sooner; and if heredity and environment enable the in- dividual to cross this bridge successfully there is some- times 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 free- dom 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 ex- press, and never does understanding so outstrip ability to explain. Overaccuracy is atrophy. Both mental and moral acquisition sink at once too deep to be repro- duced by examination without injury both to intellect and will. There is nothing in the environment to which the adolescent nature does not keenly respond. With pedagogic tact we can teach about everything we know that is really worth knowing; but if we amplify and morselize instead of giving great wholes, if we let the hammer that strikes the bell rest too long against it and deaden the sound, and if we wait before each methodic step till the pupil has reproduced all the last, we starve and retard the soul, which is now all insight and receptivity. Plasticity is at its maximum, utter- ance 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 in- terests 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 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 psy- chologically akin to a nameless crime that in some parts of the country meets summary vengeance.
(A) The heart of education as well as its phyletic root is the vernacular literature and language. These are the chief instruments of the social as well as of the ethnic and patriotic instinct. The prime place of the former we saw in the last chapter, and we now pass to the latter, the uniqueness of which should first be con- sidered.
The Century, the largest complete dictionary of English, claims to have 250,000 words, as against 55,000 in the old Webster's Un- abridged. Worcester's Unabridged of 1860 has 105,000; Murray's, now in L, it is said, will contain 240,000 principal and 140,000 com- pound 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 phi- lologist ^ says, if given large liberty, he "will undertake to supply 1,000,000 English words for 1,000,000 American dollars. ' ' Chamber- lain ^ estimates that our language contains more than two score as many words as all those left us from the Latin. Many savage languages contain only a very few thousand, and some but a few hundred, words. Our tongue is essentially Saxon in its vocabulary and its spirit and, from the time when it was despised and vulgar, has followed an expansion policy, swallowing with little modification terms not only from classical antiquity, but from all modern languages ' — Indian, African, Chinese, Mongolian — according to its needs, its 1 Charles P. G. Scott: The Number of Words in the Enghsh and Other Languages. Princeton University Bulletin, May, 1902, vol. 13, pp.
2 The Teaching of English. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK 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 pedi- gree like those of Lear, Carrol, and many others.^ 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 Midler 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 out- strips 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 hfe, or this content may be indefinitely elabor- ated in a rich literature and science. The former is generally well on in its development 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 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 defini- tions. In the days of Johnson's dictionary, individuality still had wide range in determining meanings. In pronunciation, too: we may now pronounce the word tomato in six ways, all sanctioned by dictionaries. Of our tongue in particular it is true, as Tylor says in general, condensing a longer passage, ''take language all in all, it is the product of a rough-and-ready ingenuity and of the great rule of thumb. It is an old barbaric engine, which in its highest develop- ment is altered, patched, and tinkered into capability. It is originally and naturally a product of low culture, developed by ages of con- scious and unconscious improvement to answer more or less per- fectly the requirements of modern civilization."
1 See my Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self. American Jovimal of Psychology, April, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 351-395.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE It is plain, therefore, that no grammar, and least of all that derived from the prim, meager Latin con- tingent 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 diffi- culty in learning other languages is because ours has so far outgrown them by throwing off not only inflec- tions 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 ex- pression it should be attended to; but where by a small grammatical negligence the energ}^ of an idea is con- densed or a word stands for a sentence, I hold gram- matical 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 de- generation 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 1 Sprachgeschi elite und Sprachpsychologie, mit Riicksicht auf B. Delbriick's "Grundfragen der Sprachforschung." Leipzig, W. Engel- INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK that marked deficiency here often debars from all other courses. Every careful study of the subject for nearly twenty years shows deterioration, and Professor Shur- man, of Nebraska, thinks it now worse than at any time for forty years. We are in the case of many Christians described by Dante who strove by prayers to get nearer to God when in fact with every petition they were departing farther from him. Such a compre- hensive 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 nieets on great international highwaj^s of travel are linguists only in the sense that the moke on the variety stage who plays a dozen instruments equally badly is a musician. It is a psychological impossibility to pass through the apprenticeship stage of learning foreign languages at the age when the vernacular is setting without crippling it. The extremes are the youth in ancient Greece study- ing 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 peda- gogical glory Latin was the universal tongue of the YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE learned. Sturm's idea was to train boys so that if sud- denly 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 ver- nacular 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.^ 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 com- mand 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 increas- ing percentage of girl pupils more ready to follow the teacher's advice^ in connection Avith 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 almiost any other subject, the mod- ern 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 in- evitably by steady pedagogic decline despite the vaunted new methods; until noAV the baby Latin in the average 1 Latin in the High School. By Edward Conradi. Pedagogical Semi- nary, March, 1905, vol. 12, pp. 1-26.
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK high school class is a kind of sanctified relic, a ghost of a ghost, suggesting Swift's Struldbrugs, doomed to physical immortality but shriveling and with increasing horror of all things new. In 1892 the German emperor declared it a shame for a boy to excel in Latin 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 Viri Romce, which is not a classic but a modern peda- gogue'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 speak- ing of something of vital present interest. The psychology of trans- lation 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 train- YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE ing 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 in- dividuality in a 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 com- pared to the virile Kipling. The nature and needs of the adolescent mind demand bread and meat, while Latin rudiments are husks. In his autobiography, Booker Washington says that for ten years after their emancipation, the two chief ambitions of the young negro of the South were to hold office and to study Latin, and he adds that the chief endeavor of his life has been against these tendencies. For the American boy and girl, high school too often means Latin. This gives at first a pleasing sense of exaltation to a higher stage of life, but after from one to three years the great majority who enter the high school drop out limp and discouraged for many reasons, largely, however, because they are not fed. Recent studies of truancy have shown a strong but strangely unconscious association between run- aways and a bad dietary at home. 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 text- books devoted to it, lacks just the quality of logic which made and besouled it. Philology, too, with all its mag- nificence, 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 gen- eral 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 INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK English ' ' that will parse and that is spelled, punctuated, capitalized, and paragraphed aright. Good professors of English literature are hard to find, and upon them philologists, who are plentiful, look with a certain con- descension. 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 phi- losopher, did not know, and his professor deemed the question im- proper. I visited the eleventh recitation in Othello in a high school class of nineteen pupils, not one of whom knew how the story ended, so intent had they been kept on its verbiage. Hence, too, has come the twelve feet of text-books on English on my shelves with many standard works, edited for schools, with more notes than text. Fashion that works from above down the grades and college entrance requirements are in large measure responsible for this, perhaps now the worst case of the prostitution of content to form.
Long exposure to this method of linguistic manicuring tends to make students who try to write ultra-fastidiously, seeking an over- refined elaboration of petty trifles, as if the less the content the greater the triumph of form alone could be. These petty but pretty nothings are like German confectionery, that appeals to the eye but has little for taste and is worse than nothing for the digestion. It is like straining work on an empty stomach. For youth this em- broidery of details is the precocious senescence that Nordau has so copiously illustrated as literary decadence. Language is vastly larger than all its content, and the way to teach it is to focus the mind upon story, history, oratory, drama, Bible, for their esthetic, mental, and above all, moral content, as shown in the last chapter. The more unconscious processes that reflect imitatively the linguistic environment and that strike out intuitively oral and written vents for interests so intense that they must be told and shared, are what teach us how to command the resources of our mother tongue. These prescriptions and corrections and consciousness of the mani- fold 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 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE and propriety of diction. To hold up the flights of exuberant youth by forever being on the hunt for errors is, to borrow the language of the gridiron, low tackle, and I would rather be convicted of many errors by such methods than use them. Of course this has its place, but it must always be subordinated to a larger view, as in one of the newly discovered logia ascribed to Jesus, who, when he found a man gathering sticks on Sunday, said to him, "If you understand what you are doing, it is well, but if not, thou shalt be damned." The great teacher who, when asked how he obtained such rare results in expression, answered, "By carefully neglecting it and seeking utter absorption in subject-matter," was also a good prac- tical 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 gre- garious 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 INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK although some of the great men in history could not read, and though some of the illiterate were often mor- ally 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 more oral and objective work, more stories, narratives, and even vivid readings, as is now done statedly in more than a dozen of the public li- braries 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, pro- 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 psychologi- cally worse, is the substitution of the pen and the scribbling fingers for the mouth and tongue. Speech is directly to and from the soul. Writing, the delib- eration 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 ^ pedagogy of to-day and in this country. Not only has the daily theme spread as an 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 1 Pen-paper, YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE be condueting correspondence classes with their own pupils. It all makes excellent busy work, keeps the pupils quiet and orderly, and allows the school output to be quantified, and some of it gives time for more care in the choice of words. But is it a gain to sub- stitute 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.