[Footnote 25: On Some Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude.
Pedagogical Seminary, April 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69]
[Footnote 26: A. Rauber: h.o.m.o 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 Inst.i.tutional 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. Goschen, 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 inst.i.tution 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 p.u.b.erty-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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 sc.r.a.pes, had something to do with bad, if more with good, a.s.sociates, 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 a.s.sociates, speaks standard English, or is as pious and deeply in love with religious services as the typical maiden teacher or the a 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 pa.s.sion 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 r.e.t.a.r.d 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 naivete 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 pa.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.sical 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 Muller 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 p.r.o.nunciation, too: we may now p.r.o.nounce 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 pa.s.sage, "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 G.o.d when in fact with every pet.i.tion 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 deeducational-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 pa.s.s 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 cla.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trated by the new installation of the old Roman p.r.o.nunciation with which our tongue has only remote a.n.a.logies, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 cla.s.sic 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 emanc.i.p.ation, 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 pa.r.s.e 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 Oth.e.l.lo in a high school cla.s.s 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 prost.i.tution 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 d.a.m.ned." 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, p.r.o.nunciation, 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 subst.i.tution 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 cla.s.ses 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 subst.i.tute 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 Brunetiere 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 s.p.a.ce or sequence in time but that is best in the far higher and more mental a.s.sociations 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 a.s.sociative 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 G.o.d, 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 p.r.o.nunciations; "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 p.u.b.erty, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sages to this end, or modulate their voices to aid them, affect elegance with a chosen mate by agreement soliloquize before a gla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 subst.i.tute for swearing, destroyed exactness, etc. This writer attempts a provisional cla.s.sification 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 navete, 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 uncla.s.sified; and while he maintains throughout a distinction between that used by boys and by girls, s.e.x 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 ma.s.sive, 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 a.s.serts 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 s.e.xes have two distinct styles, that of the cla.s.sroom 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 a.s.sert 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 ill.u.s.tration of the need of condensation for intellectual objects that later growth a.n.a.lyzes. These expressions also ill.u.s.trate the law that the higher and larger the spiritual content, the grosser must be the ill.u.s.tration 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 p.u.b.escent 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 ill.u.s.trated, 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 appet.i.te "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 p.u.b.escent reading pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d, 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 a.n.a.logous 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, reenforcing all its good motives, preforming choices, and universalizing its sympathies.
R. W. Bullock[14] cla.s.sified 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 cla.s.ses 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 s.e.x, 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 s.e.xes 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] cla.s.sified 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xes, "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 p.r.o.nounced in both s.e.xes 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 s.e.x 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 quant.i.ty 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 pa.s.sion 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.