The sentence is affected by the more voluminous mentation of the teens. It seems always to grow longer and more intricate and sometimes to become for a time inordinately involved till periodicity is almost lost. This is sometimes preceded by increased simplification. The simpler forms of intrication come first. Often there is oscillation between different types of construction, and the propensity to quote fine extracts and to ape favored adult friends and authors sug- gests a subtle plasticity and susceptibility to styles for which there is no pedagogic direction except exposure to good pat- terns of many different kinds that the instinct of imitation may have a free field and a long rein. The few and meager data, so far at hand, are the following: J. A. Hancock 1 examined papers written for the purpose, according to a special plan, of 542 boys and 590 girls from ten to fifteen, in order 1 Children's Ability to Reason. Ed. Rev., New York, October, 1895. See also his article on Children's Use of Written Language Forms. N.-W. Monthly, INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 47 * to study the development of the sentence sense. He found that the use of simple sentences decreased about thirty per cent from ten to fifteen; that the years of greatest change were from thirteen to four- teen, especially for boys who developed rapidly in this respect. Curi- ously enough, there was here a year of arrest, if not retrogression. He found that " the increase in the use of the compound sentence is rapid from ten to eleven, but is nearly all lost during the next year. From twelve to fourteen the increase is again rapid for the boys, while a yet greater gain is made by the girls from twelve to thirteen." The cul- mination of the curve for girls precedes that of the boys by about a year. The adverbial subordinate sentence was the form most fre- quently used by children of all ages, it being most common at twelve and from thirteen to fifteen decreasing for boys. From eleven to twelve there was great increase in the proportion of the substantive subordinate sentence, especially in boys. There was a marked tendency to increase the number of words in a sentence with age, which seemed to " reflect in some measure mental peculiarities of puberty and early adolescence." The long* sentences at this age are often highly involved and complex, as if many mental items were struggling for sug- gestion but tended to break down old limits. In extreme instances, sentences of very great length are used. Sherman's Analytics of Literature concludes that the percentage of simple sentences in good English literature has increased from four per cent to thirty-three and one-third per cent; that the average number of predicates has fallen from five and a fraction to two and a fraction per cent; that the average sentence length has decreased about sixty-six and two thirds per cent, as written now tends to approach the characteris- tics of oral speech. This conclusion, if true, has immediate practical bearings.
Mr. Sanford Bell writes, "My experience during eleven years of teaching and supervising convinces me that the language curve drops below the thought curve in the fifth grade, when the child is eleven or twelve, and continues there for some years." He expresses the opinion that the elaborate analyses of grammatical matter and of arithmetical processes seriously interfere with the progress of the child, and that " five times as much work " as is usually prescribed can be done in arithmetic, if the children are allowed to take any short cuts they please to solve the problems, either mentally or with the pencil, and are freed from the obnoxious formulas. He also thinks that the requirements of grammatical accuracy seriously interfere not only with the function of language to express thought, but with thought itself.
Of Conradi's 133 reports on the long sentence habit, more than two-thirds were reminiscent and rather more than half were before the teens. The causes were imitation, ignorance of sentence structure, impetuosity, etc. Closely connected with this is the love of quoting pretty phrases and album poetry. Conradi gives many interesting specimens and quotes many of these under the captions: Wise sayings, 47 2 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE despondency, optimism, altruism, heroic self-affirmation, love, with many miscellanies.
The sentence-sense is often weakened along with the power of sequent logical thought and the construction is often changed. Thought can not be stated in concise form but is spun out with copu- las and no periodicity, and jargon, provincialism, and often profane and obscene expressions occur that owe a large part of their charm to the fact that they are tabooed in good society; diction is stilted or poetic, there are endless iterations, words used with remotely suggested meanings, or sheer nullity of thought. Verbigeration alter- nates with taciturnity and even mutism, fatuity with flashes of genius, animals' noises, cars, machinery, wind, etc., are imitated often with more or less virtuosoship.
Of Conradi's returns twenty-eight per cent had aped some stylistic writer either consciously or unconsciously. Some were charmed by the periods of Hugo, Macaulay, Dickens, Addison, Emerson, Mark Twain, Mrs. Southworth, Miss Alcott, or many others, or cultivated newspaperism or the forms of polite letter-writing, etc.
Just fifty per cent of Conradi's cases, mostly in the early teens, had tried their hand at spontaneous original poetry generally concern- ing either living persons, nature, or religious themes. Many of the first class are humorous, of all of which this writer prints suggestive samples.
This propensity for narration has been very strong in the youth of many eminent authors. Goethe spun long tales for the delectation of not only children but adults, one of which he tells at length in his autobiography. Beth invented incidents and personated in costume the characters of her plots. George Sand and the anonymous author of the Autobiography of a Child, and many others, excelled in this, when the latter became interested in genealogy, invented a family named L'Estrange, who came over with William the Conqueror, and the chief of which as a certificate of chivalry fought at the Battle of Hastings. He had shining armor and golden hair and wondrous eyes, and they married him to an imaginary heroine. To stimulate their imagination a cemetery was founded with wooden tombstones for all the L'Estranges since, where every one after his history had been developed as far down as the Battle of Bosworth Field, was buried. The epitaphs they devised showed that all their heroes were brave as lions, mild as lambs, and stainless as Galahads.
Children sometimes float off in complete absorption in some realm of fancy. One girl, as she stood by the window, was a captive princess in some palace waiting for a fairy prince to release her, and at the same time catching flies. Boys' tales are of hunting, adventure, vast wealth, power, cunning, fights, and the improbabilities gradually de- cline with advancing age. Following are a few observations: In a very interesting study of the continued story,1 Miss Learoyd 1 Am. Jour, of Psy., October, 1895, vol. vii, pp. 86-90.
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 473 found ninety-three adults who had formed the habit of carrying on narratives in their minds, and that nearly two-thirds of all the children did so. The narratives are imaginative, unwritten, and may be of the type of the fairy tale and Marchen common in childhood, or of the romance and adventure peculiar to adolescence; ideal at all ages, but more practical in later life. In childhood the habit is nearly as com- mon among boys as among girls, but in maturity nearly three times as frequent among women. Some continue one story for weeks, and sixty- four prolonged them for years. Others have hundreds of short stories. Solitude and night are favorable. The starting-point may be some- thing read or real life. The habit is sometimes thought helpful, but occasionally is deemed adverse to sleep, and tends to absent-minded- ness. Some develop almost illusionary intensity; the characters grow with the child; often there is hardly any plot and the story moves on, weaving itself, the weaver often being the hero around whom every- thing centers, and visualizing the minutest details about the charac- ters. It may end with the hero's death, and then often another is started.
One hundred and thiity-seven children, well distributed between the ages of six and a half and fifteen, were asked to write a story on any topic of their own choice. The younger children mostly wrote of personal experiences or general topics, while the experiences of others came into prominence near the dawn of adolescence. At that time the stories showed a marked increase in length, complexity of plot and climax. The aim was more real and dominant, and occasionally de- scriptions were interspersed. While the young children had used mainly verbs and especially nouns, mostly names of persons and familiar objects, personal pronouns, articles, and prepositions increased with age, and adjectives, which first refer chiefly to size and beauty, come into dominance, as do conjunctions, which are very rare with younger children.1 One girl of fifteen, who was much alone in the country, was in the habit of beginning and thinking out long social romances involving a dozen or twenty people. Each of these had his own name and characteristics, and she would think out a section of the story involv- ing incidents chronologically connected. Everything could be dropped any time, but was always begun on the next occasion exactly where it left off. Another girl at the same age told her stories to groups of school children, who came at stated times once or twice a week, and whom she held enchanted sometimes for an hour or two. A boy of fourteen developed unusual power in telling tales full of wonder and stilted heroism to his mates. These he was able to begin without premeditation at any time and to carry the plot on to an almost indefi- nite length, but every session brought forth a new story. Another, at the age of fourteen, had great infatuation for stories of the Sylvanus 1 Children's Stories, by S. W. Eaton. Fed. Sem., October, 1895, vol. iii, pp.
69 474 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Cobb and Mrs. Southworth order, and covered nearly half a ream of paper one spring and summer in working out the romance of Devil's Dare. It was a tale of incredible prowess and adventure, underground passages and hair-breadth escapes, and written in red ink to symbolize the gore which flowed so freely through its pages. His mother found out what he was doing and undertook to read it, but her maternal in- terest was not quite equal to the task of finishing it. This, however, was accomplished by a somewhat younger girl cousin, who professed to await with eager interest every new section, and always longed for more.
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 en- courages 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 noth- ing 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 INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 475 case analogous to the typical girl who exclaimed to her teacher, " I can do and understand this perfectly if you only won't ex- plain it." That is why examinations in English, if not im- possible, as Goldwin Smith and Oxford hold, are very liable to be harmful, and recitations and critical notes an imperti- nence, and always in danger of causing arrest of this exquisite romantic function in which literature comes in the closest rapport to life, keeping the heart warm, reenforcing all its good motives, preforming choices, and universalizing its sym- pathies.
R. W. Bullock * classified and tabulated 2,000 returns from school- children from the third to the twelfth grade, both inclusive, concern- ing their reading. From this it appeared that the average boy of the third grade " read 4.9 books in six months; that the average fails to 3.6 in the fourth and fifth grades and rises to a maximum of 6.5 in 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 maxi- mum 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 maximum 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 ac- knowledge 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 476- THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE 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 aver- age 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 teach- er or librarian is to see that they have both in the highest, purest form.
Henderson * 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 adven- ture 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 * 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 in- satiable and is often quite indiscriminate." It seems to " most fre- quently begin at about twelve years of age and continue at least three or four years," after which increased home duties, social responsibili- ties, 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 Vostrovsky3 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 is declining and that for fiction and general literature is rapidly increased. At about the sixteenth year a change took place 1 Report on Child Reading. New York Report of State Supt., 1897, vol. ii, 8 Children's Reading. North-Western Mo., December, 1898, vol. ix, p. 188, and January, 1899, vol. ix, p. 229.
8 A Study of Children's Reading Tastes. Fed. Sem., December, 1899, vol. vj, INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 477 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 adoles- cence. 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 recommenda- tions more than boys. The latter were more guided by reason and 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 be- cause of children in them, and more often because they were 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 more like those with which they are fa- miliar. " 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 inocu- late 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 develop- ment of their tastes from the fairy tales of early childhood to the travels and adventures of boyhood and then to romance, poetry, his- tory, etc.; and some give the order of their development of taste for the great poets.
47 8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE 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 of 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 for- bidden 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 expan- siveness that makes life about them uninteresting and unreal, and that reacts to commonplace later. Conradi prints some two to three hundred favorite books and authors of early and INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 479 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 knowl- edge 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 a moment, as a mathematician sums up a column of figures, and as the artist Dore was able to read a book by turn- ing the leaves, can be attained by training and practise. School pressure should not suppress this instinct of omniv- orous reading, which at this age sometimes prompts the re- solve 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 em- phasized 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 uniformita- rians, 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 sac- charinity ineffable of Tennyson's Princess (a strange expres- sion 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