The following responses made by feeble-minded delinquents from 16 to 21 years of age demonstrate sufficiently their inability to comprehend the moral situation:—
Hercules and the Wagoner. “Teaches you to look where you are going.” “Not to help any one who is stuck in the mud.” “Not to whip oxen.” “Teaches that Hercules was mean.” “Teaches us to carry a stick along to pry the wheels out.”
The Fox and the Crow. “Not to sing when eating.” “To keep away from strangers.” “To swallow it before you sing.” “Not to be stingy.” “Not to listen to evil.” “The fox was wiser than the crow.” “Not to be selfish with food.” “Not to do two things at once.” “To hang on to what you’ve got.”
The Farmer and the Stork. “Teaches the stork to look where he steps.” “Not to be cruel like the farmer.” “Not to tell lies.” “Not to butt into other people’s things.” “To be kind to birds.” “Teaches us how to get rid of troublesome people.” “Never go with anything else.”
The following are the responses of an 18-year-old delinquent (intelligence level 10 years) to the five fables:—
Maid and Eggs. “She was thinking about getting the dress and spilled the milk. Teaches selfishness.”
Hercules and the Wagoner. “He wanted to help the oxen out.”
Fox and Crow. “Guess that’s where the fox got his name—‘Old Foxy.’ Don’t teach us anything.”
Farmer and Stork. “Try and help the stork out of the field.”
Miller, Son, and Donkey. “They was all big fools and mean to the donkey.”
One does not require very profound psychological insight to see that a person of this degree of comprehension is not promising material for moral education. His weakness in the ability to generalize a moral situation is not due to lack of instruction, but is inherent in the nature of his mental processes, all of which have the infantile quality of average 9- or 10-year intelligence. Well-instructed normal children of 10 years ordinarily succeed no better. The ability to draw the correct lesson from a social situation is little developed below the mental level of 12 or 13 years.
The test is also valuable because it throws light on the subject’s ability to appreciate the finer shades of meaning. The mentally retarded often show marked inferiority in this respect. They sense, perhaps, in a general way the trend of the story, but they fail to comprehend much that to us seems clearly expressed. They do not get what is left for the reader to infer, because they are insensible to the thought fringes. It is these which give meaning to the fable. The dull subject may be able to image the objects and activities described, but taken in the rough such imagery gets him nowhere.
Finally, the test is almost free from the danger of coaching. The subject who has been given a number of fables along with twenty-five or thirty other tests can as a rule give only hazy and inaccurate testimony as to what he has been put through. Moreover, we have found that, even if a subject has previously heard a fable, that fact does not materially increase his chances of giving a correct interpretation. If the situation depicted in the fable is beyond the subject’s power of comprehension even explicit instruction has little effect upon the quality of the response.
Incidentally, this observation raises the question whether the use of proverbs, mottoes, fables, poetry, etc., in the moral instruction of children may not often be futile because the material is not fitted to the child’s power of comprehension. Much of the school’s instruction in history and literature has a moral purpose, but there is reason to suspect that in this field schools often make precocious attempts in “generalizing” exercises.
XII, 6. Repeating five digits reversed
The series are 3–1–8–7–9; 6–9–4–8–2; 5–2–9–6–1.