We may say, therefore, in regard to two of the general aspects of mental types—the relation of the favoured function to attention, on the one hand, and to habit, on the other—that they both find emphatic illustration in the pupil of the visual type. He is, more than any other sensory pupil, a special case. His mental processes set decidedly toward vision. He is the more important, also, because he is so common. Statistics are lacking, but possibly half of the entire human family in civilized life are visual in their type for most of the language functions. This is due, no doubt, to the emphasis that civilization puts upon sight as the means of social acquisition generally, and to our predominantly visual methods of instruction.
The third fact mentioned is also illustrated by this type; the fact that mental instruction and derangement may come easily, through the stress laid upon vision in the person's mental economy. I need not enlarge upon the different forms of special defect which come through impairment of sight by central lesion or degeneration of the visual centers and connections. Suffice it to say that they are very common, and very difficult of recovery. The visual person is often so completely a slave to his sight that when that fails either in itself or through weakness of attention he becomes a wreck off the shore of the ocean of intellect. When we consider the large proportion just mentioned of pupils of this type, the care which should be exercised by the school authorities in the matter of favourable conditions of light, avoidance of visual fatigue, proper distance-adjustments in all visual application as regards focus, symmetry, size of objects, copies, prints, etc., becomes at once sufficiently evident to the thoughtful teacher, as it should be still earlier to the parent. There should be a medical examination, by a competent oculist, before the child goes to school, and regular tests afterward. School examiners and boards should have qualifications for reporting on the hygienic conditions of the school as regards lighting. The bright glare of a neighbouring wall before a window toward which children with weak eyes face when at their desks may result not only in common defects of vision but also in resulting mental and moral damage; and the results are worse to those who depend mainly on vision for the food, drink, and exercise, so to speak, of their growing minds.
As to the methods of teaching these and also the other sensory pupils, the indications already given must suffice. The statement of some of these far-reaching problems of educational psychology, and of the directions in which their answers are to be sought, exhausts the purpose of this chapter. In general it may be said that the recommendations made for the treatment of sensory children at the earlier stage may be extended to later periods also, and that the treatment should be, for the most part, in intelligent contrast to that which the motor pupils receive.
Language Study.—From this general consideration of the child's training it becomes evident that the great subjects which are most useful for discipline in the period of secondary education are the mathematical studies on the one hand, which exercise the faculty of abstraction, and the positive sciences, which train the power of observation and require truth to detail. If we should pursue the subject into the collegiate period, we should find mental and moral science, literature, and history coming to their rights. If this be in the main psychological, we see that language study, as such, should have no great place in secondary education. The study of grammar, as has been already said, is very useful in the early periods of development if taught vocally; it brings the child out in self-expression, and carries its own correctives, from the fact that its results are always open to social control. These are, in my mind, the main functions of the study of language.
What, then, is the justification for devoting ten or twelve years of the youth's time to study of a dead language, as is commonly done in the case of Latin? The utility of expression does not enter into it, and the discipline of truth to elegant literary copy can be even so well attained from the study of our own tongue, which is lamentably neglected. In all this dreary language study, the youth's interest is dried up at its source. He is fed on formulas and rules; he has no outlet for invention or discovery; lists of exceptions to the rules destroy the remnant of his curiosity and incentive; even reasoning from analogy is strictly forbidden him; he is shut up from Nature as in a room with no windows; the dictionary is his authority as absolute and final as it is flat and sterile. His very industry, being forced rather than spontaneous, makes him mentally, no less than physically, stoop-shouldered and near-sighted. It seems to be one of those mistakes of the past still so well lodged in tradition and class rivalry that soundness of culture is artificially identified with its maintenance. Yet there is no reason that the spirit of classical culture and the durable elements of Greek and Roman life should not be as well acquired—nay, better—from the study of history, archæology, and literature. For this language work is not study of literature. Not one in one hundred of the students who are forced through the periodical examinations in these languages ever gets any insight into their æsthetic quality or any inspiration from their form.
But more than this. At least one positively vicious effect follows from language study with grammar and lexicon, no matter what the language be. The habit of intellectual guessing grows with the need of continuous effort in putting together elements which go together for no particular reason. When a thing can not be reasoned out, it may just as well be guessed out. The guess is always easier than the dictionary, and, if successful, it answers just as well. Moreover, the teacher has no way of distinguishing the pupil's replies which are due to the guess from those due to honest work. I venture to say, from personal experience, that no one who has been through the usual classical course in college and before it has not more than once staked his all upon the happy guess at the stubborn author's meaning. This shallow device becomes a substitute for honest struggle. And it is more than shallow; to guess is dishonest. It is a servant to unworthy inertia; and worse, it is a cloak to mental unreadiness and to conscious moral cowardice. The guess is a bluff to fortune when the honest gauntlet of ignorance should be thrown down to the issue.
The effects of this show themselves in a habit of mind tolerated in persons of a literary bent, which is a marked contrast to that demanded and exemplified by science. I think that much of our literary impressionism and sentimentalism reveal the guessing habit.
Yet why guess? Why be content with an impression? Why hint of a "certain this and a certain that" when the "certain," if it mean anything, commonly means the uncertain? Things worth writing about should be formulated clearly enough to be understood. Why let the personal reaction of the individual's feeling suffice? Our youth need to be told that the guess is immoral, that hypothesis is the servant of research, that the private impression instructs nobody, that presentiment is usually wrong, that science is the best antidote to the fear of ghosts, and that the reply "I guess so" betrays itself, whether it arise from bravado, from cowardice, or from literary finesse! I think that the great need of our life is honesty, that the bulwark of honesty in education is exact knowledge with the scientific habit of mind, and, furthermore, that the greatest hindrance to these things is the training which does not, with all the sanctions at its command, distinguish the real, with its infallible tests, from the shadowy and vague, but which contents itself with the throw of the intellectual dice box. Any study which tends to make the difference between truth and error pass with the throwing of a die, and which leads the student to be content with a result he can not verify, has somewhat the function in his education of the puzzle in our society amusements or the game of sliced animals in the nursery.