At five or six years of age the pupil comes to the primary school. His experience is very limited; his senses are open to the impressions of color and sound and touch, and he eagerly or timidly mixes in the social group which is often to him bewilderingly large and strange. The key to the understanding of this period is to be found in the simple psychological principle that out of all the bewildering mass of childish experience it is persons who attract the child’s most vivid attention. The experiences of childhood are to be thought of not as meager but as confusing in their abundance. The world is so full of a number of things that one hardly knows where to turn. In the mass of this experience one turns to some person and follows in a docile way the lead of that person. The first grade is a place where children do what others do. First-graders are a flock of sheep. The teacher can lead them into almost anything because they are eager to do whatever they see others do.
Sometimes this period is described as a period when children are absorbed in sense impressions. This statement is true if it means that colors and sounds constitute the content of experience. It is false if it is meant to teach that little children are absorbed in the study of objects. The sounds and colors which hold the attention of primary children are those which attach to people. A little child will give up a plaything which he has in hand for a less attractive plaything in the hands of someone else. Primary children are social creatures first, last, and all the time.
This description of the primary child’s mental attitudes gives us the formula for the organization of the primary course of study. There is an eager desire on the part of the first-grader to write his name. He does not need any artificial stimulation to undertake writing. Other people write; that is enough for him. He is eager to be initiated. Other people look into books; he must do the same. The period is not a period for nature study in any analytical scientific sense. It is a period for social companionships. The primary child likes animals as playthings; he is not interested in studying their structure. Show an animal to a little child and let him ask the questions that are in his mind, and social questions are the only ones which will come. “Where can I get one?” “Will it bite me?”
The judgment of the race has been right; this is the period for the teaching of reading and writing. The oral language which the pupil acquires in the pre-school period is the basis on which the primary work must be erected. The first reading lessons are lessons in the association of known oral symbols with those complicated social devices, the printed symbols. The ability to live in society which the pupil brings to the first grade must be extended through the mastery of language in its written and printed forms.
The utter absorption of the child of this age in society rather than in material things is attested by his credulity for fairy tales which are full of people but are grotesquely impossible in their description of material facts. In his eager desire to illustrate every story he hears, the child produces drawings which have very little merit as representations of things but are often expressive of action in the highest degree. A child of this age is keen in his observation of people but neglectful of things.
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.