[Footnote 30: The Social Pedagogy of Boyhood. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 307-346. See also his The Boy Problem, with an introduction by G. Stanley Hall, The Pilgrim Press, Boston, 1901, p. 194. Also Winifred Buck (Boys' Self-governing Clubs, Macmillan, New York, 1903), who thinks ten million dollars could be used in training club advisers who should have the use of schools and grounds after hours and evenings, conduct excursions, organize games, etc., but avoid all direct teaching and book work generally. This writer thinks such an institution would soon result in a marked increase of public morality and an augmented demand for technical instruction, and that for the advisers themselves the work would be the best training for high positions in politics and reform. Clubs of boys from eight to sixteen or eighteen must not admit age disparities of more than two years.]
[Footnote 31: See Young People's Societies, by L.W. Bacon. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1900, p. 265. Also, F.G. Cressey: The Church and Young Men. Fleming H. Revell Co., New York, 1903, p. 233.]
* * * * *
CHAPTER X
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK
The general change and plasticity at puberty—English teaching—Causes of its failure: (1) too much time to other languages, (2) subordination of literary content to form, (3) too early stress on eye and hand instead of ear and mouth, (4) excessive use of concrete words—Children's interest in words—Their favorites—Slang—Story telling—Age of reading crazes—What to read—The historic sense—Growth of memory span.
Just as about the only duty of young children is implicit obedience, so the chief mental training from about eight to twelve is arbitrary memorization, drill, habituation, with only limited appeal to the understanding. After the critical transition age of six or seven, when the brain has achieved its adult size and weight, and teething has reduced the chewing surface to its least extent, begins a unique stage of life marked by reduced growth and increased activity and power to resist both disease and fatigue, which suggests what was, in some just post-simian age of our race, its period of maturity. Here belong discipline in writing, reading, spelling, verbal memory, manual training, practise of instrumental technic, proper names, drawing, drill in arithmetic, foreign languages by oral methods, the correct pronunciation of which is far harder if acquired later, etc. The hand is never so near the brain. Most of the content of the mind has entered it through the senses, and the eye-and ear-gates should be open at their widest. Authority should now take precedence of reason. Children comprehend much and very rapidly if we can only refrain from explaining, but this slows down intuition, tends to make casuists and prigs and to enfeeble the ultimate vigor of reason. It is the age of little method and much matter. The good teacher is now a pedotrieb, or boy-driver. Boys of this age at now not very affectionate. They take pleasure in obliging and imitating those they like and perhaps in disobliging those they dislike. They have much selfishness and little sentiment. As this period draws to a close and the teens begin, the average normal child will not be bookish but should read and write well, know a few dozen well-chosen books, play several dozen games, be well started in one or more ancient and modern languages—if these must be studied at all, should know something of several industries and how to make many things he is interested in, belong to a few teams and societies, know much about nature in his environment, be able to sing and draw, should have memorized much more than he now does, and be acquainted, at least in story form, with the outlines of many of the best works in literature and the epochs and persons in history.[1] Morally he should have been through many if not most forms of what parents and teachers commonly call "badness," and Professor Yoder even calls "meanness". He should have fought, whipped and been whipped, used language offensive to the prude and to the prim precisian, been in some scrapes, had something to do with bad, if more with good, associates, and been exposed to and already recovering from as many forms of ethical mumps and measles as, by having in mild form now he can be rendered immune to later when they become far more dangerous, because his moral and religious as well as his rational nature is normally rudimentary. He is not depraved, but only in a savage or half-animal stage, although to a large-brained, large-hearted and truly parental soul that does not call what causes it inconvenience by opprobrious names, an altogether lovable and even fascinating stage. The more we know of boyhood the more narrow and often selfish do adult ideals of it appear. Something is amiss with the lad of ten who is very good, studious, industrious, thoughtful, altruistic, quiet, polite, respectful, obedient, gentlemanly, orderly, always in good toilet, docile to reason, who turns away from stories that reek with gore, prefers adult companionship to that of his mates, refuses all low associates, speaks standard English, or is as pious and deeply in love with religious services as the typical maiden teacher or the à la mode parent wishes. Such a boy is either under-vitalized and anemic and precocious by nature, a repressed, overtrained, conventionalized manikin, a hypocrite, as some can become under pressure thus early in life, or else a genius of some kind with a little of all these.
But with the teens all this begins to be changed and many of these precepts must be gradually reversed. There is an outburst of growth that needs a large part of the total kinetic energy of the body. There is a new interest in adults, a passion to be treated like one's elders, to make plans for the future, a new sensitiveness to adult praise or blame. The large muscles have their innings and there is a new clumsiness of body and mind. The blood-vessels expand and blushing is increased, new sensations and feelings arise, the imagination blossoms, love of nature is born, music is felt in a new, more inward way, fatigue comes easier and sooner; and if heredity and environment enable the individual to cross this bridge successfully there is sometimes 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 freedom 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 express, and never does understanding so outstrip ability to explain. Overaccuracy is atrophy. Both mental and moral acquisition sink at once too deep to be reproduced 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, utterance 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 naiveté should have some respect. Deep interests 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 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 psychologically 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 considered.
The Century, the largest complete dictionary of English, claims to have 250,000 words, as against 55,000 in the old Webster's Unabridged. Worcester's Unabridged of 1860 has 105,000; Murray's, now in L, it is said, will contain 240,000 principal and 140,000 compound 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 philologist[2] says, if given large liberty, he "will undertake to supply 1,000,000 English words for 1,000,000 American dollars." Chamberlain[3] 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 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 pedigree like those of Lear, Carrol, and many others.[4]