Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene

by G. Stanley Hall

In this vast field the mind of the child early begins to take flight. Here his soul finds its native breath and vital air. He may live as a peasant, using, as Max Müller says many do, but a few hundred words during his lifetime; or he may need 8,000, like Milton, 15,000, like Shakespeare, 20,000 or 30,000, like Huxley, who commanded both literary and technical terms; while in understanding, which far outstrips, use, a philologist may master perhaps 100,000 or 200,000 words. The content of a tongue may contain only folk-lore and terms for immediate practical life, or this content may be indefinitely elaborated in a rich literature and science. The former is generally well on in its development before speech itself becomes an abject of study. Greek literature was fully grown when the Sophists, and finally Aristotle, developed the rudiments of grammar, the parts of speech being at first closely related with his ten metaphysical categories. Our modern tongue had the fortune, unknown to those of antiquity, when it was crude and despised, to be patronized and regulated by Latin grammarians, and has had a long experience, both for good and evil, with their conserving and uniformitizing instincts. It has, too, a long history of resistance to this control. Once spelling was a matter of fashion or even individual taste; and as the constraint grew, two pedagogues in the thirteenth century fought a duel for the right spelling of the word, and that maintained by the survivor prevailed. Phonic and economic influences are now again making some headway against orthographic orthodoxy here; so with definitions. In the days of Johnson's dictionary, individuality still had wide range in determining meanings. In pronunciation, too: we may now pronounce the word tomato in six ways, all sanctioned by dictionaries. Of our tongue in particular it is true, as Tylor says in general, condensing a longer passage, "take language all in all, it is the product of a rough-and-ready ingenuity and of the great rule of thumb. It is an old barbaric engine, which in its highest development is altered, patched, and tinkered into capability. It is originally and naturally a product of low culture, developed by ages of conscious and unconscious improvement to answer more or less perfectly the requirements of modern civilization."

It is plain, therefore, that no grammar, and least of all that derived from the prim, meager Latin contingent of it, is adequate to legislate for the free spirit of our magnificent tongue. Again, if this is ever done and English ever has a grammar that is to it what Latin grammar is to that language, it will only be when the psychology of speech represented, e.g., in Wundt's Psychologie der Sprache,[5] which is now compiling and organizing the best elements from all grammars, is complete. The reason why English speakers find such difficulty in learning other languages is because ours has so far outgrown them by throwing off not only inflections but many old rules of syntax, that we have had to go backward to an earlier and more obsolescent stage of human development. In 1414, at the Council of Constance, when Emperor Sigismund was rebuked for a wrong gender, he replied, "I am King of the Romans and above grammar." Thomas Jefferson later wrote, "Where strictures of grammar does not weaken expression it should be attended to; but where by a small grammatical negligence the energy of an idea is condensed or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt." Browning, Whitman, and Kipling deliberately violate grammar and secure thereby unique effects neither asking nor needing excuse.

By general consent both high school and college youth in this country are in an advanced stage of degeneration in the command of this the world's greatest organ of the intellect; and that, despite the fact that the study of English often continues from primary into college grades, that no topic counts for more, and that marked deficiency here often debars from all other courses. Every careful study of the subject for nearly twenty years shows deterioration, and Professor Shurman, of Nebraska, thinks it now worse than at any time for forty years. We are in the case of many Christians described by Dante, who strove by prayers to get nearer to God when in fact with every petition they were departing farther from him. Such a comprehensive fact must have many causes.

I. One of these is the excessive time given to other languages just at the psychological period of greatest linguistic plasticity and capacity for growth. School invention and tradition is so inveterate that it is hard for us to understand that there is little educational value—and perhaps it is deëducational—to learn to tell the time of day or name a spade in several different tongues or to learn to say the Lord's Prayer in many different languages, any one of which the Lord only can understand. The polyglot people that one meets on great international highways of travel are linguists only in the sense that the moke on the variety stage who plays a dozen instruments equally badly is a musician. It is a psychological impossibility to pass through the apprenticeship stage of learning foreign languages at the age when the vernacular is setting without crippling it. The extremes are the youth in ancient Greece studying his own language only and the modern high school boy and girl dabbling in three or perhaps four languages. Latin, which in the eight years preceding 1898 increased one hundred and seventy-four per cent. in American high schools, while the proportion entering college in the country and even in Massachusetts steadily declined, is the chief offender. In the day of its pedagogical glory Latin was the universal tongue of the learned. Sturm's idea was to train boys so that if suddenly transported to ancient Rome or Greece they would be at home there. Language, it was said, was the chief instrument of culture; Latin, the chief language and therefore a better drill in the vernacular than the vernacular itself. Its rules were wholesome swathing bands for the modern languages when in their infancy. Boys must speak only Latin on the playground. They thought, felt, and developed an intellectual life in and with that tongue.[6] But how changed all this is now. Statistical studies show that five hours a week for a year gives command of but a few hundred words, that two years does not double this number, and that command of the language and its resources in the original is almost never attained, but that it is abandoned not only by the increasing percentage that do not go to college but also by the increasing percentage who drop it forever at the college door. Its enormous numerical increase due to high school requirements, the increasing percentage of girl pupils more ready to follow the teacher's advice, in connection with the deteriorating quality of the girls—inevitable with their increasing numbers, the sense that Latin means entering upon a higher education, the special reverence for it by Catholic children, the overcrowded market for Latin teachers whom a recent writer says can be procured by the score at less rates than in almost any other subject, the modern methods of teaching it which work well with less knowledge of it by the teacher than in the case of other school topics, have been attended perhaps inevitably by steady pedagogic decline despite the vaunted new methods; until now the baby Latin in the average high school class is a kind of sanctified relic, a ghost of a ghost, suggesting Swift's Struldbrugs, doomed to physical immortality but shriveling and with increasing horror of all things new. In 1892 the German emperor declared it a shame for a boy to excel in Latin composition, and in the high schools of Sweden and Norway it has been practically abandoned. In the present stage of its educational decadence the power of the dead hand is strongly illustrated by the new installation of the old Roman pronunciation with which our tongue has only remote analogies, which makes havoc with proper names which is unknown and unrecognized in the schools of the European continent, and which makes a pedantic affectation out of more vocalism. I do not know nor care whether the old Romans pronounced thus or not, but if historic fidelity in this sense has pedagogic justification, why still teach a text like the Viri Romae, which is not a classic but a modern pedagogue's composition?

I believe profoundly in the Latin both as a university specialty and for all students who even approach mastery, but for the vast numbers who stop in the early stages of proficiency it is disastrous to the vernacular. Compare the evils of translation English, which not even the most competent and laborious teaching can wholly prevent and which careless mechanical instruction directly fosters, with the vigorous fresh productions of a boy or girl writing or speaking of something of vital present interest. The psychology of translation shows that it gives the novice a consciousness of etymologies which rather impedes than helps the free movement of the mind. Jowett said in substance that it is almost impossible to render either of the great dead languages into English without compromise, and this tends to injure the idiomatic mastery of one's own tongue, which can be got only by much hard experience in uttering our own thoughts before trying to shape the dead thoughts of others into our language. We confound the little knowledge of word-histories which Latin gives with the far higher and subtler sentence-sense which makes the soul of one language so different from that of another, and training in which ought not to end until one has become more or less of a stylist and knows how to hew out modes of expressing his own individuality in great language. There is a sense in which Macaulay was not an Englishman at all, but a Ciceronian Latinist who foisted an alien style upon our tongue; and even Addison is a foreigner compared to the virile Kipling. The nature and needs of the adolescent mind demand bread and meat, while Latin rudiments are husks. In his autobiography, Booker Washington says that for ten years after their emancipation, the two chief ambitions of the young negro of the South were to hold office and to study Latin, and he adds that the chief endeavor of his life has been against these tendencies. For the American boy and girl, high school too often means Latin. This gives at first a pleasing sense of exaltation to a higher stage of life, but after from one to three years the great majority who enter the high school drop out limp and discouraged for many reasons, largely, however, because they are not fed. Defective nutrition of the mind also causes a restlessness, which enhances all the influences which make boys and girls leave school.

II. The second cause of this degeneration is the subordination of literature and content to language study. Grammar arises in the old age of language. As once applied to our relatively grammarless tongue it always was more or less of a school-made artifact and an alien yoke, and has become increasingly so as English has grown great and free. Its ghost, in the many textbooks devoted to it, lacks just the quality of logic which made and besouled it. Philology, too, with all its magnificence, is not a product of the nascent stages of speech. In the college, which is its stronghold, it has so inspired professors of English that their ideal is to be critical rather than creative till they prefer the minute reading of a few masterpieces to a wide general knowledge, and a typical university announces that "in every case the examiners will treat mere knowledge of books as less important than the ability to write good English" that will parse and that is spelled, punctuated, capitalized, and paragraphed aright. Good professors of English literature are hard to find, and upon them philologists, who are plentiful, look with a certain condescension. Many academic chairs of English are filled by men whose acquaintance of our literature is very narrow, who wish to be linguistic and not literary, and this is true even in ancient tongues.

At a brilliant examination, a candidate for the doctor's degree who had answered many questions concerning the forms of Lucretius, when asked whether he was a dramatist, historian, poet, or philosopher, did not know, and his professor deemed the question improper. I visited the eleventh recitation in Othello in a high school class of nineteen pupils, not one of whom knew how the story ended, so intent had they been kept on its verbiage. Hence, too, has come the twelve feet of text-books on English on my shelves with many standard works, edited for schools, with more notes than text. Fashion that works from above down the grades and college entrance requirements are in large measure responsible for this, perhaps now the worst case of the prostitution of content to form.

Long exposure to this method of linguistic manicuring tends to make students who try to write ultra-fastidiously, seeking an over-refined elaboration of petty trifles, as if the less the content the greater the triumph of form alone could be. These petty but pretty nothings are like German confectionery, that appeals to the eye but has little for taste and is worse than nothing for the digestion. It is like straining work on an empty stomach. For youth this embroidery of details is the precocious senescence that Nordau has so copiously illustrated as literary decadence. Language is vastly larger than all its content, and the way to teach it is to focus the mind upon story, history, oratory, drama, Bible, for their esthetic, mental, and above all, moral content, as shown in the last chapter. The more unconscious processes that reflect imitatively the linguistic environment and that strike out intuitively oral and written vents for interests so intense that they must be told and shared, are what teach us how to command the resources of our mother tongue. These prescriptions and corrections and consciousness of the manifold ways of error are never so peculiarly liable to hinder rather than to help as in early adolescence, when the soul has a new content and a new sense for it, and so abhors and is so incapable of precision and propriety of diction. To hold up the flights of exuberant youth by forever being on the hunt for errors is, to borrow the language of the gridiron, low tackle, and I would rather be convicted of many errors by such methods than use them. Of course this has its place, but it must always be subordinated to a larger view, as in one of the newly discovered logia ascribed to Jesus, who, when he found a man gathering sticks on Sunday, said to him, "If you understand what you are doing, it is well, but if not, thou shalt be damned." The great teacher who, when asked how he obtained such rare results in expression, answered, "By carefully neglecting it and seeking utter absorption in subject-matter," was also a good practical psychologist. This is the inveterate tendency that in other ages has made pedagogic scribes, Talmudists, epigoni, and sophists, who have magnified the letter and lost the spirit. But there are yet other seats of difficulty.

III. It is hard and, in the history of the race, a late change, to receive language through the eye which reads instead of through the ear which hears. Not only is perception measurably quite distinctly slower, but book language is related to oral speech somewhat as an herbarium is to a garden, or a museum of stuffed specimens to a menagerie. The invention of letters is a novelty in the history of the race that spoke for countless ages before it wrote. The winged word of mouth is saturated with color, perhaps hot with feeling, musical with inflection, is the utterance of a living present personality, the consummation of man's gregarious instincts. The book is dead and more or less impersonal, best apprehended in solitude, its matter more intellectualized; it deals in remoter second-hand knowledge so that Plato reproached Aristotle as being a reader, one remove from the first spontaneous source of original impressions and ideas, and the doughty medieval knights scorned reading as a mere clerk's trick, not wishing to muddle their wits with other people's ideas when their own were good enough for them. But although some of the great men in history could not read, and though some of the illiterate were often morally and intellectually above some of the literate, the argument here is that the printed page must not be too suddenly or too early thrust between the child and life. The plea is for moral and objective work, more stories, narratives, and even vivid readings, as is now done statedly in more than a dozen of the public libraries of the country, not so often by teachers as by librarians, all to the end that the ear, the chief receptacle of language, be maintained in its dominance, that the fine sense of sound, rhythm, cadence, pronunciation, and speech-music generally be not atrophied, that the eye which normally ranges freely from far to near be not injured by the confined treadmill and zigzag of the printed page.

Closely connected with this, and perhaps psychologically worse, is the substitution of the pen and the scribbling fingers for the mouth and tongue. Speech is directly to and from the soul. Writing, the deliberation of which fits age better than youth, slows down its impetuosity many fold, and is in every way farther removed from vocal utterance than is the eye from the ear. Never have there been so many pounds of paper, so many pencils, and such excessive scribbling as in the calamopapyrus [Pen-paper] pedagogy of to-day and in this country. Not only has the daily theme spread as infection, but the daily lesson is now extracted through the point of a pencil instead of from the mouth. The tongue rests and the curve of writer's cramp takes a sharp turn upward, as if we were making scribes, reporters, and proof-readers. In some schools, teachers seem to be conducting correspondence classes with their own pupils. It all makes excellent busy work, keeps the pupils quiet and orderly, and allows the school output to be quantified, and some of it gives time for more care in the choice of words. But is it a gain to substitute a letter for a visit, to try to give written precedence over spoken forms? Here again we violate the great law that the child repeats the history of the race, and that, from the larger historic standpoint, writing as a mode of utterance is only the latest fashion.