The mental operation of very young children can be described in the terms of logic. Gale * finds at first only associations in time and place, and that this very slowly passes to reasoning by associations of similarity. From remote analogy to the inductive method of agree- ment, and then even to the method of difference so characteristic of sci- ence, he finds even in the fifth year that the process is slow. Children at least conform to Mill's contention that we really reason from partic- ulars to particulars rather than through a major premise. This of- server even found the methods of residues and concomitant variations before the school age. Children observe keenly, and this involves analysis and regrouping. They are often religious skeptics at ten, as Barnes showed (chap. xiv). They ask why, what for, how, in ways that reveal the causal idea, and the abstract logician easily finds every deductive mood and figure and all forms of syllogism implicit in infant mentation. But on the other hand, children's ideas of size, perspective, and of time and space are so narrow, the multitude of impressions so overwhelming/ their superstitions so many, their credulity so great, they are so victimized by sense, so bound down to verbal literalness, their experience is so small, they have so little control of their atten- tion, and their minds are so permeated with error and ignorance, that it is scarcely too much to say that almost up to puberty they can hardly think at all in any proper sense. Practically, Pestalozzi, who assumed that they were susceptible to little but mechanical drill, was nearer right than Alcott's school, where their minds were thought surcharged with Wordsworthian intuitions that needed only to be explicited to become conscious reason.
Just as about the only duty of young children (Chapter III) is implicit obedience, so the chief mental training from about eight to twelve is arbitrary memorization, drill, habit- uation, 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 an unique stage of life marked by reduced growth and increased activity and power to resist both disease and fatigue, which, as was set forth in Chapter I, suggests what was, in some just post-simian age of our race, its period of maturity. Here belong dis- cipline in writing, reading, spelling, verbal memory, manual training, practise of instrumental technique, proper names, drawing, drill in arithmetic, foreign languages by oral methods, 1 Early Reasoning of Children. Jour, of Adol., July, 1902. *H. W. Brown: Thoughts and Reasonings of Children. Fed. Sem., Decem- 452 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE 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. Au- thority should now take precedence of reason. Children com- prehend 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 are 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 some- thing 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 per- sons 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 offen- sive 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 re- ligious 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 1 See my Ideal School as Based on Child Study. Proc. of the N. E. A., 1901, INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 453 parental soul that does not call what causes it inconvenience by opprobrious names, an altogether lovable and even fascina- ting 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, indus- trious, 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 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 out- burst 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 blush- ing is increased, new sensations and feelings arise, the imagi- nation 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 pons successfully there is sometimes almost a break of con- tinuity 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 under- standing 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. I There is nothing in the environment to which the adolescent nature does not keenly respond. With 454 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCEiNCE pedagogic tact we can teach about everything we know that is really worth knowing, but if we amplify and morselize in- stead 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 cur- rents. 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 mo- ment. Thus we have the converse danger of forcing knowl- edge 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 venge- ance.
(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 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 diction- ary 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 * says, if given 1 Charles P. G. Scott: The Number of Words in the English and Other Lan- guages. Princeton Univ. Bull., May, 1902.
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 455 large liberty, he "will undertake to supply 1,000,000 English words for 1,000,000 American dollars." Chamberlain1 estimates that our language contains more than two score as many words as all those left us from the Latin. Many savage languages contain but 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 an- tiquity, but from all modern languages — Indian, African, Chinese, Mongolian — according to its needs, its adopted children far outnum- bering 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 in- vents new words with no pedigree like those of Lear, Carrol, and many others.2 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 Miiller says many do, but a few hundred words during his lifetime, or he may need 8,000, like Milton, 15,000, like Shake- speare, 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 con- tent 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 develop- ment before speech itself becomes an object 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 con- serving 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 diction- ary, individuality still had wide range in determining meanings. In pronounciation, 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 JThe Teaching of English. Fed. Sem., June, 1902, vol. ix, pp. 161-168. 'See my Early Sense of Self. Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1898, vol. ix, p.
456 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE and of the great rule of thumb. It is an old barbaric engine, which in its highest development is altered, patched, and tinkered into ca- pability. 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 civili- zation."
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 Psychologic der Sprache, which is now compiling and organizing the best elements from all grammars, is com- plete. 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 strictness 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." Brown- ing, 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 INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 457 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 lan- guages 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 deeduca- tional, 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 under- stand. The polyglot people that one meets on great inter- national highways of travel are linguists only in the sense that the moke on the variety stage who plays a dozen instru- ments equally badly is a musician. It is a psychological im- possibility 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 lan- guages. 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 Latin only on the playground. They thought, felt, and de- veloped an intellectual life in and with that tongue. 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. 68 458 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Its enormous numerical increase due to high school require- ments, 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 over- crowded 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 mortality 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 com- position, 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 mere 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 Veri Roma, 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 ver- nacular. 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 vigor- ous 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 im- pedes than helps the free movement of the mind. Jowett said in sub- stance that it is almost impossible to render either of the great dead languages into English without compromise, and this tends to injure INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 459 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 lan- guage 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 a gre$t language. There is a sense in which Macaulay was not an English- man 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 offen 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. Recent studies of truancy have shown a strong but strangely un- conscious association between runaways and a bad dietary at home. Defective nutrition of the mind also causes a restlessness, which en- hances all the infltysnces which make boys and girls leave school.
II. The second cause of this degeneration is the subordi- nation 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 in- creasingly so as English has grown great and free. Its ghost, in the many text-books 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 in- spired professors of English that their ideal is to be critical rather than creative till they prefer the minute reading of a fewr 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 460 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE 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.
I 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 aiany 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 manicure tends to make students who try to write ultra-fastidious, seeking an overrefined elaboration of petty trifles, as if the less the content the greater the triumph of form alone could be. f These petty but pretty nothings are like German confectionery, that appeals to the eve 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, ora- tory, drama, Bible, for their esthetic, mental, and above all, moral con- tent, 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 re- sources of our mother tongue. fThese prescriptions and corrections and consciousness of the manifold ways of error are never so pecul- iarly 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 to 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