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, de- vitalizes 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 read- ing 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 con- versation 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 Imowledge 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 INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK while industrial education has still further greatly en- larged the material sensori-motor element of training. Geography is taught with artifacts, globes, maps, sand boxes, drawing. Lliss IMargaret Smith ^ counted two hundred and eighty objects that must be distributed and gathered for forty pupils in a single art lesson. Instruc- tion, moreover, is more and more busied upon parts and details rather than wholes, upon analysis rather than synthesis. Thus in modern pedagogy there is an in- creased tyranny of things, a growing neglect or ex- clusion of all that is unseen.
The first result of this is that the modern school child is more and more mentally helpless without ob- jects of sense. Conversation is increasingly concrete, if not of material things and persons present in time and even place. Instead of dealing with thoughts and ideas, speech and writing is close to sense and the words used are names for images and acts. But there is another higher part of language that is not so abjectly tied down to perception, but that lives, moves, and has its being in the field of concepts rather than percepts, which, to use Earle's distinction, is symbolic and not presentative, that describes thinking that is not mere contiguity in space or sequence in time but that is best in the far higher and more mental associations of likeness, that is more remote from activity, that, to use logical terminology, is connotative and not merely de- notative, 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 ma- terial world.
1 The Psychological and Pedagogical Aspect of Language. Peda- gogical Seminary, December, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 438-458.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE Our school youth to-day suffer from just this defect. If their psychic operations can be called thought it is of that elementary and half animal kind that consists in 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 rigor- ously 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. ]\Iany pupils have never in their lives talked five minutes before others on any subject whatever that can properly be called intel- lectual. 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 some- times called the associative fibers, both ends of which are in the brain, were dwarfed in comparison with the afferent and efferent fibers that mediate sense and mo- tion.
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 INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK fluently of what little lie may chance to know of God, beauty, truth, virtue, happiness, prosperity, etc. The farmer is unable to name the cattle in his yard or his own occupations, although he can reason as well as ever about politics; can not discuss coin or bills, but can talk of financial policies and securities, or about health and wealth generally. The reason is 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 articu- lation 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 vi<3ariates 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 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE of decay. If the child has no resources in solitude, can not think without the visual provocation, is losing sub- jective life, enthusiasm for public, social, ethical ques- tions, is crippled for intellectual pursuits, cares only in a languid way for literary prose and poetry, re- sponds 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 can be illustrated from a pedagogic mu- seum, then the school is dwarfing, in dawning maturity, the higher powers that belong to this stage of develop- ment 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 ^ found that out of 253 young ladies only 133 did not have favorite sounds, a and a leading among the vowels, and I, r, and m among the consonants. 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, 1 Children's Interest in Words. Pedagogical Seminary, September, INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK Elizabeth, Eva, 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, annannaman- nannaharoumlemay, immemorial, lillibulero, burbled, and incarn- adine 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 them- selves, but shows a still greater rise of interest in new words and pronunciations; "above all, there is a tremendous rise in interest in words as instruments of thought." The flood of new experiences, feelings, and views finds the old vocabulary inadequate, hence "the dumb, bound feeling of which most adolescents at one time or another complain, and also I suspect from this study in the case of girls, we have an explanation of the rise of interest in slang." "The second idea suggested by our study is the tremendous importance of hear- ing in the affective side of language."
Conradi ^ 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 w^ere artificial. As to words pretty or queer in form or sound, his list was nearly as large, but the greater part of the words were different. Sixty per cent of all had had periods of spontaneously trying to select their vocabulary by making lists, studying the dictionary, etc. The age of those who did so would seem to average not far from early puberty, but the data are too meager for conclusion. A few started to go through the dictionary, some wished to astonish their companions or used large new w^ords to themselves or their dolls. Seventy per cent had had a passion for affecting foreign words when English would do as well. Conradi says "the age varies from twelve to eighteen, most being fourteen to sixteen." Some indulge this tendency in letters, and would like to do so in conversation, but fear ridicule. Fifty-six per cent reported cases of superfine elegance or affected primness or precision in the use of words. Some had spells of effort in this direction, some belabor compositions to get a style that suits them, some memorize fine passages to this end, or modulate their voices to 1 Children's Interests in Words, Slang, Stories, etc. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 359-404.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE aid them, affect elegance with a chosen mate by agreement, soliloquize before a glass with poses. According to his curve this tendency culminates at fourteen.
Adjectivism, adverbism, and nounism, or marked disposition to multiply one or more of the above classes of words, and in the above order, also occur near the early teens. Adjectives are often used as adverbial prefixes to other adjectives, and here favorite words are marked. Nearly half of Conradi's reports show it, but the list of words so used is small.
Miss Williams presents an interesting curve of slang confessed as being both attractive and used by 226 out of 251. From this it ap- 40 30 30 10 / s.
/ s / \ \ \ h — / \ \ \ \ fj ,/ ** \ \ \ /- y / \ \ \ Slang pears 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 as 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 INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK emphatic, more exact, more concise, convenient, sounded pretty, re- lieved formality, was natural, manly, appropriate, etc. Only a very few thought it was vulgar, limited the vocabulary, led to or was a substitute for swearing, destroyed exactness, etc. This writer at- tempts a provisional classification of slang expressions under the sug- gestive 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 interfer- ing, 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, ^ for anger collated by Chamberlain, 2 crudeness or innocent naivete, love and sentimentality, etc. Slang is also rich in describing conflicts of all kinds, praising courage, censuring inquisitiveness, and as a school of moral discipline, but he finds, however, a very large number unclassified; and while he maintains throughout a distinction between that used by boys and by girls, sex differences are not very marked. The great majority of terms are mentioned but once, and a few under nearly all of the above heads have great numerical precedence. A somewhat striking fact is the manifold variations of a pet typical form. Twenty-three shock expletives, e. g., are, ''Wouldn't that you?" the blank being filled by jar, choke, cook, rattle, scorch, get, start, etc., or instead of you adjectives are devised. Feeling is so intense and massive, and psychic processes are so rapid, forcible, and undeveloped that the pithiness of some of these 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^ says that slang is "an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literal- ism and to express itself inimitably, which in the highest walks pro- duces 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* says, "There 1 American Journal of Psychology, April, 1900, vol. 11, p. 345 et seq.
2 American Journal of Psychology, January, 1895, vol. 6, pp. 585- 592. See also vol. 10, p. 517 et seq.
3 North American Review, November, 1885, vol. 141, pp. 431-435. * Introduction to the Biglow Papers, series ii.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE is death in the dictionary, and where language is too strictly limited by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also, and we get a potted literature, Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees." Lounsbury asserts that ''slang is an effort on the part of the users of language to say something more vividly, strongly, con- cisely than the language existing permits it to be said. It is the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly re- freshed." 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 dis- criminate between good and bad slang rather than to forbid it en- tirely. Emerson calls it language in the making, its crude, vital, raw 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 and 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 ''slan- guage"? Most high school and college youth of both sexes have two distinct styles, that of the classroom which is as unnatural as the etiquette of a royal drawing-room reception or a formal call, and the other, that of their own breezy, free, natural life. Often these two have no relation to or effect upon each other, and often the latter is at times put by with good resolves to speak as purely and therefore as self-consciously as they know, with petty fines for every slang expression. But very few, and these generally husky boys, boldly try to assert their own rude but vigorous vernacular in the field of school requirements.
These simple studies in this vast field demonstrate little or nothing, but they suggest very much. Slang commonly expresses a moral judgment and falls into ethical categories. It usually concerns ideas, sentiment, and will, has a psychic content, and is never, like the language of the school, a mere picture of objects of sense or a description of acts. To restate it in correct English would be a course in ethics, courtesy, taste, logical predication and opposition, honesty, self-pos- INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK session, modesty, and just the ideal and non-presentative mental content that youth most needs, and which the sen- suous 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 meati- ness are a standing illustration of the need of con- densation for intellectual objects that later growth analyzes. These expressions also illustrate the law that the higher and larger the spiritual content, the grosser must be the illustration in which it is first couched. Further studies now in progress will, I believe, make this still clearer.
Again, we see in the above, outcrops of the strong pubescent instinct to enlarge the vocabulary in two ways. One is to affect foreign equivalents. This at first suggests an appetency for another language like the dog- Latin gibberish of children. It is one of the motives that prompts many to study Latin or French, but it has little depth, for it turns out, on closer study, to be only the affectation of superiority and the love of mys- tifying 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 sjmonym 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 feel- ing, act, fact, or object precedes, and then a name for it YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 fa- vorite words should be wrought out for spelling and writing and their meanings illustrated, for these have often the charm of novelty as on the frontier of Imowl- edge and enlarge the mental horizon like new discoveries. We must not starve this voracious new appetite '' for words as instruments of thought."
Interest in story-telling rises till twelve or thirteen, and thereafter falls off perhaps rather suddenly, partly because youth is now more interested in receiving than in giving. As in the drawing curve we saw a characteristic age when the child loses pleasure in creating as its power of appreciating pictures rapidly arises, so now, as the reading curve rises, auditory receptivity makes way for the visual method shown in the rise of the reading curve with augmented zest for book-method of acquisition. Darkness or twilight enhances the story interest in chil- dren, for it eliminates the distraction of sense and encour- ages the imagination to unfold its pinions, but the youth- ful 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 ex- perience and learns to profit by that of others. There is now evolved a penumbral region in the soul more or less INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK beyond the reach of all school methods, a world of glimpses and hints, and the work here is that of the pros- pector and not of the careful miner. It is the age of skip- ping and sampling, of pressing the keys lightly. What is acquired is not examinable but only suggestive. Per- haps nothing read now fails to leave its mark. It can not be orally reproduced at call, but on emergency it is at hand for use. As Augustine said of God, so the child might say of most of his mental content in these psychic areas, ' ' If you ask me, I do not know; but if you do not ask me, I know very well " — a case analogous to the typical girl who exclaimed to her teacher, '' I can do and understand this perfectly if you only won't ex- plain 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^ 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 falls 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 tabu- lation 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 maximum reading may be postponed or accelerated perhaps nearly a year by the absence or presence of library facilities. Tabulating the 1 Some Observations on Children's Reading. Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 1897, pp. 1015-1021.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 explora- tion 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 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 am'- unt 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.