VI. NERVOUS INSTABILITY AND SPECIAL DEFECT IN READING
Burt has pointed out what every psychologist who examines school children can confirm, that neurotic children are often deficient in reading, though they may be intelligent. This follows from the psychology of the mechanics of reading. Mastery of these mechanics calls for an ordinary degree of coöperation, adherence to definite directions, power of sustained effort, and fidelity to bare facts. Neurotics are those who are characteristically inferior in these essential qualities, among others. Where impulsive response, negativistic attitude, flightiness, and illusion cause failure, neurotic children fail. Hence many of them never learn to read, except by individual teaching.
Under this category, we may consider, also, speech defectives, for speech defects are often symptomatic of nervous instability. Children who stammer or lisp may “turn against” reading, because of the ignominy they fear, in oral reading before their mates. A child who displays a speech defect in oral reading should, for humane reasons, be excused from such reading before the class.
General nervous instability naturally tends to failure in any school subject, which demands the qualities of character mentioned above as essential to the mastery of reading. Thus nervous, but intelligent, children may be deficient in reading, spelling, and arithmetic, “the tool subjects,” while making satisfactory progress in “the subject matter courses,” such as history, nature study, or geography, where precise connections in prescribed sequences of relationships need not be formed, in order to succeed.
Nervous instability may be found in combination with any degree of IQ, apparently, from dullest to brightest. The relation between them is not certainly known, though there is now considerable indication that the correlation between stability and intellect will be found to be positive and high (but not perfect). This would mean that there are very probably more ill-balanced children among the stupid than elsewhere in the distribution of IQ. That organic quality, which shows itself in superior intelligence, robustness, and longevity, also shows itself in nervous stability, more likely than not.
A nervous child, who is also very stupid, will, of course, learn under individual instruction only what his limited intelligence will permit. The methods of mental measurement enable us to differentiate between the nervous child who can learn much, and the nervous child who can learn very little, under individual training.