson, whom he publicly and
tyrannically claimed as his own and would allow no other to approach.
He had very different sensuous feelings toward Mlle. Goton, with whom
his relations were very passionate, though pure. Absolutely under the
power of both these mistresses, the effects they produced upon him
were in no wise related to each other. The former was a brother's
affection with the jealousy of a lover added, but the latter a
furious, tigerish, Turkish rage. When told of the former's marriage,
in his indignation and heroic fury he swore never more to see a
perfidious girl. A slightly neurotic vein of prolonged ephebeitis
pervades much of his life.
Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child"[54] was written when the author was
forty-two, and contains hardly a fact, but it is one of the best of
inner autobiographies, and is nowhere richer than in the last
chapters, which bring the author down to the age of fourteen and a
half. He vividly describes the new joy at waking, which he began to
feel at twelve or thirteen; the clear vision into the bottomless pit
of death; the new, marvelous susceptibility to nature as comradeship
with boys of his own age was lacking; the sudden desires from pure
bravado and perversity to do something unseemly, e. g., making a fly
omelet and carrying it in a procession with song; the melting of
pewter plates and pouring them into water and salting a wild tract of
land with them; organizing a band of miners, whom he led as if with
keen scent to the right spot and rediscovered his nuggets, everything
being done mysteriously and as a tribal secret. Loti had a new feeling
for the haunting music of Chopin, which he had been taught to play but
had not been interested in; his mind was inflamed, by a home visit of
an elder brother, with the idea of going to the South Sea Islands, and
this became a long obsession which finally led him to enlist in the
navy, dropping, with a beating heart, the momentous letter into the
post-office after long misgivings and delays. He had a superficial and
a hidden self, the latter somewhat whimsical and perhaps ridiculous,
shared only with a few intimate friends for whom he would have let
himself be cut into bits. He believes his transition period lasted
longer than with the majority of men, and during it he was carried
from one extreme to another; had rather eccentric and absurd manners,
and touched moat of the perilous rocks on the voyage of life. He had
an early love for an older girl whose name he wrote in cipher on his
books, although he felt it a little artificial, but believed it might
have developed into a great and true hereditary friendship, continuing
that which their ancestors had felt for many generations. The birth of
love in his heart was in a dream after having read the forbidden poet,
Alfred de Musset. He was fourteen, and in his dream it was a soft,
odorous twilight. He walked amid flowers seeking a nameless some one
whom he ardently desired, and felt that something strange and
wonderful, intoxicating as it advanced, was going to happen. The
twilight grew deeper, and behind a rose-bush he saw a young girl with
a languorous and mysterious smile, although her forehead and eyes were
hidden. As it darkened rather suddenly, her eyes came out, and they
were very personal and seemed to belong to some one already much
beloved, who had been found with "transports of infinite joy and
tenderness." He woke with a start and sought to retain the phantom,
which faded. He could not conceive that was a mere illusion, and as he
realized that she had vanished he felt overwhelmed with hopelessness.
It was the first stirring "of true love with all its great melancholy
and deep mystery, with its overwhelming but sad enchantment--love
which like a perfume endows with a fragrance all it touches."
It is, I believe, high time that ephebic literature should be
recognized as a class by itself, and have a place of its own in the
history of letters and in criticism. Much of it should be individually
prescribed for the reading of the young, for whom it has a singular
zest and is a true stimulus and corrective. This stage of life now has
what might almost be called a school of its own. Here the young appeal
to and listen to each other as they do not to adults, and in a way the
latter have failed to appreciate. Again, no biography, and especially
no autobiography, should henceforth be complete if it does not
describe this period of transformation so all-determining for future
life to which it alone can often give the key. Rightly to draw the
lessons of this age not only saves us from waste ineffable of this
rich but crude area of experience, but makes maturity saner and more
complete. Lastly, many if not most young people should be encouraged
to enough of the confessional private journalism to teach them
self-knowledge, for the art of self-expression usually begins now if
ever, when it has a wealth of subjective material and needs forms of
expression peculiar to itself.
For additional references on the subject of this chapter, see:
Alcafarado, Marianna, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Translated by
R. H., New York, 1887. Richardson, Abby Sage, Abelard and Héloise, and
Letters of Héloise, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston. Smith, Theodote
L., Types of Adolescent Affection. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1904,
vol. II, pp. 178-203.
[Footnote 1: Pedagogical Seminary, June 1901, vol. 8, pp. 163-205]
[Footnote 2: Being a Boy.]
[Footnote 3: Story of a Bad Boy.]
[Footnote 4: A Boy's Town.]
[Footnote 5: Court of Boyville.]
[Footnote 6: The Spoilt Child, by Peary Chandmitter. Translated by G.
D. Oswell. Thacker, Spink and Co., Calcutta, 1893.]
[Footnote 7: The Golden Age]
[Footnote 8: Frau Spyri.]
[Footnote 9: The One I Knew the Best of All.]
[Footnote 10: The Study of the Boyhood of Great Men. Pedagogical
Seminary, October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 134-156.]
[Footnote 11: The Vanishing Character of Adolescent Experiences.
Northwestern Monthly, June, 1898, vol. 8, p. 644.]
[Footnote 12: The Count of Boyville, by William Allen White. New York,
1899, p. 358.]
[Footnote 13: The Study of Adolescence. Pedagogical Seminary, June,
1891, vol. 1, pp. 174-195.]
[Footnote 14: Lancaster: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence.
Pedagogical Seminary, July, 1897, vol. 5, p. 106.]
[Footnote 15: Standards of Efficiency in School and in Life.
Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 3-22.]
[Footnote 16: See also Vittorio da Feltre and other Humanist
Educators, by W. H. Woodward. Cambridge University Press, 1897.]
[Footnote 17: See The Private Life of Galileo; from his Correspondence
and that of his Eldest Daughter. Anon, Macmillan, London, 1870.]
[Footnote 18: See Sir David Brewster's Life of Newton. Harper, New
York, 1874.]
[Footnote 19: Louis Agassiz, His Life and Work, by C. F. Holder. G. P.
Putnam's Sons, New York, 1893.]
[Footnote 20: Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, by his son Leonard
Huxley. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1901.]
[Footnote 21: See also Sully: A Girl's Religion. Longman's Magazine,
May, 1890, pp. 89-99.]
[Footnote 22: Sheldon (Institutional Activities of American Children;
American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, p. 434) describes
a faintly analogous case of a girl of eleven, who organised the
worship of Pallas Athena on two flat rocks, in a deep ravine by a
stream where a young sycamore grew from an old stump, as did Pallas
from the head of her father Zeus. There was a court consisting of
king, queen and subjects, and priests who officiated at sacrifices.
The king and queen wore goldenrod upon their heads and waded in
streams attended by their subjects; gathered flowers for Athena;
caught crayfish which were duly smashed upon her altar. "Sometimes
there was a special celebration, when, in addition to the slaughtered
crayfish and beautiful flower decorations, and pickles stolen from the
dinner-table, there would be an elaborate ceremony," which because of
its uncanny acts was intensely disliked by the people at hand.]
[Footnote 23: The One I Know The Best of All. A Memory of the Mind of
a Child. By Frances Hodgson Burnett. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893]
[Footnote 24: The Beth Book, by Sarah Grand. D. Appleton and Co., New
York, 1897.]
[Footnote 25: Autobiography of a Child. Hannah Lynch, W. Blackwood and
Sons, London, 1899, p. 255.]
[Footnote 26: The Story of My Life. By Helen Keller. Doubleday, Page
and Co., New York, 1903, p. 39.]
[Footnote 27: Journal of a Young Artist. Cassell and Co., New York,
1889, p. 434.]
[Footnote 28: The Story of Mary MacLane. By herself. Herbert S. Stone
and Co., Chicago, 1902, p. 322.]
[Footnote 29: Fate. Translated from the Italian by A.M. Von Blomberg.
Copeland and Day, Boston, 1898.]
[Footnote 30: Confessions of an Opium Eater. Part I. Introductory
Narrative. (Cambridge Classics) 1896.]
[Footnote 31: Longmans, Green and Co. London, 1891, 2nd ed.]
[Footnote 32: The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, London, 1891, p. 324.]
[Footnote 33: An Autobiography. Edited by H.M. Trollope. 2 vols.
London, 1883.]
[Footnote 34: See his Memoirs. London, 1885.]
[Footnote 35: See Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (pseudonym for W.H.
White), edited by Reuben Shapcott. 2 vols. London, 1881.]
[Footnote 36: The rest of the two volumes is devoted to his further
life as a dissenting minister, who later became something of a
literary man; relating how he was slowly driven to leave his little
church, how he outgrew and broke with the girl to whom he was engaged,
whom he marvelously met and married when both were well on in years,
and how strangely he was influenced by the free-thinker Mardon and his
remarkable daughter. All in all it is a rare study of emancipation.]
[Footnote 37: London, 1896, vol. 1.]
[Footnote 38: Macmillan, 1902.]
[Footnote 39: Life of Sir J.F. Stephen. By his brother, Leslie
Stephen, London, 1895.]
[Footnote 40: See the very impressive account of Dicken's
characterization of childhood and youth, and of his great but hitherto
inadequately recognized interest and influence as an educator. Dickens
as an Educator. James L. Hughes. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1901,
p. 319.]
[Footnote 41: John Inglesant: A Romance. 6th ed. Macmillan, 1886.]
[Footnote 42: The Autobiography of a Journalist. 2 vols. Houghton,
Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1901.]
[Footnote 43: A. Bronson Alcott, His Life and Philosophy. By F. B.
Sanborn and W. T. Harris. Roberts Bros., Boston, 1893.]
[Footnote 44: Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian. By Theodore F.
Munger. Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1899.]
[Footnote 45: By C.W. Chesnutt. (Beacon Biographies.) Small, Maynard
and Co., Boston, 1899.]
[Footnote 46: The Making of an American. Macmillan, 1901.]
[Footnote 47: Sonny. By Ruth McEnery Stuart. The Century Co., New
York, 1896.]
[Footnote 48: The Story of My Life. Works, vol. 8 new edition.
Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1894.]
[Footnote 49: The Story of My Life. Translated by M. J. Safford. D.
Appleton and Co., New York 1893.]
[Footnote 50: Gesammelte Werke. Vierter Band. Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin,
1897.]
[Footnote 51: My Autobiography, p. 106. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New
York, 1901.]
[Footnote 52: Wagner and His Works. By Henry T. Finck. Chas.
Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893.]
[Footnote 53: Les Confessions. Oeuvres Complètes, vols. 8 and 9.
Hachette et Cie., Paris, 1903.]
[Footnote 54: Translated from the French by C.F. Smith. C.C. Birchard
and Co., Boston, 1901.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER IX
THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS
Change from childish to adult friends--Influence of favorite
teachers--What children wish or plan to do or be--Property and the
money sense--Social judgments--The only child--First social
organizations--Student life--Associations for youth, controlled by
adults.
In a few aspects we are already able to trace the normal psychic
outgrowing of the home of childhood as its interests irradiate into an
ever enlarging environment. Almost the only duty of small children is
habitual and prompt obedience. Our very presence enforces one general
law--that of keeping our good-will and avoiding our displeasure. They
respect all we smile at or even notice, and grow to it like the plant
toward the light. Their early lies are often saying what they think
will please. At bottom, the most restless child admires and loves
those who save him from too great fluctuations by coercion, provided
the means be rightly chosen and the ascendency extend over heart and
mind. But the time comes when parents are often shocked at the lack of
respect suddenly shown by the child. They have ceased to be the
highest ideals. The period of habituating morality and making it
habitual is ceasing; and the passion to realize freedom, to act on
personal experience, and to keep a private conscience is in order. To
act occasionally with independence from the highest possible ideal
motives develops the impulse and the joy of pure obligation, and thus
brings some new and original force into the world and makes habitual
guidance by the highest and best, or by inner as opposed to outer
constraint, the practical rule of life. To bring the richest streams
of thought to bear in interpreting the ethical instincts, so that the
youth shall cease to live in a moral interregnum, is the real goal of
self-knowledge. This is true education of the will and prepares the
way for love of overcoming obstacles of difficulty, perhaps even of
conflict. This impulse is often the secret of obstinacy.[1] And yet,
"at no time in life will a human being respond So heartily if treated
by older and wiser people as if he were an equal or even a superior.
The attempt to treat a child at adolescence as you would treat an
inferior is instantly fatal to good discipline."[2] Parents still
think of their offspring as mere children, and tighten the rein when
they should loosen it. Many young people feel that they have the best
of homes and yet that they will go crazy if they must remain in them.
If the training of earlier years has been good, guidance by command
may now safely give way to that by ideals, which are sure to be
heroic. The one unpardonable thing for the adolescent is dullness,
stupidity, lack of life, interest, and enthusiasm in school or
teachers, and, perhaps above all, too great stringency. Least of all,
at this stage, can the curriculum school be an ossuary. The child must
now be taken into the family councils and find the parents interested
in all that interests him. Where this is not done, we have the
conditions for the interesting cases of so many youth, who now begin
to suspect that father, mother, or both, are not their true parents.
Not only is there interest in rapidly widening associations with
coevals, but a new lust to push on and up to maturity. One marked
trait now is to seek friends and companions older than themselves, or
next to this, to seek those younger. This is marked contrast with
previous years, when they seek associates of their own age. Possibly
the merciless teasing instinct, which culminates at about the same
time, may have some influence, but certain it is that now interest is
transpolarized up and down the age scale. One reason is the new hunger
for information, not only concerning reproduction, but a vast variety
of other matters, so that there is often an attitude of silent begging
for knowledge. In answer to Lancaster's[3] questions on this subject,
some sought older associates because they could learn more from them,
found them better or more steadfast friends, craved sympathy and found
most of it from older and perhaps married people. Some were more
interested in their parents' conversation with other adults than with
themselves, and were particularly entertained by the chance of hearing
things they had no business to. There is often a feeling that adults
do not realize this new need of friendship with them and show want of
sympathy almost brutal.
Stableton,[4] who has made interesting notes on individual boys
entering the adolescent period, emphasizes the importance of sympathy,
appreciation, and respect in dealing with this age. They must now be
talked to as equals, and in this way their habits of industry and even
their dangerous love affairs run be controlled. He says, "There is no
more important question before the teaching fraternity today than how
to deal justly and successfully with boys at this time of life. This
is the age when they drop out of school" in far too large numbers, and
he thinks that the small percentage of male graduates from our high
schools is due to "the inability of the average grammar grade or
high-school teacher to deal rightly with boys in this critical period
of their school life." Most teachers "know all their bad points, but
fail to discover their good ones." The fine disciplinarian, the
mechanical movement of whose school is so admirable and who does not
realize the new need of liberty or how loose-jointed, mentally and
physically, all are at this age, should be supplanted by one who can
look into the heart and by a glance make the boy feel that he or she
is his friend. "The weakest work in our schools is the handling of
boys entering the adolescent period of life, and there is no greater
blessing that can come to a boy at this age, when he does not
understand himself, than a good strong teacher that understands him,
has faith in him, and will day by day lead him till he can walk
alone."
Small[5] found the teacher a focus of imitation whence many
influences, both physical and mental, irradiated to the pupils. Every
accent, gesture, automatism, like and dislike is caught consciously
and unconsciously. Every intellectual interest in the teacher
permeates the class--liars, if trusted, became honest; those treated
as ladies and gentlemen act so; those told by favorite teachers of the
good things they are capable of feel a strong impulsion to do them;
some older children are almost transformed by being made companions to
teachers, by having their good traits recognized, and by frank
apologies by the teacher when in error.
An interesting and unsuspected illustration of the growth of
independence with adolescence was found in 2,411 papers from the
second to eighth grades on the characteristics of the best teacher as
seen by children.[6] In the second and third grades, all, and in the
fourth, ninety-five per cent specified help in studies. This falls off
rapidly in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades to thirty-nine per
cent, while at the same time the quality of patience in the upper
grades rises from a mention by two to twenty-two per cent.
Sanford Bell[7] collated the answers of 543 males and 488 females as
to who of all their past teachers did them most good, and wherein;
whom they loved and disliked most, and why. His most striking result
is presented in which shows that fourteen in girls and sixteen in boys
is the age in which most good was felt to have been done, and that
curves culminating at twelve for both sexes but not falling rapidly
until fifteen or sixteen represent the period when the strongest and
most indelible dislikes were felt. What seems to be most appreciated
in teachers is the giving of purpose, arousing of ideals, kindling of
ambition to be something or do something and so giving an object in
life, encouragement to overcome circumstances, and, in general,
inspiring self-confidence and giving direction. Next came personal
sympathy and interest, kindness, confidence, a little praise, being
understood; and next, special help in lessons, or timely and kindly
advice, while stability and poise of character, purity, the absence of
hypocrisy, independence, personal beauty, athleticism and vigor are
prominent. It is singular that those of each sex have been most helped
by their own sex and that this prominence is far greatest in men.
Four-fifths of the men and nearly one-half of the women, however, got
most help from men. Male teachers, especially near adolescence, seem
most helpful for both sexes.
The qualities that inspire most dislike are malevolence, sarcasm,
unjust punishment, suspicion, severity, sternness, absence of laughing
and smiling, indifference, threats and broken vows, excessive scolding
and "roasting," and fondness for inflicting blows. The teacher who
does not smile is far more liable to excite animosity. Most boys
dislike men most, and girls' dislikes are about divided. The stories
of school cruelties and indignities are painful. Often inveterate
grudges are established by little causes, and it is singular how
permanent and indelible strong dislike, are for the majority of
children. In many cases, aversions engendered before ten have lasted
with little diminution till maturity, and there is a sad record of
children who have lost a term, a year, or dropped school altogether
because of ill treatment or partiality.
Nearly two thousand children were asked what they would do in a
specific case of conflict between teacher and parents. It was found
that, while for young children parental authority was preferred, a
marked decline began about eleven and was most rapid after fourteen in
girls and fifteen in boys, and that there was a nearly corresponding
increase in the number of pubescents who preferred the teacher's
authority. The reasons for their choice were also analyzed, and it was
found that whereas for the young, unconditioned authority was
generally satisfactory, with pubesecents, abstract authority came into
marked predominance, "until when the children have reached the age of
sixteen almost seventy-five per cent of their reasons belong to this
class, and the children show themselves able to extend the idea of
authority without violence to their sense of justice."
On a basis of 1,400 papers answering the question whom, of anyone ever
heard or read of, they would like to resemble, Barnes[8] found that
girls' ideals were far more often found in the immediate circle of
their acquaintance than boys, and that those within that circle were
more often in their own family, but that the tendency to go outside
their personal knowledge and choose historical and public characters
was greatly augmented at puberty, when also the heroes of philanthropy
showed marked gain in prominence. Boys rarely chose women as their
ideals; but in America, half the girls at eight and two-thirds at
eighteen chose male characters. The range of important women ideals
among the girls was surprisingly small. Barnes fears that if from the
choice of relative as ideals, the expansion to remote or world heroes
is too fast, it may "lead to disintegration of character and reckless
living." "If, on the other hand, it is expanded too slowly we shall
have that arrested development which makes good ground in which to
grow stupidity, brutality, and drunkenness--the first fruits of a
sluggish and self-contained mind." "No one can consider the regularity
with which local ideals die out and are replaced by world ideals
without feeling that he is in the presence of law-abiding forces," and
this emphasizes the fact that the teacher or parent does not work in a
world governed by caprice.
The compositions written by thousands of children in New York on what
they wanted to do when they were grown up were collated by Dr.
Thurber.[9] The replies were serious, and showed that poor children
looked forward willingly to severe labor and the increased earnestness
of adolescent years, and the better answers to the question _why_ were
noteworthy. All anticipated giving up the elastic joyousness of
childhood and felt the need of patience. Up to ten, there was an
increase in the number of those who had two or more desires. This
number declined rapidly at eleven, rose as rapidly at twelve, and
slowly fell later. Preferences for a teacher's life exceeded in girls
up to nine, fell rapidly at eleven, increased slightly the next year,
and declined thereafter. The ideal of becoming a dressmaker and
milliner increased till ten, fell at eleven, rose rapidly to a maximum
at thirteen, when it eclipsed teaching, and then fell permanently
again. The professions of clerk and stenographer showed a marked rise
from eleven and a half. The number of boys who chose the father's
occupation attained its maximum at nine and its minimum at twelve,
with a slight rise to fourteen, when the survey ended. The ideal of
tradesman culminated at eight, with a second rise at thirteen. The
reason "to earn money" reached its high maximum of fifty per cent at
twelve, and fell very rapidly. The reason "because I like it"
culminated at ten and fell steadily thereafter. The motive that
influenced the choice of a profession and which was altruistic toward
parents or for their benefit culminated at twelve and a half, and then
declined. The desire for character increased somewhat throughout, but
rapidly after twelve, and the impulse to do good to the world, which
had risen slowly from nine, mounted sharply after thirteen. Thus, "at
eleven all the ideas and tendencies are increasing toward a maximum.
At twelve we find the altruistic desires for the welfare of parents,
the reason 'to earn money'; at thirteen the desire on the part of the
girls to be dressmakers, also to be clerks and stenographers. At
fourteen culminates the desire for a business career in bank or office
among the boys, the consciousness of life's uncertainties which
appeared first at twelve, the desire for character, and the hope of
doing the world good."
"What would you like to be in an imaginary new city?" was a question
answered by 1,234 written papers.[10] One hundred and fourteen
different occupations were given; that of teacher led with the girls
at every age except thirteen and fourteen, when dressmaker and
milliner took precedence. The motive of making money led among the
boys at every age except fourteen and sixteen, when occupations chosen
because they were liked led. The greatest number of those who chose
the parent's occupation was found at thirteen, but from that age it
steadily declined and independent choice came into prominence. The
maximum of girls who chose parental vocations was at fourteen. Motives
of philanthropy reached nearly their highest point in girls and boys
at thirteen.
Jegi[11] obtained letters addressed to real or imaginary friends from
3,000 German children in Milwaukee, asking what they desired to do
when they grew up, and why, and tabulated returns from 200 boys and
200 girls for each age from eight to fourteen inclusive. He also found
a steadily decreasing influence of relatives to thirteen; in early
adolescence, the personal motive of choosing an occupation because it
was liked increased, while from twelve in boys and thirteen in girls
the consideration of finding easy vocations grew rapidly strong.
L. W. Cline[12] studied by the census method returns from 2,594
children, who were asked what they wished to be and do. He found that
in naming both ideals and occupations girls were more conservative
than boys, but more likely to give a reason for their choice. In this
respect country children resembled boys more than city children.
Country boys were prone to inattention, were more independent and able
to care for themselves, suggesting that the home life of the country
child is more effective in shaping ideals and character than that of
the city child. Industrial occupations are preferred by the younger
children, the professional and technical pursuits increasing with age.
Judgments of rights and justice with the young are more prone to issue
from emotional rather than from intellectual processes. Country
children seem more altruistic than those in the city, and while girls
are more sympathetic than boys, they are also more easily prejudiced.
Many of these returns bear unmistakable marks that in some homes and
schools moralization has been excessive and has produced a sentimental
type of morality and often a feverish desire to express ethical views
instead of trusting to suggestion. Children are very prone to have one
code of ideals for themselves and another for others. Boys, too, are
more original than girls, and country children more than city
children.
Friedrich[13] asked German school children what person they chose as
their pattern. The result showed differences of age, sex, and creed.
First of all came characters in history, which seemed to show that
this study for children of the sixth and seventh grades was
essentially ethical or a training of mood and disposition
(_Gesinnungsunterricht_), and this writer suggests reform in this
respect. He seems to think that the chief purpose of history for this
age should be ethical. Next came the influence of the Bible, although
it was plain that this was rather in spite of the catechism and the
method of memoriter work. Here, too, the immediate environment at this
age furnished few ideals (four and one-fifth per cent), for children
seem to have keener eyes for the faults than for the virtues of those
near them. Religion, therefore, should chiefly be directed to the
emotions and not to the understanding. This census also suggested more
care that the reading of children should contain good examples in
their environment, and also that the matter of instruction should be
more fully adapted to the conditions of sex.
Friedrich found as his chief age result that children of the seventh
or older class in the German schools laid distinctly greater stress
upon characters distinguished by bravery and courage than did the
children of the sixth grade, while the latter more frequently selected
characters illustrating piety and holiness. The author divided his
characters into thirty-five classes, illustrating qualities, and found
that national activity led, with piety a close second; that then came
in order those illustrating firmness of faith, bravery, modesty, and
chastity; then pity and sympathy, industry, goodness, patience, etc.
Taylor, Young, Hamilton, Chambers, and others, have also collected
interesting data on what children and young people hope to be, do,
whom they would like to be, or resemble, etc. Only a few at
adolescence feel themselves so good or happy that they are content to
be themselves. Most show more or less discontent at their lot. From
six to eleven or twelve, the number who find their ideals among their
acquaintances falls off rapidly, and historical characters rise to a
maximum at or before the earliest teens. From eleven or twelve on into
the middle teens contemporary ideals increase steadily. London
children are more backward in this expansion of ideals than Americans,
while girls choose more acquaintance ideals at all ages than do boys.
The expansion, these authors also trace largely to the study of
history. The George Washington ideal, which leads all the rest by far
and is greatly overworked, in contrast with the many heroes of equal
rank found in England, pales soon, as imperfections are seen and those
now making history loom up. This is the normal age to free from
bondage to the immediate present, and this freedom is one measure of
education. Bible heroes are chosen as ideals by only a very small
percentage, mostly girls, far more characters being from fiction and
mythology; where Jesus is chosen, His human is preferred to His divine
side. Again, it would seem that teachers would be ideals, especially
as many girls intend to teach, but they are generally unpopular as
choices. In an ideal system they would be the first step in expansion
from home ideals. Military heroes and inventors play leading rôles in
the choices of pubescent boys.
Girls at all school ages and increasingly up the grades prefer foreign
ideals, to be the wife of a man of title, as aristocracies offer
special opportunities for woman to shine, and life near the source of
fashion is very attractive, at least up to sixteen. The saddest fact
in these studies is that nearly half our American pubescent girls, or
nearly three times as many as in England, choose male ideals, or would
be men. Girls, too, have from six to fifteen times as many ideals as
boys. In this significant fact we realize how modern woman has cut
loose from all old moorings and is drifting with no destination and no
anchor aboard. While her sex has multiplied in all lower and high
school grades, its ideals are still too masculine. Text-books teach
little about women. When a woman's Bible, history, course of study,
etc., is proposed, her sex fears it may reduce her to the old
servitude. While boys rarely, and then only when very young, choose
female ideals, girls' preference for the life of the other sex
sometimes reaches sixty and seventy per cent. The divorce between the
life preferred and that demanded by the interests of the race is often
absolute. Saddest and most unnatural of all is the fact that this
state of things increases most rapidly during just those years when
ideals of womanhood should be developed and become most dominant, till
it seems as if the female character was threatened with
disintegration. While statistics are not yet sufficient to be reliable
on the subject, there is some indication that woman later slowly
reverts toward ideals not only from her own sex but also from the
circle of her own acquaintances.
The reasons for the choice of ideals are various and not yet well
determined. Civic virtues certainly rise; material and utilitarian
considerations do not seem to much, if at all, at adolescence, and in
some data decline. Position, fame, honor, and general greatness
increase rapidly, but moral qualities rise highest and also fastest
just before and near puberty and continue to increase later yet. By
these choices both sexes, but girls far most, show increasing
admiration of ethical and social qualities. Artistic and intellectual
traits also rise quite steadily from ten or eleven onward, but with no
such rapidity, and reach no such height as military ability and
achievement for boys. Striking in these studies is the rapid increase,
especially from eight to fourteen, of the sense of historic time for
historic persons. These long since dead are no longer spoken of as now
living. Most of these choices are direct expressions of real
differences of taste and character.
_Property,_ Kline and France[14] have defined as "anything that the
individual may acquire which sustains and prolongs life, favors
survival, and gives an advantage over opposing forces." Many animals
and even insects store up food both for themselves and for their
young. Very early in life children evince signs of ownership.
Letourneau[15] says that the notion of private property, which seems
to us so natural, dawned late and slowly, and that common ownership
was the rule among primitive people. Value is sometimes measured by
use and sometimes by the work required to produce it. Before puberty,
there is great eagerness to possess things that are of immediate
service; but after its dawn, the desire of possession takes another
form, and money for its own sake, which is at first rather an
abstraction, comes to be respected or regarded as an object of extreme
desire, because it is seen to be the embodiment of all values.
The money sense, as it is now often called, is very complex and has
not yet been satisfactorily analyzed by psychology. Ribot and others
trace its origin to provision which they think animals that hoard food
feel. Monroe[16] has tabulated returns from 977 boys and 1,090 girls
from six to sixteen in answer to the question as to what they would do
with a small monthly allowance. The following table shows the marked
increase at the dawn of adolescence of the number who would save it:
Age. Boys. Girls. | Age. Boys. Girls.
7....43 per cent 36 per cent | 12....82 per cent 64 per cent
8....45 " 34 " | 13....88 " 78 "
9....48 " 35 " | 14....85 " 80 "
10....58 " 50 " | 15....83 " 78 "
11....71 " 58 " | 16....85 " 82 "
This tendency to thrift is strongest in boys, and both sexes often
show the tendency to moralize, that is so strong in the early teens.
Much of our school work in arithmetic is dominated by the money sense;
and school savings-banks, at first for the poor, are now extending to
children of all classes. This sense tends to prevent pauperism,
prodigality, is an immense stimulus to the imagination and develops
purpose to pursue a distant object for a long time. To see all things
and values in terms of money has, of course, its pedagogic and ethical
limitations; but there is a stage when it is a great educational
advance, and it, too, is full of phylogenetic suggestions.
_Social judgement, cronies, solitude_--The two following observations
afford a glimpse of the development of moral judgments. From 1,000
boys and 1,000 girls of each age from six to sixteen who answered the
question as to what should be done to a girl with a new box of paints
who beautified the parlor chairs with them with a wish to please her
mother, the following conclusion was drawn.[17] Most of the younger
children would whip the girl, but from fourteen on the number declines
very rapidly. Few of the young children suggest explaining why it was
wrong; while at twelve, 181, and at sixteen, 751 would explain. The
motive of the younger children in punishment is revenge; with the
older ones that of preventing a repetition of the act comes in; and
higher and later comes the purpose of reform. With age comes also a
marked distinction between the act and its motive and a sense of the
girl's ignorance. Only the older children would suggest extracting a
promise not to offend again. Thus with puberty comes a change of
view-point from judging actions by results to judging by motives, and
only the older ones see that wrong can be done if there are no bad
consequences. There is also with increased years a great development
of the quality of mercy.
One hundred children of each sex and age between six and sixteen asked
what they would do with a burglar, the question stating that the
penalty was five years in prison.[18] Of the younger children nearly
nine-tenths ignored the law and fixed upon some other penalty, but
from twelve years there is a steady advance in those who would inflict
the legal penalty, while at sixteen, seventy-four per cent would have
the criminal punished according to law. Thus "with the dawn of
adolescence at the age of twelve or shortly after comes the
recognition of a larger life, a life to be lived in common with
others, and with this recognition the desire to sustain the social
code made for the common welfare," and punishment is no longer
regarded as an individual and arbitrary matter.
From another question answered by 1,914 children[19] it was found that
with the development of the psychic faculties in youth, there was an
increasing appreciation of punishment as preventive; an increasing
sense of the value of individuality and of the tendency to demand
protection of personal rights; a change from a sense of justice based
on feeling and on faith in authority to that based on reason and
understanding. Children's attitude toward punishment for weak time
sense, tested by 2,536 children from six to sixteen,[20] showed also a
marked pubescent increase in the sense of the need of the remedial
function of punishment as distinct from the view of it as vindictive,
or getting even, common in earlier years. There is also a marked
increase in discriminating the kinds and degrees of offenses; in
taking account of mitigating circumstances, the inconvenience caused
others, the involuntary nature of the offense and the purpose of the
culprit. All this continues to increase up to sixteen, where these
studies leave the child.
An interesting effect of the social instinct appears in August
Mayer's[21] elaborate study made up on fourteen boys in the fifth and
sixth grade of a Würzburg school to determine whether they could work
better together or alone. The tests were in dictation, mental and
written arithmetic, memory, and Ebbinghaus's combination exercises and
all were given with every practicable precaution to make the other
conditions uniform. The conclusions demonstrate the advantages of
collective over individual instruction. Under the former condition,
emulation is stronger and work more rapid and better in quality. From
this it is inferred that pupils should not be grouped according to
ability, for the dull are most stimulated by the presence of the
bright, the bad by the good, etc. Thus work at home is prone to
deteriorate, and experimental pedagogy shows that the social impulse
is on the whole a stronger spur for boys of eleven or twelve than the
absence of distraction which solitude brings.
From the answers of 1,068 boys and 1,268 girls from seven to sixteen
on the kind of chum they liked best,[22] it appears that with the
teens children are more anxious for chums that can keep secrets and
dress neatly, and there is an increased number who are liked for
qualities that supplement rather than duplicate those of the chooser.
"There is an apparent struggle between the real actual self and the
ideal self; a pretty strong desire to have a chum that embodies the
traits youth most desire but which they are conscious of lacking." The
strong like the weak; those full of fun the serious; the timid the
bold; the small the large, etc. Only children[23] illustrate differing
effects of isolation, while "mashes" and "crushes" and ultra-crony-ism
with "selfishness for two" show the results of abnormal restriction of
the irradiation of the social instinct which should now occur.[24]
M. H. Small,[25] after pointing out that communal animals are more
intelligent than those with solitary habits, and that even to name all
the irradiations of the social instinct would be write a history of
the human race, studied nearly five hundred cases of eminent men who
developed proclivities to solitude. It is interesting to observe in
how many of these cases this was developed in adolescence when, with
the horror of mediocrity, comes introspection, apathy, irresolution,
and subjectivism. The grounds of repulsion from society at this age
may be disappointed hunger for praise, wounded vanity, the reaction
from over-assertion, or the nursing of some high ideals, as it is
slowly realized that in society the individual cannot be absolute. The
motives to self-isolation may be because youth feels its lack of
physical or moral force to compete with men, or they may be due to the
failure of others to concede to the exactions of inordinate egotism
and are directly proportional to the impulse to magnify self, or to
the remoteness of common social interests from immediate personal
desire or need, and inversely as the number and range of interests
seen to be common and the clearness with which social relations are
realized. While maturity of character needs some solitude, too much
dwarfs it, and more or less of the same paralysis of association
follows which is described in the nostalgia of arctic journeys,
deserts, being lost in the jungle, solitary confinement, and in the
interesting stories of feral men.[26] In some of these cases the mind
is saved from entire stultification by pets, imaginary companions,
tasks, etc. Normally "the tendency to solitude at adolescence
indicates not fulness but want"; and a judicious balance between rest
and work, pursuit of favorite lines, genuine sympathy, and wise
companionship will generally normalize the social relation.
_First forms of spontaneous social organizations.--_ Gulick has
studied the propensity of boys from thirteen on to consort in gangs,
do "dawsies" and stumps, get into scrapes together, and fight and
suffer for one another. The manners and customs of the gang are to
build shanties or "hunkies," hunt with sling shots, build fires before
huts in the woods, cook their squirrels and other game, play Indian,
build tree-platforms, where they smoke or troop about some leader, who
may have an old revolver. They find or excavate caves, or perhaps roof
them over; the barn is a blockhouse or a battleship. In the early
teens boys begin to use frozen snowballs or put pebbles in them, or
perhaps have stone-fights between gangs than which no contiguous
African tribes could be more hostile. They become toughs and tantalize
policemen and peddlers; "lick" every enemy or even stranger found
alone on their grounds; often smash windows; begin to use sticks and
brass knuckles in their fights; pelt each other with green apples;
carry shillalahs, or perhaps air-rifles. The more plucky arrange
fights beforehand; rifle unoccupied houses; set ambushes for gangs
with which they are at feud; perhaps have secrets and initiations
where new boys are triced up by the legs and butted against trees and
rocks. When painted for their Indian fights, they may grow so excited
as to perhaps rush into the water or into the school-room yelling;
mimic the violence of strikes; kindle dangerous bonfires; pelt
policemen, and shout vile nicknames.
The spontaneous tendency to develop social and political organizations
among boys in pubescent years was well seen in a school near Baltimore
in the midst of an eight-hundred-acre farm richly diversified with
swamp and forest and abounding with birds, squirrels, rabbits, etc.
Soon after the opening of this school[27] the boys gathered nuts in
parties. When a tree was reached which others had shaken, an unwritten
law soon required those who wished to shake it further first to pile
up all nuts under the tree, while those who failed to do so were
universally regarded as dishonest and every boy's hand was against
them. To pile them involved much labor, so that the second party
usually sought fresh trees, and partial shaking practically gave
possession of all the fruits on a tree. They took birds' eggs freely,
and whenever a bird was found in building, or a squirrel's hole was
discovered, the finder tacked his name on the tree and thereby
confirmed his ownership, as he did if he placed a box in which a nest
was built. The ticket must not blow off, and the right at first lasted
only one season. In the rabbit-land every trap that was set preëmpted
ground for a fixed number of yards about it. Some grasping boys soon
made many traps and set them all over a valuable district, so that the
common land fell into a few hands. Traps were left out all winter and
simply set the next spring. All these rights finally came into the
ownership of two or three boys, who slowly acquired the right and
bequeathed their claims to others for a consideration, when they left
school. The monopolists often had a large surplus of rabbits which
they bartered for "butters," the unit being the ounce of daily
allowance. These could be represented by tickets transferred, so that
debts were paid with "butters" that had never been seen. An agrarian
party arose and demanded a redistribution of land from the
monopolists, as Sir Henry Maine shows often happened in the old
village community. Legislation and judicial procedure were developed
and quarrels settled by arbitration, ordeal, and wager, and punishment
by bumping often followed the decision of the boy folk-mote. Scales of
prices for commodities in "butters" or in pie-currency were evolved,
so that we here have an almost entirely spontaneous but amazingly
rapid recapitulation of the social development of the race by these
boys.
From a study of 1,166 children's organizations described as a language
lesson in school composition, Mr. Sheldon[28] arrives at some
interesting results. American children tend strongly to institutional
activities, only about thirty per cent of all not having belonged to
some such organization. Imitation plays a very important rôle, and
girls take far more kindly than boys to societies organized by adults
for their benefit. They are also more governed by adult and altruistic
motives in forming their organizations, while boys are nearer to
primitive man. Before ten comes the period of free spontaneous
imitation of every form of adult institution. The child reproduces
sympathetically miniature copies of the life around him. On a farm,
his play is raking, threshing, building barns, or on the seashore he
makes ships and harbors. In general, he plays family, store, church,
and chooses officers simply because adults do. The feeling of caste,
almost absent in the young, culminates about ten and declines
thereafter. From ten to fourteen, however, associations assume a new
character; boys especially cease to imitate adult organizations and
tend to form social units characteristic of lower stages of human
evolution--pirates, robbers, soldiers, lodges, and other savage
reversionary combinations, where the strongest and boldest is the
leader. They build huts, wear feathers and tomahawks as badges, carry
knives and toy-pistols, make raids and sell the loot. Cowards alone,
together they fear nothing. Their imagination is perhaps inflamed by
flash literature and "penny-dreadfuls." Such associations often break
out in decadent country communities where, with fewer and feebler
offspring, lax notions of family discipline prevail and hoodlumism is
the direct result of the passing of the rod. These barbaric societies
have their place and give vigor; but if unreduced later, as in many
unsettled portions of this country, a semisavage state of society
results. At twelve the predatory function is normally subordinated,
and if it is not it becomes dangerous, because the members are no
longer satisfied with mere play, but are stronger and abler to do
harm, and the spice of danger and its fascination may issue in crime.
Athleticism is now the form into which these wilder instincts can be
best transmuted, and where they find harmless and even wholesome vent.
Another change early in adolescence is the increased number of social,
literary, and even philanthropic organizations and institutions for
mutual help--perhaps against vice, for having a good time, or for
holding picnics and parties. Altruism now begins to make itself felt
as a motive.
_Student life and organizations._ Student life is perhaps the best of
all fields, unworked though it is, for studying the natural history of
adolescence. Its modern record is over eight hundred years old and it
is marked with the signatures of every age, yet has essential features
that do not vary. Cloister and garrison rules have never been enforced
even in the hospice, bursa, inn, "house," "hall," or dormitory, and
_in loco parentis_ [In place of a parent] practises are impossible,
especially with large numbers. The very word "school" means leisure,
and in a world of toil and moil suggests paradise. Some have urged
that _élite_ youth, exempt from the struggle to live and left to the
freedom of their own inclinations, might serve as a biological and
ethnic compass to point out the goal of human destiny. But the
spontaneous expressions of this best age and condition of life, with
no other occupation than their own development, have shown reversions
as often as progress. The rupture of home ties stimulates every wider
vicarious expression of the social instinct. Each taste and trait can
find congenial companionship in others and thus be stimulated to more
intensity and self-consciousness. Very much that has been hitherto
repressed in the adolescent soul is now reënforced by association and
may become excessive and even aggressive. While many of the
race-correlates of childhood are lost, those of this stage are more
accessible in savage and sub-savage life. Freedom is the native air
and vital breath of student life. The sense of personal liberty is
absolutely indispensable for moral maturity; and just as truth can not
be found without the possibility of error, so the _posse non peccare_
[Ability not to sin] precedes the _non posse peccare_, [Inability to
sin] and professors must make abroad application of the rule _abusus
non tollit usum_ [Abuse does not do away with use]. The student must
have much freedom to be lazy, make his own minor morals, vent his
disrespect for what he can see no use in, be among strangers to act
himself out and form a personality of his own, be baptized with the
revolutionary and skeptical spirit, and go to extremes at the age when
excesses teach wisdom with amazing rapidity, if he is to become a true
knight of the spirit and his own master. Ziegler[29] frankly told
German students that about one-tenth of them would be morally lost in
this process, but insisted that on the whole more good was done than
by restraint; for, he said, "youth is now in the stage of Schiller's
bell when it was molten metal."
Of all safeguards I believe a rightly cultivated sense of honor is the
most effective at this age. Sadly as the written code of student honor
in all lands needs revision, and partial, freaky, and utterly
perverted, tainted and cowardly as it often is, it really means what
Kant expressed in the sublime precept, "Thou canst because thou
oughtest." Fichte said that _Faulheit, Feigheit_, and _Falschheit_
[Laziness, cowardice, falsehood] were the three dishonorable things
for students. If they would study the history and enter into the
spirit of their own fraternities, they would often have keener and
broader ideas of honor to which they are happily so sensitive. If
professors made it always a point of honor to confess and never to
conceal the limitation of their knowledge, would scorn all pretense of
it, place credit for originality frankly where it belongs, teach no
creeds they do not profoundly believe, or topics in which they are not
interested, and withhold nothing from those who want the truth, they
could from this vantage with more effect bring students to feel that
the laziness that, while outwardly conforming, does no real inner
work; that getting a diploma, as a professor lately said, an average
student could do, on one hour's study a day; living beyond one's
means, and thus imposing a hardship on parents greater than the talent
of the son justifies; accepting stipends not needed, especially to the
deprivation of those more needy; using dishonest ways of securing rank
in studies or positions on teams, or social standing, are, one and
all, not only ungentlemanly but cowardly and mean, and the axe would
be laid at the root of the tree. Honor should impel students to go
nowhere where they conceal their college, their fraternity, or even
their name; to keep themselves immaculate from all contact with that
class of women which, Ziegler states, brought twenty-five per cent of
the students of the University of Berlin in a single year to
physicians; to remember that other's sisters are as cherished as their
own; to avoid those sins against confiding innocence which cry for
vengeance, as did Valentine against Faust, and which strengthen the
hate of social classes and make mothers and sisters seem tedious
because low ideas of womanhood have been implanted, and which give a
taste for mucky authors that reek with suggestiveness; and to avoid
the waste of nerve substance and nerve weakness in ways which Ibsen
and Tolstoi have described. These things are the darkest blot on the
honor of youth.
_Associations for youth, devised or guided by adults._ Here we enter a
very different realm. Forbush[30] undertakes an analysis of many such
clubs which he divides according to their purpose into nine chief
classes: physical training, handicraft, literary, social, civic and
patriotic, science-study, hero-love, ethical, religious. These he
classifies as to age of the boys, his purview generally ending at
seventeen; discusses and tabulates the most favorable number, the
instincts chiefly utilized, the kinds of education gained in each and
its percentage of interest, and the qualities developed. He commends
Riis's mode of pulling the safety-valve of a rather dangerous boy-gang
by becoming an adult honorary member, and interpreting the impulsions
of this age in the direction of adventure instead of in that of
mischief. He reminds us that nearly one-third of the inhabitants of
America are adolescents, that 3,000,000 are boys between twelve and
sixteen, "that the do-called heathen people are, whatever their age,
all in the adolescent stage of life."
A few American societies of this class we may briefly characterize as
follows:
(a) Typical of a large class of local juvenile clubs is the "Captains
of Ten," originally for boys of from eight to fourteen, and with a
later graduate squad of those over fifteen. The "Ten" are the fingers;
and whittling, scrap-book making, mat-weaving, etc., are taught. The
motto is, "The hand of the diligent shall bear rule"; its watchword is
"Loyalty"; and the prime objects are "to promote a spirit of loyalty
to Christ among the boys of the club," and to learn about and work for
Christ's kingdom. The members wear a silver badge; have an annual
photograph; elect their leaders; vote their money to missions (on
which topic they hold meetings); act Bible stories in costume; hear
stories and see scientific experiments; enact a Chinese school; write
articles for the children's department of religious journals; develop
comradeship, and "have a good time."
(b) The Agassiz Association, founded in 1875 "to encourage personal
work in natural science," now numbers some 25,000 members, with
chapters distributed all over the country, and was said by the late
Professor Hyatt to include "the largest number of persons ever bound
together for the purpose of mutual help in the study of nature." It
furnishes practical courses of study in the sciences; has local
chapters in thousands of towns and cities in this and other countries;
publishes a monthly organ, The Swiss Cross, to facilitate
correspondence and exchange of specimens; has a small endowment, a
badge, is incorporated, and is animated by a spirit akin to that of
University Extension; and, although not exclusively for young people,
is chiefly sustained by them.
(c) The Catholic Total Abstinence Union is a strong, well-organized,
and widely extended society, mostly composed of young men. The pledge
required of all members explains its object: "I promise with the
Divine assistance and in honor of the Sacred Thirst and the Agony of
our Saviour, to abstain from all intoxicating drinks and to prevent as
much as possible by advice and example the sin of intemperance in
others and to discountenance the drinking customs of society." A
general convention of the Union has been held annually since 1877.
(d) The Princely Knights of Character Castle is an organization
founded in 1895 for boys from twelve to eighteen to "inculcate,
disseminate, and practise the principles of heroism--endurance--love,
purity, and patriotism." The central incorporated castle grants
charters to local castles, directs the ritual and secret work. Its
officers are supreme prince, patriarch, scribes, treasurer, director,
with captain of the guard, watchman, porter, keeper of the dungeon,
musician, herald, and favorite son. The degrees of the secret work are
shepherd lad, captive, viceroy, brother, son, prince, knight, and
royal knight. There are jewels, regalia, paraphernalia, and
initiations. The pledge for the first degree is, "I hereby promise and
pledge that I will abstain from the use of intoxicating liquor in any
form as a beverage; that I will not use profane or improper language;
that I will discourage the use of tobacco in any form; that I will
strive to live pure in body and mind; that I will obey all rules and
regulations of the order and not reveal any of the secrets in any
way." There are benefits, reliefs, passwords, a list of offenses and
penalties.
(e) Some 35,000 Bands of Mercy are now organized under the direction
of the American Humane Education Society. The object of the
organization is to cultivate kindness to animals and sympathy with the
poor and oppressed. The prevention of cruelty in driving, cattle
transportation, humane methods of killing, care for the sick and
abandoned or overworked animals, are the themes of most of its
voluminous literature. It has badges, hymnbooks, cards, and
certificates of membership, and a motto, "Kindness, Justice, and Mercy
to All." Its pledge is, "I will try to be kind to all harmless living
creatures, and try to protect them from cruel usage," and is intended
to include human as well as dumb creatures. The founder and secretary,
with great and commendable energy, has instituted prize contests for
speaking on humane subjects in schools, and has printed and circulated
prize stories; since the incorporation of the society in 1868, he has
been indefatigable in collecting funds, speaking before schools and
colleges, and prints fifty to sixty thousand copies of the monthly
organ. In addition to its mission of sentiment, and to make it more
effective, this organization clearly needs to make more provision for
the intellectual element by well-selected or constructed courses, or
at least references on the life, history, habits, and instincts of
animals, and it also needs more recognition that modern charity is a
science as well as a virtue.
(f) The Coming Men of America, although organized only in 1894, now
claims to be the greatest chartered secret society for boys and young
men in the country. It began two years earlier in a lodge started by a
nineteen-year-old boy in Chicago in imitation of such ideas of Masons,
Odd-Fellows, etc., as its founder could get from his older brother,
and its meetings were first held in a basement. On this basis older
heads aided in its development, so that it is a good example of the
boy-imitative helped out by parents. The organization is now
represented in every State and Territory, and boys travel on its
badge. There is an official organ, The Star, a badge, sign, and a
secret sign language called "bestography." Its secret ritual work is
highly praised. Its membership is limited to white boys under
twenty-one.
(g) The first Harry Wadsworth Club was established in 1871 as a
result of E.E. Hale's Ten Times One, published the year before. Its
motto is, "Look up, and not down; look forward, and not back; look
out, and not in; lend a hand," or "Faith, Hope, and Charity." Its
organ is the Ten Times One Record; its badge is a silver Maltese
cross. Each club may organize as it will, and choose its own name,
provided it accepts the above motto. Its watchword is, "In His Name."
It distributes charities, conducts a Noonday Rest, outings in the
country, and devotes itself to doing good.[31]
[Footnote 1: Tarde: L'Opposition Universelle. Alcan, Paris, 1897, p.
461.]
[Footnote 2: The Adolescent at Home and in School. By E. G. Lancaster.
Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 1899, p. 1039.]
[Footnote 3: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence. Pedagogical
Seminary, July, 1897, vol. 5, p. 87.]
[Footnote 4: Study of Boys Entering the Adolescent Period of Life.
North Western Monthly, November, 1897, vol. 8, pp. 248-250, and a
series thereafter.]
[Footnote 5: The Suggestibility of Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
December, 1896, vol. 4, p. 211]
[Footnote 6: Characteristics of the Best Teacher as Recognized by
Children. By H.E. Kratz. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1896, vol. 3, pp.
413-418. See also The High School Teacher from the Pupil's Point of
View, by W.F. Book. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1905, vol. 12,
pp. 239-288.]
[Footnote 7: A Study of the Teacher's Influence. Pedagogical Seminary,
December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 492-525.]
[Footnote 8: Children's Ideals. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900,
vol. 7, pp. 3-12]
[Footnote 9: Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study,
vol. 2, No. 2, 1896, pp. 41-46.]
[Footnote 10: Children's Ambitions. By H.M. Willard. Barnes's Studies
in Education, vol. 2, pp. 243-258. (Privately printed by Earl Barnes,
4401 Sansom Street, Philadelphia.)]
[Footnote 11: Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study,
October, 1898, vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 131-144.]
[Footnote 12: A Study in Juvenile Ethics. Pedagogical Seminary, June,
1903, vol. 10, pp. 239-266]
[Footnote 13: Die Ideale der Kinder. Zeitschrift für pädagogische
Psychologie, Pathologie und Hygiene, Jahrgang 3, Heft 1, pp. 38-64.]
[Footnote 14: The Psychology of Ownership, Pedagogical Seminary,
December, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 421-470.]
[Footnote 15: Property: Its Origin and Development. Chas. Scribner's
Sons, 1892.]
[Footnote 16: Money-Sense of Children. Will S. Monroe. Pedagogical
Seminary, March, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 152-156]
[Footnote 17: A Study of Children's Rights, as Seen by Themselves. By
M.E. Schallenberger. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1894, vol. 3, pp.
87-96.]
[Footnote 18: Children's Attitude toward Law. By E. M Darrah. Barnes's
Studies in Education, vol. 1, pp. 213-216. (Stanford University,
1897.) G. E. Stechert and Co., New York.]
[Footnote 19: Class Punishment. By Caroline Frear. Barnes's Studies in
Education, vol. 1, pp. 332-337.]
[Footnote 20: Children's Attitude toward Punishment for Weak Time
Sense. By D.S. Snedden. Barnes's Studies in Education, vol. 1, pp.
344-351]
[Footnote 21: Ueber Einzel- und Gesamtleistung des Schulkindes. Archiv
für die gesamte Psychologie, 1 Band, 2 and 3 Heft, 1903, pp. 276-416]
[Footnote 22: Development of the Social Consciousness of Children. By
Will S. Monroe. North-Western Monthly, September, 1898, vol. 9, pp.
31-36.]
[Footnote 23: Bohannon: The Only Child in a Family. Pedagogical
Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 475-496.]
[Footnote 24: J. Delitsch: Über Schülerfreundschaften in einer
Volksschulklasse, Die Kinderfehler. Fünfter Jahrgang, Mai, 1900, pp.
150-163.]
[Footnote 25: On Some Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude.
Pedagogical Seminary, April 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69]
[Footnote 26: A. Rauber: Homo Sapiens Ferus. J. Brehse, Leipzig,
1888. See also my Social Aspects of Education; Pedagogical Seminary,
March, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 81-91. Also Kropotkin: Mutual Aid a Factor of
Evolution. W. Heinemann, London, 1902.]
[Footnote 27: Rudimentary Society among Boys, by John H. Johnson,
McDonogh, Md. McDonogh School, 1983, reprinted from Johns Hopkins
University Studies Series 2 (Historical and Political Studies, vol. 2,
No. 11).]
[Footnote 28: The Institutional Activities of American Children.
American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 425-448.]
[Footnote 29: Der deutsche Student am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. 6th
Ed. Göschen, Leipzig, 1896.]
[Footnote 30: The Social Pedagogy of Boyhood. Pedagogical Seminary,
October, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 307-346. See also his The Boy Problem, with
an introduction by G. Stanley Hall, The Pilgrim Press, Boston, 1901,
p. 194. Also Winifred Buck (Boys' Self-governing Clubs, Macmillan, New
York, 1903), who thinks ten million dollars could be used in training
club advisers who should have the use of schools and grounds after
hours and evenings, conduct excursions, organize games, etc., but
avoid all direct teaching and book work generally. This writer thinks
such an institution would soon result in a marked increase of public
morality and an augmented demand for technical instruction, and that
for the advisers themselves the work would be the best training for
high positions in politics and reform. Clubs of boys from eight to
sixteen or eighteen must not admit age disparities of more than two
years.]
[Footnote 31: See Young People's Societies, by L.W. Bacon. D. Appleton
and Co., New York, 1900, p. 265. Also, F.G. Cressey: The Church and
Young Men. Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1903, p. 233.]
* * * * *
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.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER XI
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS
Equal opportunities of higher education now open--Brings new dangers to
women--Ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the sexes
should and do diverge--Different interests--Sex tension--Girls more
mature than boys at the same age--Radical psychic and physiological
differences between the sexes--The bachelor women--Needed
reconstruction--Food--Sleep--Regimen--Manners--Religion--Regularity--The
topics for a girls' curriculum--The eternal womanly.
The long battle of woman and her friends for equal educational and
other opportunities is essentially won all along the line. Her
academic achievements have forced conservative minds to admit that her
intellect is not inferior to that of man. The old cloistral seclusion
and exclusion is forever gone and new ideals are arising. It has been
a noble movement and is a necessary first stage of woman's
emancipation. The caricatured maidens "as beautiful as an angel but as
silly as a goose" who come from the kitchen to the husband's study to
ask how much is two times two, and are told it is four for a man and
three for a woman, and go back with a happy "Thank you, my dear";
those who love to be called baby, and appeal to instincts half
parental in their lovers and husbands; those who find all the sphere
they desire in a doll's house, like Nora's, and are content to be
men's pets; whose ideal is the clinging vine, and who take no interest
in the field where their husbands struggle, will perhaps soon survive
only as a diminishing remainder. Marriages do still occur where
woman's ignorance and helplessness seem to be the chief charm to men,
and may be happy, but such cases are no farther from the present ideal
and tendency on the one hand than on the other are those which consist
in intellectual partnerships, in which there is no segregation of
interests but which are devoted throughout to joint work or enjoyment.
A typical contemporary writer[1] thinks the question whether a girl
shall receive a college education is very like the same question for
boys. Even if the four K's, _Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen,_ and _Kleider_
(which may be translated by the four C's, _Church, Children, Cooking,_
and _Clothes_), are her vocation, college may help her. The best
training for a young woman is not the old college course that has
proven unfit for young men. Most college men look forward to a
professional training as few women do. The latter have often greater
sympathy, readiness of memory, patience with technic, skill in
literature and language, but lack originality, are not attracted by
unsolved problems, are less motor-minded; but their training is just
as serious and important as that of men. The best results are where
the sexes are brought closer together, because their separation
generally emphasizes for girls the technical training for the
profession of womanhood. With girls, literature and language take
precedence over science; expression stands higher than action; the
scholarship may be superior, but is not effective; the educated woman
"is likely to master technic rather than art; method, rather than
substance. She may know a good deal, but she can do nothing." In most
separate colleges for women, old traditions are more prevalent than in
colleges for men. In the annex system, she does not get the best of
the institution. By the coeducation method, "young men are more
earnest, better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civilized
than under monastic conditions. The women do more work in a more
natural way, with better perspective and with saner incentives than
when isolated from the influence of the society of men. There is less
silliness and folly where a man is not a novelty. In coeducational
institutions of high standards, frivolous conduct or scandals of any
form are rarely known. The responsibility for decorum is thrown from
the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility."
The character of college work has not been lowered but raised by
coeducation, despite the fact that most of the new, small, weak
colleges are coeducational. Social strain, Jordan thinks, is easily
regulated, and the dormitory system is on the whole best, because the
college atmosphere is highly prized. The reasons for the present
reaction against coeducation are ascribed partly to the dislike of the
idle boy to have girls excel him and see his failures, or because
rowdyish tendencies are checked by the presence of women. Some think
that girls do not help athletics; that men count for most because they
are more apt to be heard from later; but the most serious new argument
is the fear that woman's standards and amateurishness will take the
place of specialization. Women take up higher education because they
like it; men because their careers depend upon it. Hence their studies
are more objective and face the world as it is. In college the women
do as well as men, but not in the university. The half-educated woman
as a social factor has produced many soft lecture courses and cheap
books. This is an argument for the higher education of the sex.
Finally, Jordan insists that coeducation leads to marriage, and he
believes that its best basis is common interest and intellectual
friendship.
From the available data it seems, however, that the more scholastic
the education of women, the fewer children and the harder, more
dangerous, and more dreaded is parturition, and the less the ability
to nurse children. Not intelligence, but education by present man-made
ways, is inversely as fecundity. The sooner and the more clearly this
is recognized as a universal rule, not, of course, without many
notable and much vaunted exceptions, the better for our civilization.
For one, I plead with no whit less earnestness and conviction than any
of the feminists, and indeed with more fervor because on nearly all
their grounds and also on others, for the higher education of women,
and would welcome them to every opportunity available to men if they
can not do better; but I would open to their election another
education, which every competent judge would pronounce more favorable
to motherhood, under the influence of female principals who do not
publicly say that it is "not desirable" that women students should
study motherhood, because they do not know whether they will marry;
who encourage them to elect "no special subjects because they are
women," and who think infant psychology "foolish."
Various interesting experiments in coeducation are now being made in
England.[2] Some are whole-hearted and encourage the girls to do
almost everything that the boys do in both study and play. There are
girl prefects; cricket teams are formed sometimes of both sexes, but
often the sexes matched against each other; one play-yard, a dual
staff of teachers, and friendships between the boys and girls are not
tabooed, etc. In other schools the sexes meet perhaps in recitation
only, have separate rooms for study, entrances, play-grounds, and
their relations are otherwise restricted. The opinion of English
writers generally favors coeducation up to about the beginning of the
teens, and from there on views are more divided. It is admitted that,
if there is a very great preponderance of either sex over the other,
the latter is likely to lose its characteristic qualities, and
something of this occurs where the average age of one sex is
distinctly greater than that of the other. On the other hand, several
urge that, where age and numbers are equal, each sex is more inclined
to develop the best qualities peculiar to itself in the presence of
the other.
Some girls are no doubt far fitter for boys' studies and men's careers
than others. Coeducation, too, generally means far more assimilation
of girls' to boys' ways and work than conversely. Many people believe
that girls either gain or are more affected by coeducation, especially
in the upper grades, than boys. It is interesting, however, to observe
the differences that still persist. Certain games, like football and
boxing, girls can not play; they do not fight; they are not flogged or
caned as English boys are when their bad marks foot up beyond a
certain aggregate; girls are more prone to cliques; their punishments
must be in appeals to school sentiment, to which they are exceedingly
sensitive; it is hard for them to bear defeat in games with the same
dignity and unruffled temper as boys; it is harder for them to accept
the school standards of honor that condemn the tell-tale as a sneak,
although they soon learn this. They may be a little in danger of being
roughened by boyish ways and especially by the crude and unique
language, almost a dialect in itself, prevalent among schoolboys.
Girls are far more prone to overdo; boys are persistingly lazy and
idle. Girls are content to sit and have the subject-matter pumped into
them by recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while boys are more
inspired by being told to do things and make tests and experiments. In
this, girls are often quite at sea. One writer speaks of a certain
feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools
soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that singing classes
the voices of each sex are better in quality for the presence of the
other. In many topics of all kinds boys and girls are interested in
different aspects of the same theme, and therefore the work is
broadened. In manual training, girls excel in all artistic work; boys,
in carpentry. Girls can be made not only less noxiously sentimental
and impulsive, but their conduct tends to become more thoughtful; they
can be made to feel responsibility for bestowing their praise aright
and thus influencing the tone of the school. Calamitous as it world be
for the education of boys beyond a certain age to be entrusted
entirely or chiefly to women, it would be less so for that of girls to
be given entirely to men. Perhaps the great women teachers, whose life
and work have made them a power with girls comparable to that of
Arnold and Thring with boys, are dying out. Very likely economic
motives are too dominant for this problem to be settled on its merits
only. Finally, several writers mention the increased healthfulness of
moral tone. The vices that infest boys' schools, which Arnold thought
a quantity constantly changing with every class, are diminished.
Healthful thoughts of sex, less subterranean and base imaginings on
the one hand, and less gushy sentimentality on the other, are favored.
For either sex to be a copy of the other is to be weakened, and each
comes normally to respect more and to prefer its own sex.
Not to pursue this subject further here, it is probable that many of
the causes for the facts set forth are very different and some of them
almost diametrically opposite in the two sexes. Hard as it is _per
se_, it is after all a comparatively easy matter to educate boys. They
are less peculiarly responsive in mental tone to the physical and
psychic environment, tend more strongly and early to special
interests, and react more vigorously against the obnoxious elements of
their surroundings. This is truest of the higher education, and more
so in proportion as the tendencies of the age are toward special and
vocational training. Woman, as we saw, in every fiber of her soul and
body is a more generic creature than man, nearer to the race, and
demands more and more with advancing age an education that is
essentially liberal and humanistic. This is progressively hard when
the sexes differentiate in the higher grades. Moreover, nature decrees
that with advancing civilization the sexes shall not approximate, but
differentiate, and we shall probably be obliged to carry sex
distinctions, at least of method, into many if not most of the topics
of the higher education. Now that woman has by general consent
attained the right to the best that man has, she must seek a training
that fits her own nature as well or better. So long as she strives to
be manlike she will be inferior and a pinchbeck imitation, but she
must develop a new sphere that shall be like the rich field of the
cloth of gold for the best instincts of her nature.
Divergence is most marked and sudden in the pubescent period--in the
early teens. At this age, by almost world-wide consent, boys and girls
separate for a time, and lead their lives during this most critical
period more or less apart, at least for a few years, until the ferment
of mind and body which results in maturity of functions then born and
culminating in nubility, has done its work. The family and the home
abundantly recognize this tendency. At twelve or fourteen, brothers
and sisters develop a life more independent of each other than before.
Their home occupations differ as do their plays, games, tastes.
History, anthropology, and sociology, a well as home life, abundantly
illustrate this. This is normal and biological. What our schools and
other institutions should do, is not to obliterate these differences
but to make boys more manly and girls more womanly. We should respect
the law of sexual differences, and not forget that motherhood is a
very different thing from fatherhood. Neither sex should copy nor set
patterns to the other, but all parts should be played harmoniously and
clearly in the great sex symphony.
I have here less to say against coeducation in college, still less in
university grades after the maturity which comes at eighteen or twenty
has been achieved; but it is high time to ask ourselves whether the
theory and practise of identical coeducation, especially in the high
school, which has lately been carried to a greater extreme in this
country than the rest of the world recognizes, has not brought certain
grave dangers, and whether it does not interfere with the natural
differentiations seen everywhere else. I recognize, of course, the
great argument of economy. Indeed, we should save money and effort
could we unite churches of not too diverse creeds. We could thus give
better preaching, music, improve the edifice, etc. I am by no means
ready to advocate the radical abolition of coeducation, but we can
already sum up in a rough, brief way our account of profit and loss
with it. On the one hand, no doubt each sex develops some of its own
best qualities best in the presence of the other, but the question
still remains, how much, when, and in what way, identical coeducation
secures this end?
As has been said, girls and boys are often interested in different
aspects of the same topic, and this may have a tendency to broaden the
view-point of both and bring it into sympathy with that of the other,
but the question still remains whether one be not too much attracted
to the sphere of the other, especially girls to that of boys. No doubt
some girls become a little less gushy, their conduct more thoughtful,
and their sense of responsibility greater; for one of woman's great
functions, which is that of bestowing praise aright, is increased.
There is also much evidence that certain boys' vices are mitigated;
they are made more urbane and their thoughts of sex made more
healthful. In some respects boys are stimulated to good scholarship by
girls, who in many schools and topics excel them. We should ask,
however, What is nature's way at this stage of life? Whether boys, in
order to be well virified later, ought not to be so boisterous and
even rough as to be at times unfit companions for girls; or whether,
on the other hand, girls to be best matured ought not to have their
sentimental periods of instability, especially when we venture to
raise the question, whether for a girl in the early teens, when her
health for her whole life depends upon normalizing the lunar month,
there is not something unhygienic, unnatural, not to say a little
monstrous, in school associations with boys when she must suppress and
conceal her feelings and instinctive promptings at those times which
suggest withdrawing, to let nature do its beautiful work of
inflorescence. It is a sacred time of reverent exemption from the hard
struggle of existence in the world and from mental effort in the
school. Medical specialists, many of the best of whom now insist that
through this period she should be, as it were, "turned out to grass,"
or should lie fallow, so far as intellectual efforts go, one-fourth
the time, no doubt often go too far, but their unanimous voice should
not entirely be disregarded.
It is not this, however, that I have chiefly in mind here, but the
effects of too familiar relations and, especially, of the identical
work, treatment, and environment of the modern school.
We have now at least eight good and independent statistical studies
which show that the ideals of boys from ten years on are almost always
those of their own sex, while girls' ideals are increasingly of the
opposite sex, or those of men. That the ideals of pubescent girls are
not found in the great and noble women of the world or in their
literature, but more and more in men, suggests a divorce between the
ideals adopted and the line of life best suited to the interests of
the race. We are not furnished in our public schools with adequate
womanly ideals in history or literature. The new love of freedom which
women have lately felt inclines girls to abandon the home for the
office. "It surely can hardly be called an ideal education for women
that permits eighteen out of one hundred college girls to state boldly
that they would rather be men than women." More than one-half of the
schoolgirls in these censuses choose male ideals, as if those of
femininity are disintegrating. A recent writer,[3] in view of this
fact, states that "unless there is a change of trend, we shall soon
have a female sex without a female character." In the progressive
numerical feminization of our schools most teachers, perhaps naturally
and necessarily, have more or less masculine ideals, and this does not
encourage the development of those that constitute the glory of
womanhood. "At every age from eight to sixteen, girls named from three
to twenty more ideals than boys." "These facts indicate a condition of
diffused interests and lack of clear-cut purposes and a need of
integration."
When we turn to boys the case is different. In most public high
schools girls preponderate, especially in the upper classes, and in
many of them the boys that remain are practically in a girls' school,
sometimes taught chiefly, if not solely, by women teachers at an age
when strong men should be in control more than at any other period of
life. Boys need a different discipline and moral regimen and
atmosphere. They also need a different method of work. Girls excel
them in learning and memorization, accepting studies upon suggestion
or authority, but are often quite at sea when set to make tests and
experiments that give individuality and a chance for self-expression,
which is one of the best things in boyhood. Girls preponderate in our
overgrown high school Latin and algebra, because custom and tradition
and, perhaps, advice incline them to it. They preponderate in English
and history classes more often, let us hope, from inner inclination.
The boy sooner grows restless in a curriculum where form takes
precedence over content. He revolts at much method with meager matter.
He craves utility, and when all these instincts are denied, without
knowing what is the matter, he drops out of school, when with robust
tone and with a truly boy life, such as prevails at Harrow, Eton, and
Rugby, he would have fought it through and have done well. This
feminization of the school spirit, discipline, and personnel is bad
for boys. Of course, on the whole, perhaps, they are made more
gentlemanly, more at ease, their manners improved, and all this to a
woman teacher seems excellent, but something is the matter with the
boy in early teens who can be truly called "a perfect gentleman." That
should come later, when the brute and animal element have had
opportunity to work themselves off in a healthful normal way. They
still have football to themselves, and are the majority perhaps in
chemistry, and sometimes in physics, but there is danger of a settled
eviration. The segregation, which even some of our schools are now
attempting, is always in some degree necessary for full and complete
development. Just as the boys' language is apt to creep into that of
the girl, so girls' interests, ways, standards and tastes, which are
crude at this age, sometimes attract boys out of their orbit. While
some differences are emphasized by contact, others are compromised.
Boys tend to grow content with mechanical, memorized work and,
excelling on the lines of girls' qualities, fail to develop those of
their own. There is a little charm and bloom rubbed off the ideal of
girlhood by close contact, and boyhood seems less ideal to girls at
close range. In place of the mystic attraction of the other sex that
has inspired so much that is best in the world, familiar comradeship
brings a little disenchantment. The impulse to be at one's best in the
presence of the other sex prows lax and sex tension remits, and each
comes to feel itself seen through, so that there is less motive to
indulge in the ideal conduct which such motives inspire, because the
call for it is incessant. This disillusioning weakens the motivation
to marriage sometimes on both sides, when girls grow careless in their
dress and too negligent in their manners, one of the best schools of
woman's morals; and when boys lose all restraints which the presence
of girls usually enforces, there is a subtle deterioration. Thus, I
believe, although of course it is impossible to prove, that this is
one of the factors of a decreasing percentage of marriage among
educated young men and women.
At eighteen or twenty the girl normally reaches a stage of first
maturity when her ideas of life are amazingly keen and true; when, if
her body is developed, she can endure a great deal; when she is
nearest, perhaps, the ideal of feminine beauty and perfection. Of this
we saw illustrations in Chapter VIII. In our environment, however,
there is a little danger that this age once well past there will
slowly arise a slight sense of aimlessness or lassitude, unrest,
uneasiness, as if one were almost unconsciously feeling along the wall
for a door to which the key was not at hand. Thus some lose their
bloom and, yielding to the great danger of young womanhood, slowly
lapse to a anxious state of expectancy, or desire something not within
their reach, and so the diathesis of restlessness slowly supervenes.
The best thing about college life for girls is, perhaps, that it
postpones this incipient disappointment; but it is a little pathetic
to me to read, as I have lately done, the class letters of hundreds of
girl graduates, out of college one, two, or three years, turning a
little to art, music, travel, teaching, charity work, one after the
other, or trying to find something to which they can devote
themselves, some cause, movement, occupation, where their capacity for
altruism and self-sacrifice can find a field. The tension is almost
imperceptible, perhaps quite unconscious. It is everywhere overborne
by a keen interest in life, by a desire to know the world at first
hand, while susceptibilities are at their height. The apple of
intelligence has been plucked at perhaps a little too great cost of
health. The purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back.
The girl wishes to know a good deal more of the world and perfect her
own personality, and would not marry, although every cell of her body
and every unconscious impulse points to just that end. Soon, it may be
in five or ten years or more, the complexion of ill health is in these
notes, or else life has been adjusted to independence and
self-support. Many of these bachelor women are magnificent in mind and
body, but they lack wifehood and yet more--motherhood.
In fine, we should use these facts as a stimulus to ask more
searchingly the question whether the present system of higher
education for both sexes is not lacking in some very essential
elements, and if so what these are. Indeed, considering the facts that
in our social system man makes the advances and that woman is by
nature more prone than man to domesticity and parenthood, it is not
impossible that men's colleges do more to unfit for these than do
those for women. One cause may be moral. Ethics used to be taught as a
practical power for life and reënforced by religious motives. Now it
is theoretical and speculative and too often led captive by
metaphysical and epistemological speculations. Sometimes girls work or
worry more over studies and ideals than is good for their
constitution, and boys grow idle and indifferent, and this
proverbially tends to bad habits. Perhaps fitting for college has been
too hard at the critical age of about eighteen, and requirements of
honest, persevering work during college years too little enforced, or
grown irksome by physiological reaction of lassitude from the strain
of fitting and entering. Again, girls mature earlier than boys; and
the latter who have been educated with them tend to certain elements
of maturity and completeness too early in life, and their growth
period is shortened or its momentum lessened by an atmosphere of
femininity. Something is clearly wrong, and more so here than we have
at present any reason to think is the case among the academic male or
female youth of other lands. To see and admit that there is an evil
very real, deep, exceedingly difficult and complex in its causes, but
grave and demanding a careful reconsideration of current educational
ideas and practises, is the first step; and this every thoughtful and
well-informed mind, I believe, must now take.
It is utterly impossible without injury to hold girls to the same
standards of conduct, regularity, severe moral accountability, and
strenuous mental work that boys need. The privileges and immunities of
her sex are inveterate, and with these the American girl in the middle
teens fairly tingles with a new-born consciousness. Already she
occasionally asserts herself in the public high school against a male
teacher or principal who seeks to enforce discipline by methods boys
respect, in a way that suggests that the time is at hand when
popularity with her sex will be as necessary in a successful teacher
as it is in the pulpit. In these interesting oases where girl
sentiment has made itself felt in school it has generally carried
parents, committeemen, the press, and public sentiment before it, and
has already made a precious little list of martyrs whom, were I an
educational pope, I would promptly canonize. The progressive
feminization of secondary education works its subtle demoralization on
the male teachers who remain. Public sentiment would sustain them in
many parental exactions with boys which it disallows in mixed classes.
It is hard, too, for male principals of schools with only female
teachers not to suffer some deterioration in the moral tone of their
virility and to lose in the power to cope successfully with men. Not
only is this often confessed and deplored, but the incessant
compromises the best male teachers of mixed classes must make with
their pedagogic convictions in both teaching and discipline make the
profession less attractive to manly men of large caliber and of sound
fiber. Again, the recent rapid increase of girls, the percentage of
which to population in high schools has in many communities doubled in
but little more than a decade, almost necessarily involves a decline
in the average quality of girls, perhaps as much greater for them as
compared with boys as their increase has been greater. When but few
were found in these institutions they were usually picked girls with
superior tastes and ability, but now the average girl of the rank and
file is, despite advanced standard, of admission, of an order natively
lower. From this deterioration both boys and teachers suffer, even
though the greatest good for the greatest number may be enhanced. Once
more, it is generally admitted that girls in good boarding-schools,
where evenings, food, and regimen are controlled, are in better health
than day pupils with social, church, and domestic duties and perhaps
worries to which boys are less subject. This is the nascent stage of
periodicity to the slow normalization of which, during these few
critical years, everything that interferes should yield. Some kind of
tacit recognition of this is indispensable, but in mixed classes every
form of such concession is baffling and demoralizing to boys.
The women who really achieve the higher culture should make it their
"cause" or "mission" to work out the new humanistic or liberal
education which the old college claimed to stand for and which now
needs radical reconstruction to meet the demands of modern life. In
science they should aim to restore the humanistic elements of its
history, biography, its popular features at their best, and its
applications in all the more non-technical fields, as described in
Chapter XII, and feel responsibility not to let the moral, religious,
and poetic aspects of nature be lost in utilities. Woman should be
true to her generic nature and take her stand against all premature
specialization, and when the _Zeitgeist_ [Spirit of the Times] insists
on specialized training for occupative pursuits without waiting for
broad foundations to be laid, she should resist all these influences
that make for psychological precocity. _Das Ewig-Weibliche_ [The
eternal womanly] is no iridescent fiction but a very definable
reality, and means perennial youth. It means that woman at her best
never outgrows adolescence as man does, but lingers in, magnifies and
glorifies this culminating stage of life with its all-sided interests,
its convertibility of emotions, its enthusiasm, and zest for all that
is good, beautiful, true, and heroic. This constitutes her freshness
and charm, even in age, and makes her by nature more humanistic than
man, more sympathetic and appreciative. It is not chiefly the 70,000
superfluous Massachusetts women of the last census, but
representatives of every class and age in the 4,000 women's clubs of
this country that now find some leisure for general culture in all
fields, and in which most of them no doubt surpass their husbands.
Those who still say that men do not like women to be their mental
superiors and that no man was ever won by the attraction of intellect,
on the one hand, and those who urge that women really want husbands to
be their intellectual superiors, both misapprehend. The male in all
the orders of life is the agent of variation and tends by nature to
expertness and specialisation, without which his individuality is
incomplete. In his chosen line he would lead and be authoritative, and
he rarely seeks partnership in it in marriage. This is no subjection,
but woman instinctively respects and even reveres, and perhaps
educated woman coming to demand, it in the man of her whole-hearted
choice. This granted, man was never more plastic to woman's great work
of creating in him all the wide range of secondary sex qualities which
constitute his essential manhood. In all this, the pedagogic fathers
we teach in the history of education are most of them about as
luminous and obsolete as is patristics for the religious teacher, or
as methods of other countries are coming to be in solving our own
peculiar pedagogic problems. The relation of the academically trained
sexes is faintly typified by that of the ideal college to the ideal
university, professional or technical school. This is the harmony of
counterparts and constitutes the best basis of psychic amphimixis. For
the reinstallation of the humanistic college, the time has come when
cultivated woman ought to come forward and render vital aid. If she
does so and helps to evolve a high school and an A.B. course that is
truly liberal, it will not only fit her nature and needs far better
than anything now existing, but young men at the humanistic stage of
their own education will seek to profit by it, and she will thus repay
her debt to man in the past by aiding him to de-universitize the
college and to rescue secondary education from its gravest dangers.
But even should all this be done, coeducation would by means be thus
justified. If adolescent boys normally pass through a generalized or
even feminized stage of psychic development in which they are
peculiarly plastic to the guidance of older women who have such rare
insight into their nature, such infinite sympathy and patience with
all the symptoms of their storm and stress metamorphosis, when they
seek everything by turns and nothing long, and if young men will
forever afterward understand woman's nature better for living out more
fully this stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it is
abridged or dwarfed, it by no means follows that intimate daily and
class-room association with girls of their own age is necessary or
best. The danger of this is that the boy's instinct to assert his own
manhood will thus be made premature and excessive, that he will react
against general culture, in the capacity for which girls, who are
older than boys at the same age, naturally excel them. Companionship
and comparisons incline him to take premature refuge in some one
talent that emphasizes his psycho-sexual difference too soon. Again,
he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl classmate of his own
age, and coeducation and marriage between them are prone to violate
the important physiological law of disparity that requires the husband
to be some years the wife's senior, both in their own interests, as
maturity begins to decline to age, and in those of their offspring.
Thus the young man with his years of restraint and probation ahead,
and his inflammable desires, is best removed from the half-conscious
cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably more insistent with constant
girl companionship. If he resists this during all the years of his
apprenticeship, he grows more immune and inhibitive of it when its
proper hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor before his
time. In this side of his nature he is forever incommensurate with and
unintelligible to woman, be she even teacher, sister, or mother.
Better some risk of gross thoughts and even acts, to which phylogeny
and recapitulation so strongly incline him, than this subtle
eviration. But if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of girls'
interests, the girl is in some danger of being unduly drawn to his,
and, as we saw above, of forgetting some of the ideals of her own sex.
Riper in mind and body than her male classmate, and often excelling
him in the capacity of acquisition, nearer the age of her full
maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and callow to
fulfil the ideals of manhood normal to her age which point to older
and riper men. In all that makes sexual attraction best, a classmate
of her own age is too undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute
disenchantment, and even if engagement be dreamed of, it would be, on
her part, with unconscious reservations if not with some conscious
renunciation of ideals. Thus the boy is correct in feeling himself
understood and seen through by his girl classmates to a degree that is
sometimes quite distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself
misunderstood by and disappointed in men. Boys arrive at the
humanistic stage of culture later than girls and pass it sooner; and
to find them already there and with their greater aptitude excelling
him, is not an inviting situation, and so he is tempted to abridge or
cut it out and to hasten on and be mature and professional before his
time, for thus he gravitates toward his normal relation to her sex of
expert mastership on some bread- or fame-winning line. Of course,
these influences are not patent, demonstrable by experiment, or
measurable by statistics; but I have come to believe that, like many
other facts and laws, they have a reality and a dominance that is
all-pervasive and inescapable, and that they will ultimately prevail
over economic motives and traditions.
To be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna
conception expresses man's highest comprehension of woman's real
nature. Sexual relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are
long. The elimination of maternity is one of the great calamities, if
not diseases, of our age. Marholm[4] points out at length how art
again to-day gives woman a waspish waist with no abdomen, as if to
carefully score away every trace of her mission; usually with no child
in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated perhaps to
entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts
her to a fashion-plate painter, perhaps with suggestions of the arts
of toilet, cosmetics, and coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction
to decadent stimuli. As in the Munchausen tale, the wolf slowly ate
the running nag from behind until he found himself in the harness, so
in the disoriented woman the mistress, virtuous and otherwise, is
slowly supplanting the mother. Please she must, even though she can
not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her,
although she become thereby lax and vapid.
The more exhausted men become, whether by overwork, unnatural city
life, alcohol, recrudescent polygamic inclinations, exclusive devotion
to greed and pelf; whether they become weak, stooping, blear-eyed,
bald-headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, barbaric, and
bestial, the more they lose the power to lead woman or to arouse her
nature, which is essentially passive. Thus her perversions are his
fault. Man, before he lost the soil and piety, was not only her
protector and provider, but her priest. He not only supported and
defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admirably calculated to
receive and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. In their
inmost souls even young girls often experience disenchantment, find
men little and no heroes, and so cease to revere and begin to think
stupidly of them as they think coarsely of her. Sometimes the girlish
conceptions of men are too romantic and exalted; often the intimacy of
school and college wear off a charm, while man must not forget that
to-day he too often fails to realize the just and legitimate
expectations and ideals of women. If women confide themselves, body
and soul, less to him than he desires, it is not she, but he, who is
often chiefly to blame. Indeed, in some psychic respects, it seems as
if in human society the processes of subordinating the male to the
female, carried so far in some of the animal species, had already
begun. If he is not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is less
worshipful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to excite
and retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. Where
marriage and maternity are of less supreme interest to an increasing
number of women, there are various results, the chief of which are as
follows:
1. Women grow dollish; sink more or less consciously to man's level;
gratify his desires and even his selfish caprices, but exact in return
luxury and display, growing vain as he grows sordid; thus, while
submitting, conquering, and tyrannizing over him, content with present
worldly pleasure, unmindful of the past, the future, or the above.
This may react to intersexual antagonism until man comes to hate woman
as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider sex a wile of the
devil. Along these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the
tragedies of life.
2. The disappointed woman in whom something is dying comes to assert
her own ego and more or less consciously to make it an end, aiming to
possess and realize herself fully rather than to transmit. Despairing
of herself as a woman, she asserts her lower rights in the place of
her one great right to be loved. The desire for love may be transmuted
into the desire for knowledge, or outward achievement become a
substitute for inner content. Failing to respect herself as a
productive organism, she gives vent to personal solutions; seeks
independence; comes to know very plainly what she wants; perhaps
becomes intellectually emancipated, and substitutes science for
religion, or the doctor for the priest, with the all-sided
impressionability characteristic of her sex which, when cultivated, is
so like an awakened child. She perhaps even affects mannish ways,
unconsciously copying from those not most manly, or comes to feel that
she has been robbed of something; competes with men, but sometimes
where they are most sordid, brutish, and strongest; always expecting,
but never finding, she turns successively to art, science, literature,
and reforms; craves especially work that she can not do; and seeks
stimuli for feelings which have never found their legitimate
expression.
3. Another type, truer to woman's nature, subordinates self; goes
beyond personal happiness; adopts the motto of self-immolation; enters
a life of service, denial, and perhaps mortification, like the
Countess Schimmelmann; and perhaps becomes a devotee, a saint, and, if
need be, a martyr, but all with modesty, humility, and with a
shrinking from publicity.
In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment
of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the
above-mentioned peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the
world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their
susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at its
highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their
whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with
the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such--Stella
Klive, Mary MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff--have
been veritable epics upon woman's nature; have revealed the
characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything
is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least
unity, aim, or purpose. By and by perhaps they will see in all their
scrappy past, if not order and coherence, a justification, and then
alone will they realize that life is governed by motives deeper than
those which are conscious or even personal. This is the age when, if
ever, no girl should be compelled. It is the experiences of this age,
never entirely obliterated in women, that enable them to take
adolescent boys seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these
experiences are more limited in range though no less intense. It is
this stage in woman which is most unintelligible to man and even
unrealized to herself. It is the echoes from it that make vast numbers
of mothers pursue the various branches of culture, often half
secretly, to maintain their position with their college sons and
daughters, with their husbands, or with society.
But in a very few years, I believe even in the early twenties with
American girls, along with rapidly in creasing development of capacity
there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration.
Unless marriage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of
invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life, a
little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms of
self-pampering, the resolution to be happy, though at too great cost;
and thus the clear air of morning begins to haze over and
unconsciously she begins to grope. By thirty, she is perhaps goaded
into more or less sourness; has developed more petty self-indulgences;
has come to feel a right to happiness almost as passionately as the
men of the French Revolution and as the women in their late movement
for enfranchisement felt for liberty. Very likely she has turned to
other women and entered into innocent Platonic pairing-off relations
with some one. There is a little more affectation, playing a rôle, and
interest in dress and appearance is either less or more specialized
and definite. Perhaps she has already begun to be a seeker who will
perhaps find, lose, and seek again. Her temper is modified; there is a
slight stagnation of soul; a craving for work or travel; a love of
children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion to
them; an analysis of psychic processes until they are weakened and
insight becomes too clear; sense of responsibility without an object;
a slight general _malaise_ and a sense that society is a false
"margarine" affair; revolt against those that insist that in her child
the real value of a woman is revealed. There are alternations between
excessive self-respect which demands something almost like adoration
of the other sex and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries
about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes
generally.
A new danger, the greatest in the history of her sex, now impends,
viz., arrest, complacency, and a sense of finality in the most
perilous first stage of higher education for girls, when, after all,
little has actually yet been won save only the right and opportunity
to begin reconstructions, so that now, for the first time in history,
methods and matter could be radically transformed to fit the nature
and needs of girls. Now most female faculties, trustees, and students
are content to ape the newest departures in some one or more male
institutions as far as their means or obvious limitations make
possible with a servility which is often abject and with rarely ever a
thought of any adjustment, save the most superficial, to sex. It is
the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically expressed
by the female head of a very successful institution,[5] who was "early
convinced in my teaching experience that the methods for mental
development for boys and girls applied equally without regard to sex,
and I have carried the same thought when I began to develop the
physical, and filled my gymnasium with the ordinary appliances used in
men's gymnasia." There is no sex in mind or in science, it is said,
but it might as well be urged that there is no age, and hence that all
methods adapted to teaching at different stages of development may be
ignored. That woman can do many things as well as man does not prove
that she ought to do the same things, or that man-made ways are the
best for her. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer[6] was right in saying that
woman's education has all the perplexities of that of man, and many
more, still more difficult and intricate, of its own.
Hence, we must conclude that, while women's colleges have to a great
extent solved the problem of special technical training, they have
done as yet very little to solve the larger one of the proper
education of woman. To assume that the latter question is settled, as
is so often done, is disastrous. I have forced myself to go through
many elaborate reports of meetings where female education was
discussed by those supposed to be competent; but as a rule, not
without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with
the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the
curse of woman's life. I deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few
general statistics, the women's colleges have not only made no study
themselves of the larger problems that impend, but have often
maintained a repellent attitude toward others who wished to do so. No
one that I know of connected with any of these institutions, where the
richest material is going to waste, is making any serious and
competent research on lines calculated to bring out the
psycho-physiological differences between the sexes and those in
authority are either conservative by constitution or else intimidated
because public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here
becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and
the old habit of ignoring everything that pertains to sex in
countenance.
Again, while I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every
opportunity which she can fill, and yield to none in appreciation of
her ability, I insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college
is that it is based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed,
if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be
trained to independence and self-support, and that matrimony and
motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even
urge, is thus best provided for. If these colleges are, as the above
statistics indicate, chiefly devoted to the training of those who do
not marry, or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right.
These institutions may perhaps come to be training stations of a
new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she nut, maid--old
or young--nun, school-teacher, or bachelor woman. I recognize the very
great debt the world owes to members of this very diverse class in the
past. Some of them have illustrated the very highest ideals of
self-sacrifice, service, and devotion in giving to mankind what was
meant for husband and children. Some of them belong to the class of
superfluous women, and others illustrate the noblest type of altruism
and have impoverished the heredity of the world to its loss, as did
the monks, who Leslie Stephens thinks contributed to bring about the
Dark Ages, because they were the best and most highly selected men of
their age and, by withdrawing from the function of heredity and
leaving no posterity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas and
training are now doing this, whether for racial weal or woe, can not
yet be determined, for many whom nature designed for model mothers.
The bachelor woman is an interesting illustration of Spencer's law of
the inverse relation of individuation and genesis. The completely
developed individual is always a terminal representative in her line
of descent. She has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was
meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her account with
heredity that, like every perfectly and completely developed
individual, she is also completely sterile. This is the very
apotheosis of selfishness from the standpoint of every biological
ethics. While the complete man can do and sometimes does this, woman
has a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her reserves.
First she loses mammary functions, so that should she undertake
maternity its functions are incompletely performed because she can not
nurse, and this implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the
child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who has never nursed
can not love or be loved aright by her child. It crops out again in
the abnormal or especially incomplete development of her offspring, in
the critical years of adolescence, although they may have been
healthful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the
diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one-child system.
These women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the
men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr,
the university student, in Hauptmann's "Lonely Lives," who alienated
the young husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all the keen
pleasures of intellectual activity; their very look, step, and bearing
is free; their mentality makes them good fellows and companionable in
all the broad intellectual spheres; to converse with them is as
charming and attractive for the best men as was Socrates's discourse
with the accomplished hetaerae; they are at home with the racquet and
on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all
their widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies;
and the world owes much and is likely to owe far more to high Platonic
friendships of this kind. These women are often in every way
magnificent, only they are not mothers, and sometimes have very little
wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry them to develop these
functions is one of the unique and too frequent tragedies of modern
life and literature. Some, though by no means all, of them are
functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of
child-bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the
limitations of married life; they are incensed whenever attention is
called to the functions peculiar to their sex, and the careful
consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought "not fit for
cultivated women."
The slow evolution of this type is probably inevitable as civilization
advances, and their training is a noble function. Already it has
produced minds of the greatest acumen who have made very valuable
contributions to science, and far more is to be expected of them in
the future. Indeed, it may be their noble function to lead their sex
out into the higher, larger life, and the deeper sense of its true
position and function, for which I plead. Hitherto woman has not been
able to solve her own problems. While she has been more religious than
man, there have been few great women preachers; while she has excelled
in teaching young children, there have been few Pestalozzis, or even
Froebels; while her invalidism is a complex problem, she has turned to
man in her diseases. This is due to the very intuitiveness and naïveté
of her nature. But now that her world is so rapidly widening, she is
in danger of losing her cue. She must be studied objectively and
laboriously as we study children, and partly by men, because their sex
must of necessity always remain objective and incommensurate with
regard to woman, and therefore more or less theoretical. Again, in
these days of intense new interest in feelings, emotions, and
sentiments, when many a psychologist now envies and, like
Schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could become a woman, he can never
really understand _das Ewig-Weibliche_, [The eternal womanly] one of
the two supreme oracles of guidance in life, because he is a man; and
here the cultivated woman must explore the nature of her sex as man
can not, and become its mouthpiece. In many of the new fields opening
in biology since Darwin, in embryology, botany, the study of children,
animals, savages (witness Miss Fletcher), sociological investigation,
to say nothing of all the vast body of work that requires painstaking
detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has superior ability, or
her very sex gives her peculiar advantages where she is to lead and
achieve great things in enlarging the kingdom of man. Perhaps, too,
the present training of women may in the end develop those who shall
one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead n the next step of
devising a scheme that shall fit woman's nature and needs.
For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all
distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate
primarily and chiefly for motherhood, assuming that, if that does not
come, single life can best take care of itself, because it is less
intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met. While girls may
be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of
adolescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy between the
sexes in high school, if not in college, tends to rub of the bloom and
delicacy which can develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect,
let us repeat, far more than boys. The familiar comradeship that
ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their
institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals
inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Staël, the Misses Cobb,
Martineau, Fuller, Bronté, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs.
Browning; and while accepting and profiting by what they have done,
and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements,
prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger class
of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the Holy Mother
to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men to
great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of noble mothers.
We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with
regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she
can, from surreptitious or worthy sources, what she most of all needs
to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman
and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as
she was of old accused of having given man the apple of knowledge of
good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less serious
indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and
encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health. We
must recognize that riches are probably harder on her, on the whole,
than poverty, and that poor parents should not labor too hard to
exempt her from its wholesome discipline. The expectancy of change so
stamped upon her sex by heredity as she advances into maturity must
not be perverted into uneasiness or her soul sown with the tares of
ambition or fired by intersexual competition and driven on, to quote
Dr. R.T. Edes, "by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of
conscience, ambition, and desire to please, plus a peculiar female
obstinacy." If she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school
factory, studying in a way which parodies Hood's "Song of the Shirt";
and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by preceptresses like
a eminent lady principal,[7] who thought girls' weakness is usually
imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting
illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a
healthy animal and an educated invalid for a wife.
Without specifying here details or curricula, the ideals that should
be striven toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of
adolescent girls with the proper presupposition of motherhood, and
which are already just as practicable as Abbotsholme[8] or _L'Ecole
des Roches_,[9] may be rudely indicated somewhat as follows.
First, the ideal institution for the training of girls from twelve or
thirteen on into the twenties, when the period most favorable to
motherhood begins, should be in the country in the midst of hills, the
climbing of which is the best stimulus for heart and lungs, and tends
to mental elevation and breadth of view. There should be water for
boating, bathing, and skating, aquaria and aquatic life; gardens both
for kitchen vegetables and horticulture; forests for their seclusion
and religious awe; good roads, walks, and paths that tempt to walking
and wheeling: playgrounds and space for golf and tennis, with large
covered but unheated space favorable for recreations in weather really
too bad for out-of-door life and for those indisposed; and plenty of
nooks that permit each to be alone with nature, for this develops
inwardness, poise, and character, yet not too great remoteness from
the city for a wise utilization of its advantages at intervals. All
that can be called environment is even more important for girls than
boys, significant as it is for the latter.
The first aim, which should dominate every item, pedagogic method and
matter, should be health--a momentous word that looms up beside
holiness, to which it is etymologically akin. The new hygiene of the
last few years should be supreme and make these academic areas soared
to the cult of the goddess Hygeia. Only those who realize what
advances have been made in health culture and know something of its
vast new literature can realize all that this means. The health of
woman is, as we have seen, if possible even more important for the
welfare of the race than that of man; and the influence of her body
upon her mind is, in a sense, greater, so that its needs should be
supreme and primary. Foods should favor the completest digestion, so
that metabolism be on the highest plane. The dietary should be
abundant, plain, and varied, and cooked with all the refinements
possible in the modern cooking-school, which should be one of its
departments, with limited use of rich foods or desserts and
stimulating drinks, but with wholesome proximity to dairy and farm.
Nutrition is the first law of health and happiness, the prime
condition and creator of euphoria; and the appetite should be, as it
always is if unperverted, like a kind of somatic conscience
steadfastly pointing toward the true pole of needs.
Sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour and curfew, on
plain beds in rooms of scrupulous neatness reserved chiefly for it
with every precaution for quiet, and, if possible, with windows more
or less open the year round, and, like other rooms, never overheated.
Bathing in moderation, and especially dress and toilet should be
almost raised to fine arts and objects of constant suggestion. Each
student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study,
respectively, and be responsible for their care, with every
encouragement for expressing individual tastes; but will, an
all-dominant idea of simplicity, convenience, refinement, and
elegance, without luxury. Girls need to go away from home a good part
of every year to escape the indiscretion and often the coddling of
parents and to learn self-reliance; and a family dormitory system,
with but few, twelve to twenty, in each building, to escape nervous
wear and distraction, to secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or
more matrons or teachers and to ensure the most pedagogic dietetics,
is suggested.
Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special reform. Swedish
gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a minimum of best points,
because it is too severe and, in forbidding music, lays too little
stress upon the rhythm element. Out-of-door walks and games should
have precedence over all else. The principle sometimes advocated, that
methods of physical training should apply to both boys and girls
without regard to sex, and with all the ordinary appliances found in
the men's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every possible
adjustment made to sex. Free plays and games should always have
precedence over indoor or uniform _commando_ exercises. Boating and
basket-ball should be allowed, but with the competition element
sedulously reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most
prominent of indoor exercises. The dance cadences the soul; the
stately minuet gives poise; the figure dances train the mind; and
pantomime and dramatic features should be introduced and even
specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions. The
history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school
of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the
best of all exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole
educational system, should be exploited, and the dancing school and
class rescued from its present degradation. No girl is educated who
can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom in its modern
form.[10]
Manners, a word too often relegated to the past as savoring of the
primness of the ancient dame school or female seminary, are really
minor or sometimes major morals. They can express everything in the
whole range of the impulsive or emotional life. Now that we understand
the primacy of movement over feeling, we can appreciate what a school
of bearing and repose in daily converse with others means. I would
revive some of the ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of
the drawing-room, call and party, although these should not be
neglected, than the deeper expressions of true ladyhood seen in an
exquisite, tender and unselfish regard for the feelings of others.
Women's ideal of compelling every one whom they meet to like them is a
noble one, and the control of every automatism is not only a part of
good breeding, but nervous health.
Regularity should be another all-pervading norm. In the main, even
though he may have "played his sex symphony too harshly," E.H. Clark
was right. Periodicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos,
celebrates its highest triumphs in woman's life. For years everything
must give way to its thorough and settled establishment. In the
monthly Sabbaths of rest, the ideal school should revert to the
meaning of the word leisure. The paradise of stated rest should be
revisited, idleness be actively cultivated; reverie, in which the
soul, which needs these seasons of withdrawal for its own development,
expatiates over the whole life of the race, should be provided for and
encouraged in every legitimate way, for, in rest, the whole momentum
of heredity is felt in ways most favorable to full and complete
development. Then woman should realize that _to be_ is greater than
_to do_; should step reverently aside from her daily routine and let
Lord Nature work. In this time of sensitiveness and perturbation, when
anemia and chlorosis are so peculiarly immanent to her sex, remission
of toil should not only be permitted, but required; and yet the
greatest individual liberty should be allowed to adjust itself to the
vast diversities of individual constitutional needs. (See Chapter VII
on this point.) The cottage home, which should take the place of the
dormitory, should always have special interest and attractions for
these seasons.
There should always be some personal instruction at these seasons
during earlier adolescent years. I have glanced over nearly a score of
books and pamphlets that are especially written for girls; while all
are well meant and far better than the ordinary modes by which girls
acquire knowledge of their own nature if left to themselves, they are,
like books for boys, far too prolix, and most are too scientific and
plain and direct. Moreover, no two girls need just the same
instruction, and to leave it to reading is too indirect and causes the
mind to dwell on it for too long periods. Best of all is individual
instruction at the time, concise, practical, and never, especially in
the early years, without a certain mystic and religious tone which
should pervade all and make everything sacred. This should not be
given by male physicians--and indeed most female doctors would make it
too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever lack reverence
for it--but it should come from one whose soul and body are full of
wifehood and motherhood and who is old enough to know and is not
without the necessary technical knowledge.
Another principle should be to broaden by retarding; to keep the
purely mental back and by every method to bring the intuitions to the
front; appeals to tact and taste should be incessant; a purely
intellectual man is no doubt biologically a deformity, but a purely
intellectual woman is far more so. Bookishness is probably a bad sign
in a girl; it suggests artificiality, pedantry, the lugging of dead
knowledge. Mere learning is not the ideal, and prodigies of
scholarship are always morbid. The rule should be to keep nothing that
is not to become practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to
be highways for the daily traffic of thought and conduct; not to
overburden the soul with the impedimenta of libraries and records of
what is afar off in time or zest, and always to follow truly the
guidance of normal and spontaneous interests wisely interpreted.
Religion will always bold as prominent a place in woman's life as
politics does in man's, and adolescence is still more its seedtime
with girls than with boys. Its roots are the sentiment of awe and
reverence, and it is the great agent in the world for transforming
life from its earlier selfish to its only really mature form of
altruism. The tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, and
self-sacrifice from the Old Testament come naturally first; then
perhaps the prophets paraphrased as in the pedagogic triumph of Kent
and Saunders's little series; and when adolescence is at its height
then the chief stress of religious instruction should be laid upon
Jesus's life and work. He should be taught first humanly, and only
later when the limitations of manhood seem exhausted should His Deity
be adduced as welcome surplusage. The supernatural is a reflex of the
heart; each sustains and neither can exist without the other. If the
transcendent and supernal had no objective existence, we should have
to invent and teach it or dwarf the life of feeling and sentiment.
Whatever else religion is, therefore, it is the supremest poetry of
the soul, reflecting like nothing else all that is deepest, most
generic and racial in it. Theology should be reduced to a minimum, but
nothing denied where wanted. Paul and his works and ways should be for
the most part deferred until after eighteen. The juvenile well as the
cyclone revivalist should be very carefully excluded; and yet in every
springtime, when nature is recreated, service and teaching should
gently encourage the revival and even the regeneration of all the
religious instincts. The mission recruiter should be allowed to do his
work outside these halls, and everything in the way of infection and
all that brings religion into conflict with good taste and good sense
should be excluded, while esthetics should supplement, reënforce, and
go hand in hand with piety. Religion is in its infancy; and woman, who
has sustained it in the past, must be the chief agent in its further
and higher development. Orthodoxies and all narrowness should forever
give place to cordial hospitality toward every serious view, which
should be met by the method of greater sympathy rather than by that of
criticism.
Nature in her many phases should, of course, make up a large part of
the entire curriculum, but here again the methods of the sexes should
differ somewhat after puberty. The poetic and mythic factors and some
glimpses of the history of science should be given more prominence;
the field naturalist rather than the laboratory man of technic should
be the ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as God's
first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible as a
primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one.
Reverence and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should
be studied without beginning and culminating in interests akin to
devotion. Mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and
those with special talents or tastes for it should go to agamic
schools. Chemistry, too, although not excluded, should have a
subordinate place. The average girl has little love of sozzling and
mussing with the elements, and cooking involves problems in organic
chemistry too complex to be understood very profoundly, but the
rudiments of household chemistry should be taught. Physics, too,
should be kept to elementary stages. Meteorology should have a larger,
and geology and astronomy increasingly larger places, and are
especially valuable because, and largely in proportion as, they are
taught out of doors, but the general principles and the untechnical
and practical aspects should be kept in the foreground. With botany
more serious work should be done. Plant-lore and the poetic aspect, as
in astronomy, should have attention throughout, while Latin
nomenclature and microscopic technic should come late if at all, and
vulgar names should have precedence over Latin terminology. Flowers,
gardening, and excursions should never be wanting. Economic and even
medical aspects should appear, and prominent and early should come the
whole matter of self cross-fertilization and that by insects. The
moral value of this subject will never be fully understood till we
have what might almost be called a woman's botany, constructed on
lines different from any of the text-books I have glanced at. Here
much knowledge interesting in itself can be early taught, which will
spring up into a world of serviceable insights as adolescence develops
and the great law of sex unfolds.
Zoology should always be taught with plenty of pets, menagerie
resources, and with aquaria, aviaries, apiaries, formicaries, etc., as
adjuncts. It should start in the environment like everything else.
Bird and animal lore, books, and pictures should abound in the early
stages, and the very prolific chapter of instincts should have ample
illustration, while the morphological nomenclature and details of
structure should be less essential. Woman has domesticated nearly all
the animals, and is so superior to man in insight into their modes of
life and psychoses that many of them are almost exemplifications of
moral qualities to her even more than to man. The peacock is an
embodied expression of pride; the pig, of filth; the fox, of cunning;
the serpent, of subtle danger; the eagle, of sublimity; the goose, of
stupidity; and so on through all the range of human qualities, as we
have seen. At bottom, however, the study of animal life is coming to
be more and more a problem of heredity, and its problems should have
dominant position and to them the other matter should grade up.
This shades over into and prepares for the study of the primitive man
and child so closely related to each other. The myth, custom, belief,
domestic practises of savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy
and childhood, the development of which is a priceless boon for the
higher education of women, open of themselves a great field of human
interest where she needs to know the great results, the striking
details, the salient illustrations, the basal principles rather than
to be entangled in the details of anthropometry, craniometry,
philology, etc.
All this lays the basis for a larger study of modern man--history,
with the biographical element very prominent throughout, with plenty
of stories of heroes of virtue, acts of valor, tales of saintly lives
and the personal element more prominent, and specialization in the
study of dynasties, wars, authorities, and controversies relegated to
a very subordinate place. Sociology, undeveloped, rudimentary, and in
some places suspected as it is, should have in the curriculum of her
higher education a place above political economy. The stories of the
great reforms, and accounts of the constitution of society, of the
home, church, state, and school, and philanthropies and ideals, should
to the fore.
Art in all its forms should be opened at least in a propædeutic way
and individual tastes amply and judiciously fed, but there should be
no special training in music without some taste and gift, and the aim
should be to develop critical and discriminative appreciation and the
good taste that sees the vast superiority of all that is good and
classic over what is cheap and fustian.
In literature, myth, poetry, and drama should perhaps lead, and the
knowledge of the great authors in the vernacular be fostered. Greek,
Hebrew, and perhaps Latin languages should be entirely excluded, not
but that they are of great value and have their place, but because a
smattering knowledge is bought at too high a price of ignorance of
more valuable things. German, French, and Italian should be allowed
and provided for by native teachers and by conversational methods if
desired, and in their proper season.
In the studies of the soul of man, generally called the philosophic
branches, metaphysics and epistemology should have the smallest, and
logic the next least place. Psychology should be taught on the genetic
basis of animals and children, and one of its tap-roots should be
developed from the love of infancy and youth, than which nothing in
all the world is more worthy. If a woman Descartes ever arises, she
will put life before theory, and her watchword will be not _cogito,
ergo sum_, [I think, therefore I am] but _sum, ergo cogito_ [I am,
therefore I think]. The psychology of sentiments and feelings and
intuitions will take precedence of that of pure intellect; ethics will
be taught on the basis of the whole series of practical duties and
problems, and the theories of the ultimate nature of right or the
constitution of conscience will have small place.
Domesticity will be taught by example in some ideal home building by a
kind of laboratory method. A nursery with all carefully selected
appliances and adjuncts, a dining-room, a kitchen, bedroom, closets,
cellars, outhouses, building, its material, the grounds, lawn,
shrubbery, hothouse, library, and all the other adjuncts of the hearth
will be both exemplified and taught. A general course in pedagogy,
especially its history and ideals, another in child study, and finally
a course in maternity the last year taught broadly, and not without
practical details of nursing, should be comprehensive and culminating.
In its largest sense maternity might be the heart of all the higher
training of young women.
Applied knowledge will thus be brought to a focus in a department of
teaching as one of the specialties of motherhood and not as a vocation
apart. The training should aim to develop power of maternity in soul
as well as in body, so that home influence may extend on and up
through the plastic years of pubescence, and future generations shall
not rebel against these influences until they have wrought their
perfect work.
The methods throughout should be objective, with copious illustrations
by way of object-lessons, apparatus, charts, pictures, diagrams, and
lectures, far less book work and recitation, only a limited amount of
room study, the function of examination reduced to a minimum, and
everything as suggestive and germinal as possible. Hints that are not
followed up; information not elaborated into a thin pedagogic sillabub
or froth; seed that is sown on the waters with no thought of reaping;
faith in a God who does not pay at the end of each week, month, or
year, but who always pays abundantly some time; training which does
not develop hypertrophied memory-pouches that carry, or creative
powers that discover and produce--these are lines on which such an
institution should develop. Specialization has its place, but it
always hurts a woman's soul more than a man's, should always come
later, and if there is special capacity it should be trained
elsewhere. Unconscious education is a power of which we have yet to
learn the full ranges.
In most groups in this series of ideal departments there should be at
least one healthful, wise, large-souled, honorable, married and
attractive man, and, if possible, several of them. His very presence
in an institution for young women gives poise, polarizes the soul, and
gives wholesome but long-circuited tension at root no doubt sexual,
but all unconsciously so. This mentor should not be more father than
brother, though he should combine the best of each, but should add
another element. He need not be a doctor, a clergyman, or even a great
scholar, but should be accessible for confidential conferences even
though intimate. He should know the soul of the adolescent girl and
how to prescribe; he should be wise and fruitful in advice, but
especially should be to all a source of contagion and inspiration for
poise and courage even though religious or medical problems be
involved. But even if he lack all these latter qualities, though he so
poised that impulsive girls can turn their hearts inside out in his
presence and perhaps even weep on his shoulder, the presence of such a
being, though a complete realization of this ideal could be only
remotely approximated, would be the center of an atmosphere most
wholesomely tonic.
In these all too meager outlines I have sketched a humanistic and
liberal education and have refrained from all details and special
curriculization. Many of the above features I believe would be as
helpful for boys as for girls, but woman has here an opportunity to
resume her exalted and supreme position, to be the first in this
higher field, to lead man and pay her debt to his educational
institutions, by resuming her crown. The ideal institutions, however,
for the two will always be radically and probably always increasingly
divergent.
As a psychologist, penetrated with the growing sense of the
predominance of the heart over the mere intellect, I believe myself
not alone in desiring to make a tender declaration of being more and
more passionately in love with woman as I conceive she came from the
hand of God. I keenly envy my Catholic friends their Maryolatry. Who
ever asked if the Holy Mother, whom the wise men adored, knew the
astronomy of the Chaldees or had studied Egyptian or Babylonian, or
even whether she knew how to read or write her own tongue, and who has
ever thought of caring? We can not conceive that she bemoaned any
limitations of her sex, but she has been an object of adoration all
these centuries because she glorified womanhood by being more generic,
nearer the race, and richer in love, pity, unselfish devotion and
intuition than man. The glorified madonna ideal shows us how much more
whole and holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator,
professor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to be a man is
larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, general, president, or
millionaire.
But with all this love and hunger in my heart, I can not help sharing
in the growing fear that modern woman, at least in more ways and
places than one, is in danger of declining from her orbit; that she is
coming to lack just confidence and pride in her sex as such, and is
just now in danger of lapsing to mannish ways, methods, and ideals,
until her original divinity may become obscured. But, if our worship
at her shrine is with a love and adoration a little qualified and
unsteady, we have a fixed and abiding faith without which we should
have no resource against pessimism for the future of our race, that
she will ere long evolve a sphere of life and even education which
fits her needs as well as, if not better than those of man fit his.
Meanwhile, if the eternally womanly seems somewhat less divine, we can
turn with unabated faith to the eternally childish, the best of which
in each are so closely related. The oracles of infancy and childhood
will never fail. Distracted as we are in the maze of new sciences,
skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not fully coördinate by our
logic or curriculize by our pedagogy; confused between the claims of
old and new methods; needing desperately, for survival as a nation and
a race, some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold modern cultures,
we have now at least one source to which we can turn--we have found
the only magnet in all the universe that points steadfastly to the
undiscovered pole of human destiny. We know what can and will
ultimately coördinate in the generic, which is larger than the logical
order, all that is worth knowing, teaching, or doing by the best
methods, that will save us from misfits and the waste ineffable of
premature and belated knowledge, and that is in the interests and line
of normal development in the child in our midst that must henceforth
ever lead us which epitomizes in its development all the stages, human
and prehuman; that is the proper object of all that strange new love
of everything that is naive, spontaneous, and unsophisticated in human
nature. The heart and soul of growing childhood is the criterion by
which we judge the larger heart and soul of mature womanhood; and
these are ultimately the only guide into the heart of the new
education which is to be, when the school becomes what Melanchthon
said it must be--a true workshop of the Holy Ghost--and what the new
psychology, when it rises to the heights of prophecy, foresees as the
true paradise of restored intuitive human nature.
[Footnote 1: David Starr Jordan: The Higher Education of Women.
Popular Science Monthly, December, 1902, vol. 62, pp. 97-107. See also
my article on this subject in Munsey's Magazine, February, 1906, and
President Jordan's reply in the March number, 1906.]
[Footnote 2: Coeducation. A series of essays by various authors,
edited by Alice Woods, with an introduction by M.E. Sadler. Longmans,
Green and Co., London 1903, p. 148 _et seq_.]
[Footnote 3: The Evolution of Ideals. W.G. Chambers, Pedagogical
Seminary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 101-143. Also, B.E. Warner: The
Young Woman in Modern Life. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1903, p. 218.]
[Footnote 4: The Psychology of Woman. Translated by G.A. Etchison.
Richards, London, 1899.]
[Footnote 5: Physical Development of Women and Children. By Miss M.E.
Allen. American Association for Physical Education., April, 1890.]
[Footnote 6: A Review of the Higher Education of Women. Forum,
September, 1891, vol. 12, pp 25-40. See also G. von Bunge: Die
zunehmende Unfähigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen. München
Reinhardt, 1903, 3d ed. Also President Harper's Decennial Report, pp.
xciv-cxi.]
[Footnote 7: Physical Hindrances to Teaching Girls, by Charlotte W.
Porter. Forum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp. 41-49.]
[Footnote 8: Abbotsholme, 1889-1899: or Ten Years' Work in an
Educational Laboratory, by Cecil Reddie, G. Allen London, 1900.]
[Footnote 9: See L'Ecole des Roches, a school of the Twentieth
Century, by T.R. Croswell. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol.
7, pp. 479-491.]
[Footnote 10: See Chapter VI.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER XII
MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING
Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of brain--Difficulties
in teaching morals--Methods in Europe--Obedience to commands--Good
habits should be mechanized--Value of scolding--How to flog aright--Its
dangers--Moral precepts and proverbs--Habituation--Training will through
intellect--Examinations--Concentration--Originality--Froebel and the
naive--First ideas of God--Conscience--Importance of Old and New
Testaments--Sex dangers--Love and religion--Conversion.
From its nature as well as from its central importance it might be
easily shown that the will is no less dependent on the culture it
receives than is the mind. It is fast becoming as absurd to suppose
that men can survive in the great practical strain to which American
life subjects all who would succeed, if the will is left to take its
doubtful chances of training and discipline, as to suppose that the
mind develops in neglect. Our changed conditions make this chance of
will-culture more doubtful than formerly. A generation or two ago[1]
most school-boys had either farm work, chores, errands, jobs
self-imposed, or required by less tender parents; they _made_ things,
either toys or tools, out of school. Most school-girls did house-work,
more or less of which is, like farm-work, perhaps the most varied and
most salutary as well as most venerable of all schools for the
youthful body and mind. They undertook extensive works of embroidery,
bed-quilting, knitting, sewing, mending, if not cleaning, and even
spinning and weaving their own or others' clothing, and cared for the
younger children. The wealthier devised or imposed tasks for
will-culture, as the German Kaiser has his children taught a trade as
part of their education. Ten days at the hoe-handle, axe, or
pitchfork, said an eminent educator lately in substance, with no new
impression from without, and one constant and only duty, is a
schooling in perseverance and sustained effort such as few boys now
get in any shape; while city instead of country life brings so many
new, heterogeneous and distracting impressions of motion rather than
rest, and so many privileges with so few corresponding duties, that
with artificial life and bad air the will is weakened, and eupeptic
minds and stomachs, on which its vigor so depends, are rare. Machines
supersede muscles, and perhaps our athleticism gives skill too great
preponderance over strength, or favors intense rather than constant,
long-sustained, unintermittent energy. Perhaps too many of our courses
of study are better fitted to turn out many-sided but superficial
paragraphists, than men who can lay deep plans, and subordinate many
complex means to one remote end. Meanwhile, if there is any one thing
of which our industries and practical arts are in more crying need
than another, it is the old-fashioned virtue of thoroughness, of a
kind and degree which does not address merely the eye, is not limited
by the letter of a contract, but which has some regard for its
products for their own sake, and some sense for the future. Whether in
science, philosophy, morals, or business, the fields for long-ranged
cumulative efforts are wider, more numerous, and far more needy than
in the days when it was the fashion for men contentedly to concentrate
themselves to one vocation, life-work, or mission, or when cathedrals
or other yet vaster public works were transmitted, unfinished but ever
advancing, from one generation of men to another.
It is because the brain is developed, while the muscles are allowed to
grow flabby and atrophied, that the deplored chasm between knowing and
doing is so often fatal to the practical effectiveness of mental and
moral culture. The great increase of city and sedentary life has been
far too sudden for the human body--which was developed by hunting,
war, agriculture, and manifold industries now given over to steam and
machinery--to adapt itself healthfully or naturally to its new
environment. Let any of us take down an anatomical chart of the human
muscles, and reflect what movements we habitually make each day, and
realize how disproportionately our activities are distributed compared
with the size or importance of the muscles, and how greatly modern
specialization of work has deformed our bodies. The muscles that move
the scribbling pen are insignificant fraction of those in the whole
body, and those that wag the tongue and adjust the larynx are also
comparatively few and small. Their importance is, of course, not
underrated, but it is disastrous to concentrate education upon them
too exclusively or too early in life. The trouble is that few realize
what physical vigor is in man or woman, or how dangerously near
weakness often is to wickedness, how impossible healthful energy of
will is without strong muscles which are its organ, or how endurance
and self-control, no less than great achievement, depend on
muscle-habits. Both in Germany and Greece, a golden age of letters was
preceded, by about a generation, by a golden age of national gymnastic
enthusiasm which constitutes, especially in the former country, one of
the most unique and suggestive chapters in the history of pedagogy.
Symmetry and grace, hardihood and courage, the power to do everything
that the human body can do with and without all conceivable apparatus,
instruments, and even tools, are culture ideals that in Greece, Rome,
and Germany respectively have influenced, as they might again
influence, young men, as intellectual ideals never can do save in a
select few. We do not want "will-virtuosos," who perform feats hard to
learn, but then easy to do and good for show; nor spurtiness of any
sort which develops an erethic habit of work, temper, and circulation,
and is favored by some of our popular sports but too soon reacts into
fatigue. Even will-training does not reach its end till it leads the
young up to taking a intelligent, serious and life-long interest in
their own physical culture and development. This is higher than
interest in success in school or college sport; and, though naturally
later than these, is one of the earliest forms of will-culture in
which it is safe and wise to attempt to interest the young for its own
sake alone. In our exciting life and trying climate, in which the
experiment of civilization has never been tried before, these thoughts
are merely exercises.
But this is, of course, preliminary. Great as is the need, the
practical difficulties in the way are very great. First, there are not
only no good text-books in ethics, but no good manual to guide
teachers. Some give so many virtues or good habits to be taught per
term, ignoring the unity of virtue as well as the order in which the
child's capacities for real virtue unfold. Advanced text-books discuss
the grounds of obligation, the nature of choice or freedom, or the
hedonistic calculus, as if pleasures and pains could be balanced as
measurable quantities, etc., so that philosophic morality is clearly
not for children or teachers. Secondly, evolution encourages too often
the doubt whether virtue can be taught, when it should have the
opposite effect. Perversity and viciousness of will are too often
treated as constitutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy,
especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, instead of
being vigorously treated as crampy disorders of will, and the child is
coddled into flaccidity. Becomes the lowest develops first, there is
danger that it will interfere with the development of the higher, and
thus, if left to his own, the child may come to have no will. The
third and greatest difficulty is, that with the best effort to do so,
so few teachers can separate morality from religious creed. So vital
is the religions sentiment here that it is hard to divorce the end of
education from the end of life, proximate from ultimate grounds of
obligation, or finite from infinite duties. Those whose training has
been more religious than ethical can hardly teach morality _per se_
satisfactorily to the _noli me tangere_ [Touch me not] spirit of
denominational freedom so wisely jealous of conflicting standards and
sanctions for the young.
How then can we ever hope to secure proper training for the will?
More than a generation ago Germany developed the following method:
Children of Lutheran, Catholic and Jewish parentage, which include
most German children, were allowed one afternoon a week for several
years, and two afternoons a week for a few months preceding
confirmation, to spend half of a school day with instructors of these
respective professions, who were nominated by the church, but examined
by the state as to their competence. These teachers are as
professional, therefore, as those in the regular class work. Each
religion is allowed to determine its own course of religious
instruction, subject only to the approval of the cultus minister or
the local authorities. In this way a rupture between the religious
sentiments and teaching of successive generations is avoided and it is
sought to bring religious training to bear upon morals. These classes
learn Scripture, hymns, church service,--the Catholics in Latin and
the Jewish in Hebrew,--the history of their church and people, and
sometimes a little systematic theology. In some of these schools,
there are prizes and diplomas, and the spirit of competition is
appealed to. A criticism sometimes made against them, especially
against the Lutheran religious pedagogy, is that it is too
intellectual. It is, of course, far more systematic and effective from
this point of view than the American Sunday School, so that whatever
may be said of its edifying effects, the German child knows these
topics far better than the American. This system, with modifications,
has been adopted in some places in France, England and in America,
more often in private than in public schools, however.
The other system originated in France some years after the
Franco-Prussian War when the clerical influence in French education
gave way to the lay and secular spirit. In these classes, for which
also stated times are set apart and which are continued through all
the required grades under the name of moral and civic instruction, the
religious element is entirely absent, except that there are a few
hymns, Bible passages and stories which all agree upon as valuable.
Most of the course is made up of carefully selected maxims and
especially stories of virtue, records of heroic achievements in French
history and even in literature and the drama. Everything, however, has
a distinct moral lesson, although that lesson is not made offensively
prominent. We have here nearly a score of these textbooks, large and
small. It would seen as though the resources of the French records and
literature had been ransacked, and indeed many deeds of heroism are
culled from the daily press. The matter is often arranged under
headings such as cleanliness, acts of kindness, courage, truthfulness
versus lying, respect for age, good manners, etc. Each virtue is thus
taught in a way appropriate to each stage of childhood, and quite
often bands of mercy, rescue leagues and other societies are the
outgrowth of this instruction. It is, of course, exposed to much
criticism from the clergy on the cogent ground that morality needs the
support of religion, at the very least, in childhood. This system has
had much influence in England where several similar courses have been
evolved, and in this country we have at least one very praiseworthy
effort in this direction, addressed mainly, however, to older
children.
Besides this, two ways suggest themselves. First, we may try to
assume, or tediously enucleate a consensus of religious truth as a
basis of will training, e.g., God and immortality, and, ignoring the
minority who doubt these, vote them into the public school. Pedagogy
need have nothing whatever to say respecting the absolute truth or
falsity of these ideas, but there is little doubt that they have an
influence on the will, at a certain stage of average development,
greater and more essential than any other; so great that even were
their vitality to decay like the faith in the Greek or German
mythology, we should still have to teach God and a future life as the
most imperative of all hypotheses in a field where, as in morals,
nothing is so practical as a good theory; and we should have to fall
to teaching the Bible as a moral classic, and cultivate a critical
sympathy for its view of life. But this way ignores revelation and
supernatural claims, while some have other objections to emancipating
or "rescuing" the Bible from theology just yet. Indeed, the problem
how to teach anything that the mind could not have found out for
itself, but that had to be revealed, has not been solved by modern
pedagogy, which, since Pestalozzi, has been more and more devoted to
natural and developing methods. The latter teaches that there must not
be too much seed sown, too much or too high precept, or too much
iteration, and that, in Jean Paul's phrase, the hammer must not rest
on bell, but only tap and rebound, to bring out a clear tone. Again, a
consensus of this content would either have to be carefully defined
and would be too generic and abstract for school uses, or else
differences of interpretation, which so pervade and are modified by
character, culture, temperament, and feeling, would make the consensus
itself nugatory. Religious training must be specific at first, and,
omitting qualifications, the more explicit the denominational faith
the earlier may religious motives affect the will.
This is the way of our hopes, to the closer consideration of which we
intend to return in the future, though it must be expected that the
happiest consensus will be long quarantined from most schools.
Meanwhile a second way, however unpromising, is still open. Noble
types of character may rest on only the native instincts of the soul
or even on broadly interpreted utilitarian considerations. But if
morality without religion were only a bloodless corpse or a plank in a
shipwreck, there is now need enough for teachers to study its form,
drift, and uses by itself alone. This, at least, is our purpose in
considering the will, and this only.
The will, purpose, and even mood of small children when alone, are
fickle, fluctuating, contradictory. Our very presence imposes one
general law on them, viz., that of keeping our good will and avoiding
our displeasure. As the plant grows towards the light, so they unfold
in the direction of our wishes, felt as by divination. They respect
all you smile at, even buffoonery; look up in their play to call your
notice, to study the lines of your sympathy, as if their chief
vocation was to learn your desires. Their early lies are often saying
what they think will please us, knowing no higher touchstones of
truth. If we are careful to be wisely and without excess happy and
affectionate when they are good, and saddened and slightly cooled in
manifestations of love if they do wrong, the power of association in
the normal, eupeptic child will early choose right as surely as
pleasure increases vitality. If our love is deep, obedience is an
instinct if not a religion. The child learns that while it can not
excite our fear, resentment or admiration, etc., it can act on our
love, and this should be the first sense of its own efficiency. Thus,
too, it first learns that the way of passion and impulse is not the
only rule of life, and that something is gained by resisting them. It
imitates our acts long before it can understand our words. As if it
felt its insignificance, and dreaded to be arrested in some lower
phase of its development, its instinct for obedience becomes almost a
passion. As the vine must twine or grovel, so the child comes
unconsciously to worship idols, and imitates bad patterns and examples
in the absence of worthy ones. He obeys as with a deep sense of being
our chattel, and, at bottom, admires those who coerce him, if the
means be wisely chosen. The authority must, of course, be ascendancy
over heart and mind. The more absolute such authority the more the
will is saved from caprice and feels the power of steadiness. Such
authority excites the unique, unfathomable sense of reverence, which
measures the capacity for will-culture, and is the strongest and
soundest of all moral motives. It is also the most comprehensive, for
it is first felt only towards persons, and personality is a bond,
enabling any number of complex elements to act or be treated as whole,
as everything does and is in the child's soul, instead of in isolation
and detail. In the feeling of respect culminating in worship almost
all educational motives are involved, but especially those which alone
can bring the will to maturity; and happy the child who is bound by
the mysterious and constraining sympathy of dependence, by which, if
unblighted by cynicism, a worthy mentor directs and lifts the will.
This unconscious reflection of our character and wishes is the diviner
side of childhood, by which it is quick and responsive to everything
in its moral environment. The child may not be able to tell whether
its teacher often smiles, dresses in this way or that, speaks loud or
low, has many rules or not, though every element of her personality
affects him profoundly. His acts of will have not been _choices_, but
a mass of psychic causes far greater than consciousness can estimate
have laid a basis of character, than which heredity alone is deeper,
before the child knows he has a will. These influences are not
transient but life-long, for if the conscious and intentional may
anywhere be said to be only a superficial wave over the depths of the
unconscious, it is in the sphere of will-culture.
But command and obedience must also be specific to supplant nature.
Here begins the difficulty. A young child can know no general
commands. "Sit in your chair," means sit a moment, a sort of trick,
with no prohibition to stand the next instant. Any just-forbidden act
may be done in the next room. All is here and now, and patient
reiteration, till habit is formed, and no havoc-making rules which it
cannot understand or remember, is our cue. Obedience can, however, be
instinct even here, and is its chief virtue, and there is no more fear
of weakening the will by it than in the case of soldiers. As the child
grows older, however, and as the acts commanded are repugnant, or
unusual, there should be increasing care, lest authority be
compromised, sympathy ruptured, or lest mutual timidity and
indecision, if not mutual insincerity and dissimulation, as well as
parodied disobedience, etc., to test us, result. We should, of course,
watch for favorable moods, assume no unwonted or preternatural dignity
or owlish air of wisdom, and command in a low voice which does not too
rudely break in upon the child's train of impressions. The acts we
command or forbid should be very few at first, but inexorable. We
should be careful not to forbid where we cannot follow a untrusty
child, or what we can not prevent. Our own will should be a rock and
not a wave. Our requirements should be uniform, with no whim, mood, or
periodicity of any sort about them. If we alternate from caresses to
severity, are fields and capricious instead of commanding by a fixed
and settled plan, if we only now and then take the child in hand, so
he does not know precisely what to expect, we really require the child
to change its nature with every change in us, and well for the child
who can defy such a changeable authority, which not only unsettles but
breaks up character anew when it is just at the beginning of the
formative period. Neglect is better than this, and fear of
inconsistency of authority makes the best parents often jealous of
arbitrariness in teachers. Only thus can we develop general habits of
will and bring the child to know general maxims of conduct
inductively, and only thus by judicious boldness and hardihood in
command can we bring the child to feel the conscious strength that
comes only from doing unpleasant things. Even if instant obedience be
only external at first, it will work inward, for moods are controlled
by work, and it is only will which enlarges the bounds of personality.
Yet we must not forget that even morality is relative, and is one
thing for adults and often quite another for children. The child knows
nothing of absolute truth, justice, or virtues. The various stimuli of
discipline are to enforce the higher though weaker insights which the
child has already unfolded, rather than to engraft entirely unintuited
good. The command must find some ally, feeble though it be, in the
child's own soul. We should strive to fill each moment with as little
sacrifice or subordination, as mere means or conditions to the future,
as possible, for fear of affectation and insincerity. But yet the
hardier and sounder the nature, the more we may address training to
barely nascent intuitions, with a less ingredient of immediate
satisfaction, and the deeper the higher element Of interest will be
grounded in the end. The child must find as he advances towards
maturity, that every new insight, or realization of his own reveals
the fact that you have been there before with commands, cultivating
sentiments and habits, and not that he was led to mistake your
convenience or hobby for duty, or failed to temper the will by
temporizing with it. The young are apt to be most sincere at an age
when they are also most mistaken, but if sincerity be kept at its
deepest and best, will be least harmful and easiest overcome. If
authority supplement rather than supersede good motives, the child
will so love authority as to overcome your reluctance to apply it
directly, and as a final result will choose the state and act you have
pre-formed in its slowly-widening margin of freedom, and will be all
the less liable to undue subservience to priest or boss, or fashion or
tradition later, as obedience gives place to normal, manly
independence.
In these and many other ways everything in conduct should be
mechanized as early and completely as possible. The child's notion of
what is right is what is habitual, and the simple, to which all else
is reduced in thought, is identified with the familiar. It is this
primitive stratum of habits which principally determines our deepest
belief which all must have over and above knowledge--to which men
revert in mature years from youthful vagaries. If good acts are a diet
and not a medicine, are repeated over and over again, as every new
beat of the loom pounds in one new thread, and sense of justice and
right is wrought into the very nerve-cells and fibers; if this ground
texture of the soul, this "memory and habit-plexus," this sphere of
thoughts we oftenest think and acts we oftenest do, is early, rightly
and indiscerptibly wrought, not only does it become a web of destiny
for us, so all-determining is it, but we have something perdurable to
fall back on if moral shock or crisis or change or calamity shall have
rudely broken up the whole structure of later associations. Not only
the more we mechanize thus, the more force of soul is freed for higher
work, but we are insured against emergencies in which the choice and
deed is likely to follow the nearest motive, or that which acts
quickest, rather than to pause and be influenced by higher and perhaps
intrinsically stronger motives. Reflection always brings in a new set
of later-acquired motives and considerations, and if these are better
than habit-mechanism, then pause is good; if not, he who deliberates
is lost. Our purposive volitions are very few compared with the long
series of desires, acts and reactions, often contradictory, many of
which were never conscious, and many once willed but now lapsed to
reflexes, the traces of which crowding the unknown margins of the
soul, constitute the organ of the conscious will.
It is only so far as this primitive will is wrong by nature or
training, that drastic reconstructions of any sort are needed. Only
those who mistake weakness for innocence, or simplicity for candor, or
forget that childish faults are no less serious because universal,
deny the, at least, occasional depravity of all children, or fail to
see that fear and pain are among the indispensables of education,
while a parent, teacher, or even a God, _all_ love, weakens and
relaxes the will. Children do not cry for the alphabet; the
multiplication table is more like medicine than confectionery, and it
is only affected thoroughness that omits all that is hard. "The fruits
of learning may be sweet, but its roots are always bitter," and it is
this alone that makes it possible to strengthen the will while
instructing the mind. The well-schooled will comes, like Herder, to
scorn the luxury of knowing without the labor of learning. We must
anticipate the future penalties of sloth as well as of badness. The
will especially is a trust we are to administer for the child, not as
he may now wish, but as he will wish when more mature. We must now
compel what he will later wish to compel himself to do. To find his
habits already formed to the same law that his mature will and the
world later enjoin, cements the strongest of all bonds between mentor
and child. Nothing, however, must be so individual as punishment. For
some, a threat at rare intervals is enough; while for others, however
ominous threats may be, they become at once "like scarecrows, on which
the foulest birds soonest learn to perch." To scold well and wisely is
an art by itself. For some children, pardon is the worst punishment;
for others, ignoring or neglect; for others, isolation from friends,
suspension from duties; for others, seclusion--which last, however, is
for certain ages beset with extreme danger--and for still others,
shame from being made conspicuous. Mr. Spencer's "natural penalties"
can be applied to but few kinds of wrong, and those not the worst.
Basedow tied boys who fell into temptation to a strong pillar to brace
them up; if stupid and careless, put on a fool's cap and bells; if
they were proud, they were suspended near the ceiling in a basket, as
Aristophanes represented Socrates. Two boys who quarreled, were made
to look into each other's eyes before the whole school till their
angry expressions gave way before the general sense of the ridiculous.
This is more ingenious than wise. The object of discipline is to avoid
punishment, but even flogging should never be forbidden. It maybe
reserved, like a sword in its scabbard, but should not get so rusted
in that it can not be drawn on occasion. The law might even limit the
size and length of the rod, and place of application, as in Germany,
but it should be of no less liberal dimensions here than there.
punishment should, of course, be minatory and reformatory, and not
vindictive, and we should not forget that certainty is more effective
than severity, nor that it is apt to make motives sensuous, and delay
the psychic restraint which should early preponderate over the
physical. But will-culture for boys is rarely as thorough as it should
be without more or less flogging. I would not, of course, urge the
extremes of the past. The Spartan beating as a gymnastic drill to
toughen, the severity which prevailed in Germany for a long time after
its Thirty Years' Wars,[2] the former fashion in many English schools
of walking up not infrequently to take a flogging as a plucky thing to
do, and with no notion of disgrace attaching to it, shows at least an
admirable strength of will. Severe constraint gives poise, inwardness,
self-control, inhibition, and not-willingness, if not willingness,
while the now too common habit of coquetting for the child's favor,
and tickling its ego with praises and prizes, and pedagogic
pettifogging for its good-will, and sentimental fear of a judicious
slap to rouse a spoiled child with no will to break, to make it keep
step with the rest in conduct, instead of delaying a whole school-room
to apply a subtle psychology of motives on it, is bad. This reminds
one of the Jain who sweeps the ground before him lest he unconsciously
tread on a worm. Possibly it may be well, as Schleiermacher suggests,
not to repress some one nascent bad act in some natures, but let it
and the punishment ensue for the sake of Dr. Spankster's tonic. Dermal
pain is not the worst thing in the world, and by a judicious knowledge
of how it feels at both ends of the rod, by flogging and being
flogged, far deeper pains may be forefended. Insulting defiance,
deliberative disobedience, ostentatious carelessness and bravado, are
diseases of the will, and, in very rare cases of Promethean obstinacy,
the severe process of breaking the will is needful, just as in surgery
it is occasionally needful to rebreak a limb wrongly set, or deformed,
to set it over better. It is a cruel process, but a crampy will in
childhood means moral traumatism of some sort in the adult. Few
parents have the nerve to do this, or the insight to see just when it
is needed. It is, as some one has said, like knocking a man down to
save him from stepping off a precipice. Even the worst punishments are
but very faint types of what nature has in store in later life for
some forms of perversity of will, and are better than sarcasm,
ridicule, or tasks, as penalties. The strength of obstinacy is
admirable, and every one ought to have his own will; but a false
direction, though almost always the result of faulty previous training
when the soul more fluid and mobile, is all the more fatal. While so
few intelligent parents are able to refrain from the self-indulgence
of too much rewarding or giving, even though it injures the child, it
is perhaps too much to expect the hardihood which can be justly cold
to the caresses of a child who seeks, by displaying all its stock of
goodness and arts of endearment, to buy back good-will after
punishment has been deserved. If we wait too long, and punish in cold
blood, a young child may hate us; while, if we punish on the instant,
and with passion, a little of which is always salutary, on the
principle, _ohne Affekt kein Effekt_, [Without passion, no effect] an
older child may fail of the natural reactions of conscience, which
should always be secured. The maxim, _summum jus summa injuria_, [The
rigor of the law may be the greatest wrong] we are often told, is
peculiarly true in school, and so it is; but to forego all punishment
is no less injustice to the average child, for it is to abandon one of
the most effective means of will-culture. We never punish but a part,
as it were, of the child's nature; he has lied, but is not therefore a
liar, and we deal only with the specific act, and must love all the
rest of him.
And yet, after all, indiscriminate flogging is so bad, and the average
teacher is so inadequate to that hardest and most tactful of all his
varied duties, viz., selecting the right outcrop of the right fault of
the right child at the right time and place, mood, etc., for best
effect, that the bold statement of such principles as above is perhaps
not entirely without practical danger, especially in two cases which
Madame Necker and Sigismund have pointed out, and in several cases of
which the present writer has notes. First, an habitually good child
sometimes has a saturnalia of defiance and disobedience; a series of
insubordinate acts are suddenly committed which really mark the first
sudden epochful and belated birth of the instinct of independence and
self-regulation, on which his future manliness will depend. He is
quite irresponsible, the acts are never repeated, and very lenient
treatment causes him, after the conflict of tumultuous feelings has
expanded his soul, to react healthfully into habitual docility again,
if some small field for independent action be at once opened him. The
other case is that of _ennui_, of which children suffer such nameless
qualms. When I should open half a dozen books, start for a walk, and
then turn back, wander about in mind or body, seeking but not finding
content in anything, a child in my mood will wish for a toy, an
amusement, food, a rare indulgence, only to neglect or even reject it
petulantly when granted. These flitting "will-spectres" are physical,
are a mild form of the many fatal dangers of fatigue; and punishment
is the worst of treatment. Rest or diversion is the only cure, and the
teacher's mind must be fruitful of purposes to that end. Perhaps a
third case for palliative treatment is, those lies which attend the
first sense of badness. The desire to conceal it occasionally
accompanies the nascent effort to reform and make the lie true. These
cases are probably rare, while the temptation to lie is far greater
for one who does ill than for one who does well, for fear is the chief
motive, and a successful lie which concealed would weaken the desire
to cure a fault.
We have thus far spoken of obedience, and come now to the later
necessity of self-guidance, which, if obedience has wrought its
perfect work, will be natural and inevitable. It is very hard to
combine reason and coercion, yet it is needful that children think
themselves free long before we cease to determine them. As we slowly
cease to prescribe and begin to inspire, a very few well-chosen
mottoes, proverbs, maxims, should be taught very simply, so that they
will sink deep. Education has been defined as working against the
chance influences of life, and it is certain that without some
precepts and rules the will will not exert itself. If reasons are
given, and energy is much absorbed in understanding, the child will
assent but will not do. If the mind is not strong, many wide ideas are
very dangerous. Strong wills are not fond of arguments, and if a young
person falls to talking or thinking beyond his experience, subjective
or objective, both conduct and thought are soon confused by chaotic
and incongruous opinions and beliefs; and false expectations, which
are the very seducers of the will, arise. There can be little
will-training by words, and the understanding can not realize the
ideals of the will. All great things are dangerous, as Plato said, and
the truth itself is not only false but actually immoral to unexpanded
minds. Will-culture is intensive, not extensive, and the writer knows
a case in which even a vacation ramble with a moralizing fabulist has
undermined the work of years. Our precepts must be made very familiar,
copiously illustrated, well wrought together by habit and attentive
thought, and above all clear cut, that the pain of violating them may
be sharp and poignant. Vague and too general precepts beyond the
horizon of the child's real experience do not haunt him if they are
outraged. Now the child must obey these, and will, if he has learned
to obey well the command of others.
One of the best sureties that he will do so is muscle-culture, for if
the latter are weaker than the nerves and brain, the gap between
knowing and doing appears and the will stagnates. Gutsmuths, the
father of gymnastics in Germany before Jahn, used to warn men not to
fancy that the few tiny muscles that moved the pen or tongue had power
to elevate men. They might titillate the soul with words and ideas;
but rigorous, symmetrical muscle-culture alone, he and his Turner
societies believed, could regenerate the Fatherland, for it was one
thing to paint the conflict of life, and quite another to bear arms in
it. They said, "The weaker the body the more it commands; the stronger
it is the more it obeys."
In this way we shall have a strong, well-knit soul-texture, made up of
volitions and ideas like warp and woof. Mind and will will be so
compactly organized that all their forces can be brought to a single
point. Each concept or purpose will call up those related to it, and
once strongly set toward its object, the soul will find itself borne
along by unexpected forces. This power of totalizing, rather than any
transcendent relation of elements, constitutes at least the practical
unity of the soul, and this unimpeded association of its elements is
true or inner freedom of will. Nothing is wanting or lost when the
powers of the soul are mobilized for a great task, and its substance
is impervious to passion. With this organization, men of really little
power accomplish wonders. Without it great minds are confused and
lost. They have only velleity or caprice. The will makes a series of
vigorous, perhaps almost convulsive, but short, inconsistent efforts.
As Jean Paul says, there is sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre in the
soul, but powder is not made, for they never find each other. To
understand this will-plexus is preeminent among the new demands now
laid on educators.
But, although this focalizing power of acting with the whole rather
than with a part of the soul, gives independence of many external,
conventional, proximate standards of conduct, deepening our interests
in life, and securing us against disappointment by defining our
expectations, while such a sound and simple will-philosophy is proof
against considerable shock and has firmness of texture enough to bear
much responsibility, there is, of course, something deeper, without
which all our good conduct is more or less hollow. This is that better
purity established by mothers in the plastic heart, before the
superfoetation of precept is possible, or even before the "soul takes
flight in language"; it is perhaps pre-natal or hereditary. Much every
way depends on how aboriginal our goodness is, whether the will acts
with effort, as we solve an intricate problem, in solitude, or as we
say the multiplication table, which only much distraction can confuse,
or as we repeat the alphabet, which the din of battle could not
hinder. Later and earlier training should harmonize with each other
and with nature. Thrice happy he who is so wisely trained that he
comes to believe he believes what his soul deeply does believe, to say
what he feels and feel what he really does feel, and chiefly whose
express volitions square with the profounder drift of his will as the
resultant of all he has desired or wished, expected, attended to, or
striven for. When such an one comes to his moral majority by standing
for the first time upon his own careful conviction, against the
popular cry, or against his own material interests or predaceous
passions, and feels the constraint and joy of pure obligation which
comes up from this deep source, a new, original force is brought into
the world of wills. Call it inspiration, or Kant's transcendental
impulse above and outside of experience, or Spencer's deep
reverberations from a vast and mysterious past of compacted ancestral
experiences, the most concentrated, distilled and instinctive of all
psychic products, and as old as Mr. Tyndall's "fiery cloud"--the name
or even source is little. We would call it the purest, freest, most
prevailing, because most inward, will or conscience.
This free, habitual guidance by the highest and best, by conviction
with no sense of compulsion or obligation, impractical if not
dangerous ideal, for it can be actually realized only by the rarest
moral genius. For most of us, the best education is that which makes
us the best and most obedient servants. This is the way of peace and
the way of nature, for even if we seriously try to keep up a private
conscience at all, apart from feeling, faction, party or class spirit,
or even habit, which are our habitual guides, the difficulties are so
great that most hasten, more or less consciously and voluntarily, to
put themselves under authority again, serving only the smallest margin
of independence in material interests, choice of masters, etc, and
yielding to the pleasing and easy illusion that inflates the minimum
to seem the maximum of freedom, and uses the noblest ideal of history,
viz., that of pure autonomous oughtness, as a pedestal for idols of
selfishness, caprice and conceit. The trouble is in interpreting these
moral instincts, for even the authorities lack the requisite
self-knowledge in which all wisdom culminates. The moral interregnum
which the _Aufklärung_ [Enlightenment] has brought will not end till
these instincts are rightly interpreted by in intelligence. The
richest streams of thought must flow about them, the best methods must
peep and pry till their secrets are found and put into the
idea-pictures in which most men think.
This brings us, finally, to the highest and also immediately practical
method of moral education, viz., training the will by and for
intellectual work. Youth and childhood must not be subordinated as
means to maturity. Learning is more useful than knowing. It is the way
and not the goal, the work and not the product, the acquiring and not
the acquisition, that educates will and character. To teach only
results, which are so simple, without methods by which they were
obtained, which are so complex and hard, to develop the sense of
possession without the strain of activity, to teach great matters too
easily or even as play, always to wind along the lines of least
resistance into the child's mind, is imply to add another and most
enervating luxury to child-life. Only the sense and power of effort,
which made Lessing prefer the search to the possession of truth, which
trains the will in the intellectual field, which is becoming more and
more the field of its activity, counts for character and makes
instruction really educating. This makes mental work a series of acts,
or living thoughts, and not merely words. Real education, that we can
really teach, and that which is really most examinable, is what we do,
while those who acquire without effort may be extremely instructed
without being truly educated.
It is those who have been trained to put forth mental power that come
to the front later, while it is only those whose acquisitions are not
transpeciated into power who are in danger of early collapse.
It is because of this imperfect appropriation through lack of
volitional reaction that mental training is so often dangerous,
especially in its higher grades. Especially wherever good precepts are
allowed to rest peacefully beside undiscarded bad habits, moral
weakness is directly cultivated. Volitional recollection, or forcing
the mind to reproduce a train of impressions, strengthens what we may
call the mental will; while if multifarious impressions which excite
at the time are left to take their chances, at best, fragmentary
reproduction, incipient amnesia, the prelude of mental decay, may be
soon detected. Few can endure the long working over of ideas,
especially if at all fundamental, which is needful to full maturity of
mind, without grave moral danger. New standpoints and ideas require
new combinations of the mental elements, with constant risk that
during the process, what was already secured will fall back into its
lower components. Even oar immigrants suffer morally from the change
of manners and customs and ideas, and yet education menus change; the
more training the more change, as a rule, and the more danger during
the critical transition period while we oscillate between control by
old habits, or association within the old circle of thought, and by
the new insights, as a medical student often suffers from trying to
bring the regulation of his physical functions under new and imperfect
hygienic insights. Thus most especially if old questions, concerning
which we have long since ceased to trust ourselves to give reasons,
need to be reopened, there is especial danger that the new equilibrium
about which the dynamic is to be re-resolved into static power will be
established, if at all, with loss instead of with gain. Indeed, it is
a question not of schools but of civilization, whether mental
training, from the three R's to science and philosophy, shall really
make men better, as the theory of popular education assumes, and
whether the genius and talent of the few who can receive and bear it
can be brought to the full maturity of a knowledge fully facultized--a
question paramount, even in a republic, to the general education of
the many.
The illusion is that beginnings are hard. They are easy. Almost any
mind can advance a little way into almost any subject. The feeblest
youth can push on briskly in the beginning of a new subject, but he
forgets, and so does the examiner who marks him, that difficulties
increase not in arithmetical but in almost geometrical ratio as he
advances. The fact, too, that all topics are taught by all teachers
and that we have no specialized teaching in elementary branches, and
that examinations are placed in the most debilitating part of our
peculiarly debilitating spring, these help us to solve the problem
which China has solved so well, viz., how to instruct and not to
educate. A pass mark, say of fifty, should be given not for mastery of
the first half of the book, or for knowledge of half the matter in it,
but for that of three-fourths or more. Suppose one choose the easier
method of tattooing his mind by attaining the easy early stages of
proficiency in many subjects, as is possible and even encouraged in
too many of our school and college curricula, he weakens the
will-quality of his mind. Smattering is dissipation of energy. Only
great, concentrated and prolonged efforts in one direction really
train the mind, because only _they_ train the will beneath it. Many
little, heterogeneous efforts of different sorts leave the mind in a
muddle of heterogeneous impressions, and the will like a rubber band
is stretched to flaccidity around one after another bundle of objects
too large for it to clasp into unity. Here again, _in der Beschränkung
zeigt sich der Meister_ [The master shows himself in self-limitation];
all-sidedness through one-sidedness; by stalking the horse or cow out
in the spring time, till he gnaws his small allotted circle of grass
to the ground, and not by roving and cropping at will, can he be
taught that the sweetest joint is nearest the root, are convenient
symbols of will-culture in the intellectual field. Even a long cram,
if only on one subject, which brings out the relations of the parts,
or a "one-study college," as is already devised in the West, or the
combination of several subjects even in primary school grades into a
"concentration series," as devised by Ziller and Rein, the university
purpose as defined by Ziller of so combining studies that each shall
stand in the course next to that with which it is inherently closest
connected by matter and method, or the requirements of one central and
two collateral branches for the doctorate examination--all these devices
no doubt tend to give a sense of efficiency, which is one of the
deepest and proudest joys of life, in the place of a sense of
possession so often attended by the exquisite misery of conscious
weakness. The unity of almost any even ideal purpose is better than
none, if it tend to check the superficial one of learning to repeat
again or of boxing the whole compass of sciences and liberal arts, as
so many of our high schools or colleges attempt.
Finally, in the sphere of mental productivity and originality, a just
preponderance of the will-element makes men distrust new insights,
quick methods, and short cuts, and trust chiefly to the genius of
honest and sustained work, in power of which perhaps lies the greatest
intellectual difference between men. When ideas are ripe for
promulgation they have been condensed and concentrated, thought
traverses them quickly and easily--in a word, they have become
practical, and the will that waits over a new idea patiently and
silently, without anxiety, even though with a deepening sense of
responsibility, till all sides have been seen, all authorities
consulted, all its latent mental reserves heard from, is the man who
"talks with the rifle and not with the water-hose," or, in a rough
farmer's phrase, "boils his words till he can give his hearers sugar
and not sap." Several of the more important discoveries of the present
generation, which cost many weary months of toil, have been enumerated
in a score or two of lines, so that every experimenter could set up
his apparatus and get the results in a few minutes. Let us not forget
that, in most departments of mental work, the more we revise and
reconstruct our thought, the longer we inhibit its final expression,
while the oftener we return to it refreshed from other interests, the
clearer and more permeable for other minds it becomes, because the
more it tends to express itself in terms of willed action, which is
"the language of complete men."
So closely bound together are moral and religious training that a
discussion of one without the other would be incomplete. In a word,
religion is the most generic kind of culture as opposed to all systems
or departments which are one sided. All education culminates in it
because it is chief among human interests, and because it gives inner
unity to the mind, heart, and will. How now should this common element
of union be taught?
To be really effective and lasting, moral and religious training must
begin in the cradle. It was a profound remark of Froebel that _the
unconsciousness of a child is rest in God_. This need not be
understood in guy pantheistic sense. From this rest in God the
childish soul should not be abruptly or prematurely aroused. Even the
primeval stages of psychic growth are rarely so all-sided, so purely
unsolicited, spontaneous, and unprecocious, as not to be in a sense a
fall from Froebel's unconsciousness or rest in God. The sense of
touch, the mother of all the other senses, is the only one which the
child brings into the world already experienced; but by the pats,
caresses, hugs, etc., so instinctive with young mothers, varied
feelings and sentiments are communicated to the child long before it
recognizes its own body as distinct from things about it. The mother's
face and voice are the first conscious objects as the infant soul
unfolds, and she soon comes to stand in the very place of God to her
child. All the religion of which the child is capable during this by
no means brief stage of its development consists of those
sentiments--gratitude, trust, dependence, love, etc., now felt only
for her--which are later directed toward God. The less these are now
cultivated toward the mother, who is now their only fitting if not
their only possible object, the more feebly they will later be felt
toward God. This, too, adds greatly to the sacredness and the
responsibilities of motherhood. Froebel perhaps is right that thus
fundamental religious sentiments can be cultivated in the earliest
months of infancy. It is of course impossible not to seem, perhaps
even not to be, sentimental upon this theme, for the infant soul has
no other content than sentiments, and because upon these rests the
whole superstructure of religion in child or adult. The mother's
emotions, and physical and mental states, indeed, imparted and
reproduced in the infant so immediately, unconsciously, and through so
many avenues, that it is no wonder that these relations see mystic.
Whether the mother is habitually under the influence of calm and
tranquil emotions, or her temper is fluctuating or violent, or her
movements are habitually energetic or soft and caressing, or she be
regular or irregular in her ministrations to the infant in her arms,
all these characteristics and habits are registered in the primeval
language of touch upon the nervous system of the child. From this
point of view, poise and calmness, the absence of all intense annuli
and of sensations or transitions which are abrupt or sudden, and an
atmosphere of quieting influences, like everything which retards by
broadening, is in the general line of religious culture. The soul of
an infant is well compared to a seed planted in a garden. It is not
pressed or moved by the breezes which rustle the leaves overhead. The
sunlight does not fall upon it, and even dew and evening coolness
scarcely reach it; but yet there is not a breath of air or a ray of
sunshine, nor a drop of moisture to which it is responsive, and which
does not stir all its germinant forces. The child is a plant, must
live out of doors in proper season, and there must be no forcing.
Religion, then, at this important stage, at least, is naturalism pure
and simple, and religious training is the supreme art of standing out
of nature's way. So implicit is the unity of soul and body at this
formative age that care of the body is the most effective
ethico-religious culture.
Next to be considered are the sentiments which unfold under the
influence of that fresh and naive curiosity which attends the first
impressions of natural objects from which both religion and science
spring as from one common root. The awe and sublimity of a
thunderstorm, the sights and sounds of a spring morning, objects which
lead the child's thoughts to what is remote in time and space, old
trees, ruins, the rocks, and, above all, the heavenly bodies--the
utilization of these lessons is the most important task of the
religious teacher during the _kindergarten_ stage of childhood. Still
more than the undevout astronomer, the undevout child under such
influences is abnormal. In these directions the mind of the child is
as open and plastic as that of the ancient prophet to the promptings
of the inspiring Spirit. The child can recognize no essential
difference between nature and the supernatural, and the products of
mythopoeic fancy which have been spun about natural objects, and which
have lain so long and so warm about the hearts of generations and
races of men, are now the best of all nutriments for the soul. To
teach scientific rudiments only about nature, on the shallow principle
that nothing should be taught which must be unlearned, or to encourage
the child to assume the critical attitude of mind, is dwarfing the
heart and prematurely forcing the head. It has been said that country
life is religion for children at this stage. However this may be, it
is clear that natural religion is rooted in such experiences, and
precedes revealed religion in the order of growth and education,
whatever its logical order in systems of thought may be. A little
later, habits of truthfulness[3] are best cultivated by the use of the
senses in exact observation. To see a simple phenomenon in nature and
report it fully and correctly is no easy matter, but the habit of
trying to do so teaches what truthfulness is and leaves the impress of
truth upon the whole life and character. I do not hesitate to say,
therefore, that elements of science should be taught to children for
the moral effects of its influences. At the same time all truth is not
sensuous, and this training alone at this age tends to make the mind
pragmatic, dry, and insensitive or unresponsive to that other kind of
truth the value of which is not measured by its certainty so much as
by its effect upon us. We must learn to interpret the heart and our
native instincts as truthfully as we do external nature, for our
happiness in life depends quite as largely upon bringing our beliefs
into harmony with the deeper feelings of our nature as it does upon
the ability to adapt ourselves to our physical environment. Thus not
only all religious beliefs and moral acts will strengthen if they
truly express the character instead of cultivating affectation and
insincerity in opinion, word, and deed, as with mistaken pedagogic
methods they may do. This latter can be avoided only by leaving all to
naturalism and spontaneity at first, and feeding the soul only
according to its appetites and stage of growth. No religious truth
must be taught as fundamental--especially as fundamental to
morality--which can be seriously doubted or even misunderstood. Yet it
must be expected that convictions will be transformed and worked over
and over again, and only late, if at all, will an equilibrium between
the heart and the truth it clings to as finally satisfying be
attained. Hence most positive religious instruction, or public piety,
if taught at all, should be taught briefly as most serious but too
high for the child yet, or as rewards to stimulate curiosity for them
later, but sacred things should not become too familiar or be
conventionalized before they can be felt or understood.
The child's conception of God should not be personal or too familiar
_at first_, but He should appear distant and vague, inspiring awe and
reverence far more than love; in a word, as the God of nature rather
than as devoted to serviceable ministrations to the child's individual
wants. The latter should be taught to be a faithful servant rather
than a favorite of God. The inestimable pedagogic value of the
God-idea consists in that it widens the child's glimpse of the whole,
and gives the first presentment of the universality of laws, such as
are observed in its experiences and that of others, so that all things
seem comprehended under one stable system or government. The slow
realization that God's laws are not like those of parents and
teachers, evadible, suspensible, but changeless, and their penalties
sure as the laws of nature, is most important factor of moral
training. First the law, the schoolmaster, then the Gospel; first
nature, then grace, is the order of growth.
The pains or pleasures which follow many acts are immediate, while the
results that follow others are so remote or so serious that the child
must utilize the experience of others. Artificial rewards and
punishments must be cunningly devised so as to simulate and typify as
closely as possible the real natural penalty, and they must be
administered uniformly and impartially like laws of nature. As
commands are just, and as they are gradually perceived to spring from
superior wisdom, respect arises, which Kant called the bottom motive
of duty, and defined as the immediate determination of the will by
law, thwarting self-love. Here the child reverences what is not
understood as authority, and to the childish "Why?" which always
implies imperfect respect for the authority, however displeasing its
behest, the teacher or parent should always reply, "You cannot
understand why yet," unless quite sure that a convincing and
controlling insight can be given, such as shall make all future
exercise of outward authority in this particular unnecessary. From
this standpoint the great importance of the character and native
dignity of the teacher is best seen. Daily contact with some teachers
is itself all-sided ethical education for the child without a spoken
precept. Here, too, the real advantage of male over female teachers,
especially for boys, is seen in their superior physical strength,
which often, if highly estimated, gives real dignity and commands real
respect, and especially in the unquestionably greater uniformity of
their moods and their discipline.
During the first years of school life, a point of prime importance in
ethico-religious training is the education of conscience. This latter
is the most complex and perhaps the most educable of all our so-called
"faculties." A system of carefully arranged talks, with copious
illustrations from history and literature, about such topics as fair
play, slang, cronies, dress, teasing, getting mad, prompting in class,
white lies, affectation, cleanliness, order, honor, taste,
self-respect, treatment of animals, reading, vacation pursuits, etc.,
can be brought quite within the range of boy-and-girl interests by a
sympathetic and tactful teacher, and be made immediately and obviously
practical. All this is nothing more or less than conscience-building.
The old superstition that children have innate faculties of such a
finished sort that they flash up and grasp the principle of things by
a rapid sort of first "intellection," an error that made all
departments of education so trivial, assumptive and dogmatic for
centuries before Comenius, Basedow and Pestalozzi, has been banished
everywhere save from moral and religious training, where it still
persists in full force. The senses develop first, and all the higher
intuitions called by the collective name of conscience gradually and
later in life. They first take the form of sentiments without much
insight, and are hence liable to be unconscious affectation, and are
caught insensibly from the environment with the aid of inherited
predisposition, and only made more definite by such talks as the
above. But parents are prone to forget that healthful and correct
sentiments concerning matters of conduct are, at first, very feeble,
and that the sense of obligation needs the long and careful
guardianship of external authority. Just as a young medical student
with a rudimentary notion of physiology and hygiene is sometimes
disposed to undertake a more or less complete reform of his diet,
regimen, etc., to make it "scientific" in a way that an older and a
more learned physician would shrink from, so the half-insights of boys
into matters of moral regimen are far too apt, in the American
temperament, to expend, in precocious emancipation and crude attempts
at practical realization, the force which is needed to bring their
insights to maturity. Authority should be relaxed gradually,
explicitly, and provisionally over one definite department of conduct
at a time. To distinguish right and wrong in their own nature is the
highest and most complex of intellectual processes. Most men and all
children are guided only by associations of greater or less subtlety.
Perhaps the whole round of human duties might be best taught by
gathering illustrations of selfishness and tracing it in its countless
disguises and ramifications through every stage of life. Selfishness
is opposed to a sense of the infinite and is inversely as real
religion, and the study of it is not, like systematic ethics, apt to
be confused and made unpractical by conflicting theories.
The Bible, the great instrument in the education of conscience, is far
less juvenile than it is now the fashion to suppose. At the very
least, it expresses the result of the ripest human experience, the
noblest traditions of humanity. Old Testament history, even more than
most very ancient history, is distilled to an almost purely ethical
content. For centuries Scripture was withheld from the masses for the
same reason that Plato refused at first to put his thoughts into
writing, because it would be sure to be misunderstood by very many and
lead to that worst of errors and fanaticism caused by half-truths.
Children should not approach it too lightly.
The Old Testament, perhaps before or more than the New, is the Bible
for childhood. A good, protracted course of the law pedagogically
prepares the way for the apprehension of the Gospel. Then the study of
the Old Testament should begin with selected tales, told, as in the
German schools, impressively, in the teacher's language, but
objectively, and without exegetical or hortatory comment. The appeal
is directly to the understanding only at first, but the moral lesson
is brought clearly and surely within the child's reach, but not
personally applied after the manner common with us.
Probably the most important changes for the educator to study are
those which begin between the ages of twelve and sixteen and are
completed only some years later, when the young adolescent receives
from nature a new capital of energy and altruistic feeling. It is
physiological second birth, and success in life depends upon the care
and wisdom with which this new and final invoice of energy is
husbanded. These changes constitute a natural predisposition to a
change of heart, and may perhaps be called, in Kantian phrase, its
_schema_. Even from the psychophysic standpoint it is a correct
instinct which has slowly led churches to center so much of their
cultus upon regeneration. In this I, of course, only assert here the
neurophysical side, which is everywhere present, even if everywhere
subordinate to the spiritual side. As everywhere, so here, too, the
physical may be called in a sense regulative rather than constitutive.
It is therefore not surprising that statistics show that far more
conversions, proportionately, take place during the adolescent period,
which does not normally end before the age of twenty-four or five,
than during any other period of equal length. At this age most
churches confirm.
Before this age the child lives in the present, is normally selfish,
deficient in sympathy, but frank and confidential, obedient to
authority, and without affectation save the supreme affectation of
childhood, viz., assuming the words, manners, habits, etc., of those
older than itself. But now stature suddenly increases, and the power
of physical and mental endurance and effort diminishes for a time;
larynx, nose, chin change, and normal and morbid ancestral traits and
features appear. Far greater and more protracted, though unseen, are
the changes which take place in the nervous system, both in the
development of the cortex and expansion of the convolutions and the
growth of association-fibers by which the elements shoot together and
relation of things are seen, which hitherto seemed independent, to
which it seems as if for a few years the energies of growth were
chiefly directed. Hence this period is so critical and changes in
character are so rapid. No matter how confidential the relations with
the parent may have been, an important domain of the soul now declares
its independence. Confidences are shared with those of equal age and
withheld from parents, especially by boys, to an extent probably
little suspected by most parents. Education must be addressed to
freedom, which recognizes only self-made law, and spontaneity of
opinion and conduct is manifested, often in extravagant and grotesque
forms. There is now a longing for that kind of close sympathy and
friendship which makes cronies and intimates; there is a craving for
strong emotions which gives pleasure in exaggerations; and there are
nameless longings for what is far, remote, strange, which emphasizes
the self-estrangement which Hegel so well describes, and which marks
the normal rise of the presentiment of something higher than self.
Instincts of rivalry and competition now grow strong in boys, and
girls grow more conscientious and inward, and begin to feel their
music, reading, religion, painting, etc., and to realize the bearing
of these upon their future adult life. There is often a strong
instinct of devotion and self-sacrifice toward some, perhaps almost
any, object, or in almost any cause which circumstances may present.
Moodiness and perhaps a love of solitude are developed. "Growing fits"
make hard and severe labor of body and mind impossible without
dwarfing or arresting the development, by robbing of its nutrition
some part of the organism--stomach, lungs, chest, heart, back, brain,
etc.--which is peculiarly liable to disease later. It is never so hard
to tell the truth plainly and objectively and without any subjective
twist. The life of the mere individual ceases and that of person, or
better, of the race, begins. It is a period of realization, and hence
often of introspection. In healthy natures it is the golden age of
life, in which enthusiasm, sympathy, generosity, and curiosity are at
their strongest and best, and when growth is so rapid that, e.g., each
college class is conscious of a vast interval of development which
separates it from the class below; but it is also a period subject to
Wertherian crises, such as Hume, Richter, J.S. Mill, and others passed
through, and all depends on the direction given to these new forces.
The dangers of this period are great and manifest. The chief of these,
far greater even than the dangers of intemperance, is that the sexual
elements of soul and body will be developed prematurely and
disproportionately. Indeed, early maturity in this respect is itself
bad. If it occurs before other compensating and controlling powers are
unfolded, this element is hypertrophied and absorbs and dwarfs their
energy and it is then more likely to be uninstructed and to suck up
all that is vile in the environment. Far more than we realize, the
thoughts and feelings of youth center about this factor of his nature.
Quite apart, therefore, from its intrinsic value, education should
serve the purpose of preoccupation, and should divert attention from
an element of our nature the premature or excessive development of
which dwarfs every part of soul and body. Intellectual interests,
athleticism, social and esthetic tastes, should be cultivated. There
should be some change in external life. Previous routine and
drill-work must be broken through and new occupations resorted to,
that the mind may not be left idle while the hands are mechanically
employed. Attractive home-life, friendships well chosen and on a high
plane, and regular habits, should of course be cultivated. Now, too,
though the intellect is not frequently judged insane, so that
pubescent insanity is comparatively rare, the feelings, which are yet
more fundamental to mental sanity, are most often perverted, and lack
of emotional steadiness, violent and dangerous impulses, unreasonable
conduct, lack of enthusiasm and sympathy, are very commonly caused by
abnormalities here. Neurotic disturbances, such as hysteria, chorea,
and, in the opinion of some physicians, sick-headache and early
dementia are peculiarly liable to appear and become seated during this
period. In short, the previous selfhood is broken up like the
regulation copy handwriting of early school years, and a new
individual is in process of crystallization. All is solvent, plastic,
peculiarly susceptible to external influences.
Between love and religion, God and nature have wrought a strong and
indissoluble bond. Flagellations, fasts, exposure, excessive penances
of many kinds, the Hindoo cultus of quietude, and mental absorption in
vacuity and even one pedagogic motive of a cultus of the spiritual and
supernatural, e. g. in the symposium of Plato, are all designed as
palliatives and alteratives of degraded love. Change of heart before
pubescent years, there are several scientific reasons for thinking
means precocity and forcing. The age signalized by the ancient Greeks
as that at which the study of what was comprehensively called music
should begin, the age at which Roman guardianship ended, as explained
by Sir Henry Maine, at which boys are confirmed in the modern Greek,
Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopal churches, and at which the child
Jesus entered the temple, is as early as any child ought consciously
to go about his heavenly Father's business. If children are instructed
in the language of these sentiments too early, the all-sided deepening
and broadening of soul and of conscience which should come with
adolescent years will be incomplete. Revival sermon which the writer
has heard preached to very young children are analogous to exhorting
them to imagine themselves married people and inculcating the duties
of that relation. It is because this precept is violated in the
intemperate haste for immediate results that we may so often hear
childish sentiments and puerile expressions so strangely mingled in
the religious experience of otherwise apparently mature adults, which
remind one of a male voice constantly modulating from manly tones into
boyish falsetto. Some one has said of very early risers that they were
apt to be conceited all the forenoon, and stupid and uninteresting all
the afternoon and evening. So, too, precocious infant Christians are
apt to be conceited and full of pious affectations all the forenoon of
life, and thereafter commonplace enough in their religious life. One
is reminded of Aristotle's theory of Catharsis, according to which the
soul was purged of strong or bad passions by listening to vivid
representations of them on the stage. So, by the forcing method we
deprecate, the soul is given just enough religious stimulus to act as
an inoculation against deeper and more serious interest later. At this
age the prescription of a series of strong feelings is very apt to
cause attention to concentrate on physical states in a way which may
culminate in the increased activity of the passional nature, or may
induce that sort of self-flirtation which is expressed in morbid love
of autobiographic confessional outpourings, or may issue in the
supreme selfishness of incipient and often unsuspected hysteria. Those
who are led to Christ normally by obeying conscience are not apt to
endanger the foundation of their moral character if they should later
chance to doubt the doctrine of verbal inspiration or some of the
miracles, or even get confused about the Trinity, because their
religious nature is not built on the sand. The art of leading young
men through college without ennobling or enlarging any of the
religious notions of childhood is anti-pedagogic and unworthy
philosophy, and is to leave men puerile in the highest department of
their nature.
At the age we have indicated, when the young man instinctively takes
the control of himself into his own hands, previous ethico-religious
training should be brought to a focus and given a personal
application, which, to be most effective, should probably, in most
cases, be according to the creed of the parent. It is a serious and
solemn epoch, and ought to be fittingly signalised. Morality now needs
religion, which cannot have affected life much before. Now duties
should be recognised as divine commands, for the strongest motives,
natural and supernatural, are needed for the regulation of the new
impulses, passions, desires, half insights, ambitions, etc., which
come to the American temperament so suddenly before the methods of
self-regulation can become established and operative. Now a deep
personal sense of purity and impurity are first possible, and indeed
inevitable, and this natural moral tension is a great opportunity to
the religious teacher. A serious sense of God within, and of
responsibilities which transcend this life as they do the adolescent's
power of comprehension; a feeling for duties deepened by a realization
and experience of their conflict such as some have thought to be the
origin of religion itself in the soul--these, too, are elements of the
"theology of the heart" revealed at this age to every serious youth,
but to the judicious emphasis and utilization of which, the teacher
should lend his consummate skill. While special lines of interest
leading to a career must be now well grounded, there must also be a
culture of the ideal and an absorption in general views and remote and
universal ends. If all that is pure and disciplining in what is
transcendent, whether to the Christian believers, the poet or the
philosopher, had even been devised only for the better regulation of
human energies set free at this age, but not yet fully defined or
realized, they would still have a most potent justification on this
ground alone. At any rate, what is often wasted in excess here, if
husbanded, ripens into philosophy, the larger love to the world, the
true and the good, in a sense not unlike that in the symposium of
Plato.
Finally, there is danger lest this change, as prescribed and
formulated by the church, be too sudden and violent, and the capital
of moral force which should last a lifetime be consumed in a brief,
convulsive effort, like the sudden running down of a watch if its
spring be broken. Piety is naturally the slowest because the most
comprehensive kind of growth. Quetelet says that the measure of the
state of civilization in a nation is the way in which it achieves its
revolutions. As it becomes truly civilized, revolutions cease to be
sudden and violent, and become gradually transitory and without abrupt
change. The same is true of that individual crisis which
psycho-physiology describes as adolescence, and of which theology
formulates a higher spiritual potency as conversion. The adolescent
period lasts ten years or more, during all of which development of
every sort is very rapid and constant, and it is, as already remarked,
intemperate haste for immediate results, of reaping without sowing,
which has made so many regard change of heart as an instantaneous
conquest rather than as a growth, and persistently to forget that
there is something of importance before and after it in healthful
religious experience.
[Footnote 1: See author's Boy Life, in Massachusetts Country Town
Forty Years Ago. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1906, vol. 13, pp.
192-207.]
[Footnote 2: Those interested in school statistics may value the
record kept by a Swabian schoolmaster named Hauberle, extending over
fifty-one years and seven months' experience as a teacher, as follows:
911,527 blows with a cane; 124,010 with a rod; 20,939 with a ruler;
136,715 with the hand; 19,295 over the mouth; 7,905 boxes on the ear;
1,115,800 snaps on the head; 22,763 nota benes with Bible, catechism,
hymnbook and grammar; 777 times boys had to kneel on peas; 613 times
on triangular blocks of wand; 5,001 had to carry a timber mare; and,
7,701 hold the rod high; the last two being punishments of his own
invention. Of the blows with the cane 800,000 were for Latin vowels,
and 76,000 of those with the rod for Bible verses and hymns. He used a
scolding vocabulary of over 3,000 terms, of which one-third were of
his own invention.]
[Footnote 3: For most recent and elaborate study of children's lies
see Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie, Pathologie und Hygiene,
Juli, 1905. Jahrgang 7, Heft 3, pp. 177-205.]
* * * * *
GLOSSARY
AGAMIC. Unmarried; unmarriageable, sometimes non-sexed.
AGENIC. Lacking in reproductive power; sterile.
AMPHIMIXIS. That form of reproduction which involves the
mingling of substance from two individuals so as to effect
a mixture of hereditary characteristics. It includes the
phenomena of conjugation and fertilization among both
unicellular and multicellular organisms.
ANABOLISM. _See_ METABOLISM.
ANAMNESIC. Pertaining to or aiding recollection.
ANEMIC. Deficient in blood; bloodless.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM. The attributing of human characteristics
to natural, supernatural, or divine beings.
ANTHROPOMETRY. Science of measurement of the human body.
ARTIFACT. Any artificial product.
APHASIA. Impairment or lose of the ability to understand or
use speech.
ASSOCIATIONISM. The psychological theory which regards the
laws of association as the fundamental laws of mental action
and development.
ATAVISTIC. Pertaining to reversion through the influence of
heredity to remote ancestral characteristics.
ATAXIC. Pertaining to inability to coördinate voluntary movements;
irregular.
CALAMO-PAPYRUS. Reed papyrus or pen-paper.
CATABOLISM. _See_ METABOLISM.
CATHARSIS. Purgation or cleansing. Aristotle's esthetic theory
that little renders immune for much.
CEREBRATION. Brain action, conscious or unconscious.
CHOREA. St. Vitus's dance; a nervous disease marked by irregular
and involuntary movements of the limbs and face.
CHRESTOMATHY. A collection of extracts and choice pieces.
CHRISTENTHUM. The Christian belief; the spirit of Christianity.
COMMANDO EXERCISES. Gymnastic exercises whose order is dependent
upon the spoken command of the director.
CORTEX. The gray matter of the brain, mostly on its surface.
CORTICAL. Pertaining to the cortex.
CRANIOMETRY. The measurement of skulls.
CRYPTOGAMOUS. Having an obscure mode of fertilization; or,
of plants that do not blossom.
CULTUS. A system of religious belief and worship.
DEUTSCHENTHUM. The spirit of the German people.
DIATHESIS. A constitutional predisposition.
EPHEBIC. Pertaining to the Greek system of instruction given
to young men to fit them for citizenship; adolescent.
EPIGONI. Successors; followers who only follow.
EPISTEMOLOGY. The theory of knowledge; that branch of logic
which undertakes to explain how knowledge is possible and
to define its limitations, meaning, and worth.
EUPEPTIC. Having good digestion.
EUPHORIA. The sense of well-being; of fullness of life.
EVIRATION. Emasculation; loss of manly characteristics.
FERAL. Wild by nature; untamed; undomesticated.
FORMICARY. An artificial ants' nest.
GEMÜTH. Disposition; the entire affective soul and its habitual
state.
HEBETUDE. Dullness; stupidity.
HEDONISTIC. Relating to hedonism, that form of Greek philosophy
which taught that pleasure is the chief end of
existence.
HETAERA. A Greek courtesan. This class was often highly
trained in music and social art, and represented the highest
grade of culture among Greek women.
HETEROGENY. (1) The spontaneous generation of animals and
vegetables, low in the scale of organization, from inorganic
elements. (2) That kind of generation in which the parent,
whether plant or animal, produces offspring differing in
structure or habit from itself, but in which after one or
more generations the original form reappears.
HETERONOMOUS. Having a different name.
HOROLOGY. The science of measuring time and of constructing
instruments for that purpose.
HYGEIA. The Greek goddess of health; health.
HYPERMETHODIC. Methodic to excess; overmethodic.
HYPERTROPHY. Excessive growth.
INDISCERPTIBLE. Incapable of being destroyed by separation of
parts.
INHIBITION. Interference with the normal result of a nervous
excitement by an opposing force.
IRRADIATION. The diffusion of nervous stimuli out of the path of
normal discharge which, as a result of the excitation of a
peripheral end organ may excite other central organs than
those directly connected with it.
KINESOLOGICAL. Pertaining to the science of tests and
measurements of bodily strength.
KINESOMETER. An instrument for measuring muscular strength.
MEDULLATION. The investment of nerve fibers with a protective
covering or medullary sheath, consisting of white, fat-like
matter.
MERISTIC. Pertaining to the levels or spinal and cerebral
segments of the body.
METABOLISM. The act or process by which, on the one hand, dead
food is built up into living matter--anabolism, and by
which, on the other, the living matter is broken down into
simpler products within a cell or organism--catabolism.
METAMORPHOSIS. Change of form or structure; transformation.
METEMPSYCHOSIS. The doctrine of the transmigration of the
soul from one body to another.
MONOPHRASTIC. Pertaining to or consisting of a single phrase.
MONOTECHNIC. Pertaining to a single art or craft.
MORPHOLOGY. The science of form and structure of plants and
animals without regard to function.
MYOLOGY. The scientific knowledge of the muscular system.
MYTHOPOEIC. Producing or having a tendency to produce myths.
NOETIC. Of, pertaining to, or conceived by, mind.
NUANCE. Slight shade; difference; distinction; degree.
ORTHOGENIC. Pertaining to right beginning and development.
ORTHOPEDIC. Relating to the art of curing deformities.
OSSUARY. A depository of dry bones.
PALEOPSYCHIC. Pertaining to the antiquity of the soul.
PANTHEISTIC. Relating to that doctrine which holds that the
entire phenomenal universe, including man and nature, is
the ever-changing manifestation of God, who rises to
self-consciousness and personality only in man.
PATRISTICS. That department of study occupied with the
doctrines and writings of the fathers of the Christian Church.
PHOBIA. Excessive or morbid fear of anything.
PHYLETICALLY. In accordance with the phylum or race; racially.
PHYLETIC. Pertaining to a race or clan.
PHYLOGENY. The history of the evolution of a species or group;
tribal history; ancestral development as opposed to ontogeny
or the development of the individual.
PHYLUM. A term introduced by Haeckel to designate the great
branches of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Each phylum
may include several classes.
PICKELHAUBE. The spiked helmet of the German army.
PLANKTON. Sea animals and plants collectively; distinguished
from coast or bottom forms and floating in a great mass.
POLYGAMIC (LOVE). Pertaining to the habit of having more than
one mate of the opposite sex.
POLYPHRASTIC. Having many phrases; pertaining to rambling,
incoherent speech.
POST-SIMIAN. Pertaining to an age later than that in which
simian or monkey-like forms prevailed.
PRENUBILE. Pertaining to the age before sexual maturity or
marriageability is reached.
PRIE DIEU. A praying desk.
PROPEDEUTIC. Preliminary; introductory.
PROPHYLACTIC. Any medicine or measure efficacious in preventing
disease.
PSEUDOPHOBIAC. Pertaining to a morbid condition in which the
subject is continually in fear of having said something not
strictly true.
PSYCHOGENESIS. The origin and development of soul.
PSYCHONOMIC. Pertaining to the laws of mind.
PSYCHOSIS. Mental constitution or condition; any change in
consciousness, especially if abnormal.
PUBERTY. The age of sexual maturity.
PUBESCENT. Relating to the dawning of puberty.
PYGMOID. Of pygmy size and form.
RABULIST. A chronic wrangler; one who argues about everything.
SCHEMA. A synopsis; a summary. In the Kantian sense, a
general type.
SCHEMATISM. An outline of any systematic arrangement; an
outline.
SUPERFOETATION. A second conception some time after a prior
one, by which two foetuses of different age exist together
in the same female. Often used figuratively.
TEMIBILITY. (From Italian _temibile_, to be feared.) The principle
of adjustment of penalty to crime in just that degree necessary
to prevent a repetition of the criminal act.
TIC. A nervous affection of the muscles; a twitching.
TRANSCENDENTAL. In the Kantian system having an _a priori_
character, transcending experience, presupposed in and
necessary to experience.
TRAUMATA. Wounds.
TRAUMATISM. A wound; any morbid condition produced by
wounds or other external violence.
VERBIGERATION. The continual utterance of certain words or
phrases at short intervals, without reference to their meaning,
as seen in insane _Gedankenflucht_ or rapid flight of
thought.
INDEX
* * * * *
Abstract words, need of
Accessory and fundamental movement
Accuracy of memory
overdone
Activity of children, motor
Adolescence
biography and literature of
characterized
Agriculture
Alternations of physical and psychic states
Altruism of country children
of woman, cutlet for
Amphimixis, psychic, basis of
Anger
Anthropometry and ideal of gymnastics
Arboreal life and the hand
Art study
Arts and crafts movement
Associations devised or guided by adults
Astronomy
Athletic festivals in Greece
Athletics as a conversation topic
dangers and defects of
records in
Attention
fostered by _commando_ exercises
rhythm in
spontaneous
Authority and adolescence
Autobiographies of boyhood
Automatisms
motor, causes and kinds of
control and serialization of
danger of premature control of
desirable
Bachelor women
Basal muscles, development of
Basal powers, development of
Bathing
Beauty, age of feminine
Belief, habit and muscle determining
Bible, the
influence of, in adolescence
methods of teaching
study of, for girls
study of, in German method of will training
study of, order in
study of, postponed
study of, preparation for
Biography and adolescence
Blood vessels, expansion at puberty
Blushing, characteristic of puberty
Body training, Greek
Botany
Boxing
Boys
age of little affection in
dangers of coeducation for
differences between, and girls
latitude in conduct and studies of, before puberty
puberty in, characteristics of
Brain action, unity in
Bullying
Bushido
Cakewalk
Castration, functional in women
Catharsis, Aristotle's theory of
Character and muscles
Children
faults and crimes of
motor activity of
motor defects of
selfishness of
Chivalry, medieval
Chorea
Christianity, muscular
Chums and cronies
Church, feminity in the
City children vs. country children
Civilized men, savages physically superior to
Climbing
hill
muscles, age for exercise of
Coeducation, dangers in
College
coeducation in
English requirements of
woman's ideal school and
Combat, personal, as exercise
_Commando_ exercises
restricted for girls
Concentration
Concreteness in modern language study, criticized
Conduct
mechanized
of Italian schoolboys tabulated
weather and
Confessionalism
of young women
passional inducement to
Conflict, _see_ Combat
Control
nervous, through dancing
of anger
of brute instincts
of children's movements
Conversation, athletics in
degeneration in, causes of
Conversion
Coördination loosened at adolescence
inherited tendencies of muscular
Corporal punishment
Country children vs. city children
Crime, juvenile
causes of
education and
reading and
Cruelty, a juvenile fault
Culture heroes
Dancing
Deadly sins, the seven, vs. modern juvenile faults
Debate and will-training
Doll curve
Domesticity
Dramatic instinct of puberty
Drawing, curve of stages of
Dueling
Education
art in
crime and
industrial
intellectual
manual
moral and religious
of boys
of girls
physical
Effort, as a developing force
Emotions
dancing completest language of the
religion directed to
Endurance
Energy and laziness
English
language and literature, pedagogy of
pedagogic degeneration in, causes of
requirements of college
sense language, dangers of
_Ennui_
Erect position and true life
Ethics, study of, criticized
Ethical judgments of children
Euphoria and exercise
Evolution, movement as a measure of
Exercise
health and
measurements and
music and
nascent periods and
rhythm and
Farm work
Fatigue
at puberty
chores and
not a cause for punishment
play and
restlessness expressive of
result of labor with defective psychic impulsion
rhythm of activity and
will-culture and
Faults of children
Favorite sounds and words
Fecundity of college women
Femininity in the church
in the school and college
Feminists
Fighting
Flogging
Foreign languages, dangers of
France, religious training in
Friendships of adolescence
Fundamental and accessory
Future life, as a school teaching
Games
groups
Panhellenic
Gangs, organized juvenile
Genius, early development of
Germany, will-training in
Girl graduates
aversion to marriage of
fecundity of
sterility of
Girls
and boys, differences between
coeducation for, dangers of
education of
education of, humanistic
education of, manners in
education of, more difficult than of boys
education of, nature in
education of, regularity in
education of, religion in
ideal school and curriculum for
overdrawing their energy
Grammar, place of
Greece, athletic festivals in
Greek body training
Group games
Growth
at puberty
gymnastics and its effect on
of muscle structure and function, measure of
periods
rhythmic
Gymnastics
effect on growth, its
ideal of, and anthropometry
ideals, its four unharmonized, and
military ideals and
nascent periods and
patriotism and
proportion and measurement for, criticized
Swedish
Habits and muscle
Hand and arboreal life
Health, exercise and
of girls
Heredity, a factor in development
High School, the coeducation in
language study and
Hill-climbing
Historic interest, growth of
Home, restraint of, detrimental
Honor, among hoodlums
in sports
Hoodlums
Hysteria
Imagination, at puberty
of children
play and
Individuality, growth of, at puberty
Industrial education
Industry and movement
Inhibition
Intellect, adolescence in
Intemperance
Knightly ideas of youth
Knowing and doing
Language, concreteness in, degeneration through
dangers of, through eye and hand
precision curve of
_vs_. literature
Latin, danger of
Laughter
Laziness and energy
Lies
Literary men, youth of
women, youth of
Literature and adolescence
language _vs_.
Machinery and movement
Mammae, loss of function of
Manners
in girls' education
Manual training
defects and criticisms of
difficulties of
Marriage, dangers in delay of
influenced by coeducation
influenced by college training
Mastery in art-craft, equipment for
Maternity, dangers of deferred
Measurements and exercise
Memory, accuracy, age, and kinds of
sex curve of types of
Military drill
ideals and gymnastics
Mind and motility
Money sense
Monthly period and Sabbath
Motherhood, training for
Motor, activity, primitive
automatisms
defects of children
defects, general
economies
powers, general growth of
precocity
psychoses, muscles and
recaptulation
regularity
Movement and industry
Movements, passive
precocity of
Muscle tension and thought
Muscles, per cent by weight of body
character and
motor psychoses and
small, and thought
will and
Muscular Christianity
Music and exercise
Myths, study of
Nascent periods and exercises
Nature in girls' education
Obedience
Panhellenic games
Passive movements
Patriotism and gymnastics
Peace, man's normal state
Periodicity in growth
in women
Philology, dangers of
Plasticity of growth at puberty
Play
course of study
imagination and
prehistoric activity and
problem
sex and
stages and ages of
work and
Plays and games, codification of
Precocity, motor
in the motor sphere
Predatory organizations
Primitive motor activity
Punishments
in school, causes of
Reading age
crime and
curve
Reason, development of
Recapitulation and motor heredity
Records in athletics
Regularity in education of girls
Religious training, age for
for girls
in Europe
premature
two methods of
Retardation as a means of broadening
Revivalists
Rhythm, exercise and
in primitive activities
of work and rest
Savages physically superior to civilized men
School, language study in
need of enthusiasm in
punishments in, causes of
reading in
Scientific men, youth of
Sedentary life
Selfishness of children
Sex, play and
sports and
Slang curve
value of
Sleep, in education of girls
Sloyd, origin, aims, criticism of
Social activities
organizations of youth
Solitude
Sounds, favorite, and words
Sports, values of different
codification of
sexual influence in
team work in
Spurtiness
Sterility of girl graduates
Story-telling, interest in
Struggle-for-lifeurs
Students' associations
Stuttering and stammering
Swedish gymnastics
Swimming
Talent, early development of
Teachers, aversions to
Team spirit
Technical courses, need of
Telegraphic skill
Temibility
Theft, juvenile
Thought and muscle tension
Transitory nature of youthful experiences
Tree life and erect posture
Truancy
Truth-telling
Turner movement
Unmarried women, dangers to
Vagabondage
Vagrancy
Virility in the Church
Weather and conduct
Will, muscles and
training
Womanly, the eternal
Women, bachelors
dangers to, in not marrying
education of, ideal
young, confessionalism of
Work at its best, play
play and
rest and, rhythm of
Wrestling
Young Men's Christian Association
* * * * *
INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES.
* * * * *
AN IDEAL SCHOOL; OR, LOOKING FORWARD.
By Preston W. Search, Honorary Fellow in Clark University. With an
Introduction by Pres. G. Stanley Hall. Vol. 52. 12mo. Cloth, $1.20
net.
"I am not concerned that the things presented in this little
constructive endeavor will not find bodily incorporation in schools;
for it is cross-fertilization and not grafting that has given us our
richest varieties of fruits and flowers. This work is an attempt at
spirit, not letter; at principle, not method."--_From the Author's
Preface_.
"A book I wish I could have written myself; and I can think of no
single educational volume in the world-wide range of literature in
this field that I believe so well calculated to do so much good at the
present time, and which I could so heartily advise every teacher in
the land, of whatever grade, to read and ponder."--_Pres. G. Stanley
Hall, Clark University_.
"It is to my mind the most stimulating book that has appeared for a
long time. The conception here set forth of the function of the school
is, I believe, the broadest and best that has been formulated. The
chapter on Illustrative Methods is worth more than all the books on
'Method' that I know of. The diagrams and tables are very convincing.
I am satisfied that the author has given us an epoch-making
book."--_Henry H. Goddard, Ph.D., State Normal School, West Chester,
Pa_.
"I received a copy of 'An Ideal School,' and I am satisfied that I
made no mistake when I, with the other two members of the book
committee, recommended the book to the 310 teachers in our
county."--_J.G. Dundore, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania_.
"Certainly one of the most notable books on education published in
many years"--_P.P. Claxton, Editor Atlantic Educational Journal_.
"You have done the cause of real education an important service. This
book is, in my opinion, one of the most useful in the International
Education Series."--_Albert Leonard, Editor of the Journals of
Pedagogy_.
* * * * *
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.
DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR.
By JAMES I. HUGHES, Inspector of Schools, Toronto. Vol. 49. 12mo.
Cloth, $1.50.
ADOPTED BY SEVERAL STATE TEACHERS' READING CIRCLES.
All teachers have read Dickens's novels with pleasure. Probably few,
however have presumably thought definitely of him as a great
educational reformer. But Inspector Hughes demonstrates that such is
his just title. William T. Harris says of "Dickens as an Educator":
"This book is sufficient to establish the claim for Dickens as an
educational reformer. He has done more than any one else to secure for
the child considerate treatment of his tender age. Dickens stands
apart and alone as one of the most potent influences of social reform
in the nineteenth century, and therefore deserves to be read and
studied by all who have to do with schools, and by all parents
everywhere in our day and generation." Professor Hughes asserts that
"Dickens was the most profound exponent of the kindergarten and the
most comprehensive student of childhood that England has yet
produced." The book brings into connected form, under proper headings,
the educational principles of this most sympathetic friend of
children.
"Mr. James L. Hughes has just published a book that will rank as one
of the finest appreciations of Dickens ever written."--_Colorado
School Journal._
"Mr. Hughes has brought together in an interesting and most effective
manner the chief teachings of Dickens on educational subjects. His
extracts make the reader feel again the reality of Dickens's
descriptions and the power of the appeal that he made for a saner,
kindlier, more inspiring pedagogy, and thus became, through his
immense vogue, one of the chief instrumentalities working for the new
education."--_Wisconsin Journal of Education._
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