The Period of Individualism
The primary attitude of mind lasts about three years. In the normal child nine years of age is a turning point. By this time he has learned to read fairly independently. He can write and can solve simple problems in arithmetic. He has control of some of the simpler objects about him. He has imitated his elders until he has habits of his own. Now comes a change. Sometimes the change is sudden and violent. The pupil who has been laboriously writing from copy throws the example of his copy book to the winds and composes a note to one of his friends in a rapid, scrawling hand. The child has become an independent master of writing for his own private purposes. So it is with his other activities. Even in social matters he asserts his independence by refusing to follow the dictates of the teacher. School discipline suddenly comes to be a serious problem.
The change here described reflects itself in a fact of administration which is of frequent recurrence. Pupils fail of promotion in the fourth or fifth grade much more commonly than in the second, third, or sixth. In other words, there is here, just after the primary grades, a period of violent readjustment.
The readjustment which comes at this point can be described by saying that the pupil is entering on a period of self-recognition. The primary child is an imitator absorbed in social examples. The intermediate child is an individualist. He is aware of his own powers and ambitions. The boys of this period have been described as young barbarians. They are disregardful of the rights of others. They step on the little children; they refuse to be friends with the girls. They are ambitious to leave school and do something to assert their independence.
The school has dealt with this period with much less intelligence than it has exhibited in the primary years. In general, the intermediate grades have followed in subject-matter and in methods too closely the example of the successful primary grades. The result appears in the fact that the migration out of elementary schools is very common in the fifth and sixth grades. The intermediate grades have been described as periods of drill. If there is one kind of work that is not appropriate here, it is routine drill. There ought to be a new and thoroughgoing study of the needs of this period and the introduction of a type of instruction which will meet the needs of children who are vividly aware of themselves and of their personal relations to the world.
That a change is coming about in the methods of dealing with pupils in these years is shown by the fact that the elementary school is setting apart the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades as the years in which the strictly elementary work is to be completed. Much that was postponed to the seventh and eighth grades under the older form of organization will doubtless be brought down into the intermediate grades. The children will no longer be drilled in the forms of the social arts while waiting for the enlarged opportunities of the upper grades, but will be introduced at once to experiences with the objects of the physical world. They will be encouraged to see things and handle them for themselves.