The backward child : a study of the psychology and treatment of backwardness; a practical manual for teachers and students

Introduction

HE problem of backwardness in children is one which necessarily occupies the attention of school administrators. A solution was expected by many when medical inspection of school children became general. Undertaken first as a public health measure, the medical inspection was soon centred on the detection and the correction of physical defects found in school children. We were then flooded with information as to the number of children suffering from defective vision, defective nasal breathing, malnutrition, etc. A vigorous campaign was carried on for their correction. Teachers and school superintendents looked for the almost total elimination of the problem of retardation when physical defects were corrected. This, however, was not the case. Certain children were still unable to make progress. Discim

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Introduction pline was no whit easier. Another remedy was needed.

The remedy lies in the recognition of individual differences in the mental make-up of school children. Gross differences we have recognised, at least since the time of Seguin and Itard. Of the finer distinctions we have been unconscious, as is evidenced by the general uniformity in school curricula throughout the country; the literature on methods of teaching; the training given to persons desirous of entering upon teaching as their life work. Because we could see the damage done to children’s bodies by hours spent at desks too large or too small, we have now provided adjustable seats and desks. Because we could not see the damage — either positive or negative — which is done to the minds of children who are forced to attend a school where the particular mental differences and difficulties are not understood, we have put the whole burden upon the child and called him stupid.

Mrs. Morgan’s work is an effort to direct

I ntrodviction.

v the minds of teachers to this point. No one can read this book without feeling the absolute necessity of breaking into smaller sections this great group of backward children, in some such way as the physician has separated the group of sick persons into those with digestive disorders, nervous disorders, circulatory disorders, etc. Unless the physician can localize the disturbance from which his patient is suffering, he is bound to do experimental work, and by a process of elimination seek to establish principles of treatment. Similar work with backward children will result in groups of those with disorders of attention, deficiencies of volitional control, etc. To carry the analogy a step further, — it is realized that the physician has to reckon with personal idiosyncrasies when he prescribes medicine. All who need a stimulant cannot take quinine.

What is the practice in treating backward children? We assume that what the backward child needs is not different mental stimulants, but more of the same thing. As vi

Introduction a consequence, we have classes for backward children where the bare bones of reading, writing, and arithmetic are offered. The effort is made to give these children the elements of education without any knowledge of their ability to get control of and to use the particular elements offered. We never question the ability of a child to learn to read; we assume that each child is able to learn long division. When they fail to do either, we never question the appeal made by the teacher in her work. The type of thing the child remembers is seldom known; the way in which he attends, the relation between his emotional life, his power of imagination, and his volitional control almost never modify his school experiences. We have taken for granted and trained accordingly the most complex mechanism in man, — the human mind. We have haggled, and are still haggling with its intricate yet delicate, instinctive, perceptive, emotional, and volitional power. The teacher of some day will look back upon us as we look upon the

Introduction vii

soothsayers and astrologers of a much earlier time. As they did, so we are doing, ladling out our notions and our cure-alls. As they treated, all bad health was alike; so, generally speaking, is our treatment of all mental defects the same. The children of the muses are not fed on the ambrosia of the gods. The school treatment of the leaders of men to be, does not differ one iota from that of the man with the hoe; the same kind and amount of food is given to all children in the elementary school.

The teacher of the future, not too far distant, will want to know — not that the child is backward, but in what particular area of his mental functioning he is strong, and where weakness dominates. She will want to know how he is to be trained; what sense appeal to make; she will ask that an educational prescription be given in order to save her own strength and to conserve the pupil’s self-respect.

ELIZABETH E. FARRELL, Superintendent of Ungraded Classes, New York Public Schools.

December I, 1913.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

J\ AENTAL analysis looks to a future when * ’ * teachers will so understand every child’s mental structure that his whole education will be directed to the fortifying of his weak points and the development of his tendencies.

The present analysis is applied to backward children because they are one of the most insistent of present school questions. It is an effort to persuade teachers and parents, in spite of a hide-bound educational system, to study the children that interest them as individuals, and to recognise their faculties and tendencies as intelligently as they do their habits and manners.

I first noticed the existence of a practically untouched field by observing the gap between the psychologists and neurologists, on the one hand, who are intent

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Preface on the mental side upon classifying, and on the other hand the teachers who are eager for expert knowledge but unable to use its results. Accordingly an experimental clinic was conducted for two years in New York City, in which children were tested and then trained in the particular deficiency which that examination had revealed.

The material offered in this book is based upon the verifications of that clinic. I have been unable, among the mass of writing upon psychological and pedagogical subjects, to find any work which analyses mental operations into their component parts and builds a scheme of training upon that diagnosis. It is with full consciousness, therefore, both of the scope and the novelty of my subject, that I present it, and in considering my temerity I beg to express a warm appreciation of Miss Farrell’s insight and encouragement.

B. S. M.

New York,

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Chapter I

THE BACKWARD CHILD .... I

On the border-line between normal and feeble-minded — Common manifestations of his character — Too general for precise treatment — Futility of perpetual schoolroom drilling — A specific cause lies at the root of retardation — Mental analysis the key to the original flaw — Nature of tests and training.

CHAPTER II Four primary processes of a child’s mind

Sense impressions the first to touch a baby’s mind — Later the recollection of sense impressions gives the child his first comprehension of distinctions, as between wrong and inexpediency— Eye-mindedness and ear-mindedness — Synthetical and analytical turns of mind — Types of attention — Association channels — Memory — Abstraction — Expansive faculties of imagination, reasoning, expression.

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Chapter III

Tests characterised — The child must be unaware that he is being tested — The teacher’s attitude — Typical instance of an examination — Deductions— Training prescribed.

Chapter IV

Attention works in three ways — (1) Homogeneous attention, viz., attention to one thing over a period of time — Tested by crossing out letters — Under-nourishment — Fatigue — The child’s method is indicative — Cases in point — Devices in training — (2) Simultaneous attention, viz., attention to several things at the same time —

Can be conscious or unconscious — Tested by pictures on a card — Listlessness as a symptom illustrated — (3) Disparate attention, viz., attention to two or more things over a period of time — Tested — Rhythm utilised.

Chapter V

Memory works in three ways — (1) Automatic memory, the faculty of remembering a series of impressions — Tests described — Deductions —

The teacher must be spontaneous — Rhythm used in training automatic memory — Alertness and accuracy the result of training — (2) Voluntary memory, the faculty of consciously formxm

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ing associations — It is apt to fall into disuse — The test must avoid the school habits — Trained by original rhymes memorised by the child as he makes them — Illustration — (3) Retentive memory is more largely physical than the other types — Forgetfulness must not be confused with poor retention — Three types of attention and three types of memory summarised and differentiated.

Chapter VI

Mental sensitivity is independent of physical constitution — A specialist’s report should precede the present examination — Colour sensitivity tested for dulness or inaccuracy — Sound sensitivity tested from the same point of view — A tendency to visual- or ear-mindedness determined by questions — Touch, smell and taste tested for their absolute and relative keenness — Sense training is valuable in young children but later is chiefly used as a basis in special work.

Chapter VII

Perception is to be understood in the technical sense of ideas in the process of formation — Illustration discloses two possible points of view, analytical and synthetical — Both forms of perception are seen in newspaper stories — A tendency to one or the other largely determines

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a child’s aptitude in studies — Analytic perception tested by anagrams and questions — Synthetic perception similarly tested — The teacher must determine which form comes more readily.

Chapter VIII

ASSOCIATION CLUES . . . . II5

Laboratory tests show the physical basis of association— Law of association — Tests used to detect criminals are not successful with children — Other methods of testing suggested — Examples of lists show various types of association to be noticed — Such deductions have little independent value but must be taken in connection with the rest of the examination.

Chapter IX

Abstraction translates sensation into ideas — The difficulty of children in casting aside concrete helps in arithmetic makes an analysis of abstraction practical — Tests disclose whether poor number sense or faulty abstraction is the trouble — Devices in training are suggested.

Chapter X

Invention is the applied form of imagination — The feeling for drama is usually the first xv

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development of imagination — Imagery or similising is another form — Tests must bring out which type of imagination prevails — Children who show no facility of imagination proper may work better within limits — The type of imagination shown is more apt to govern the child’s course in life than in the schoolroom.

Chapter XI

The causal connection of these two faculties explained and illustrated — The first developments are elementary form and elementary aesthetic judgments — Tested by squares of paper and Binet and Simon caricatures — Picture puzzles and catch questions are more searching tests — The degree of certainty and accuracy is to be observed.

Chapter XII

EXPRESSION AND RESPONSE . . . I57

An apparently dull child has perhaps some preferred channel of expression — Tests in freehand drawing, talking, and writing described — Technical excellence not considered here —

If the child shows no preferred means of expression he can be stimulated by training in illustrating stories according to his own ideas —

To stimulate expression is to create ideas — Response cannot be tested but must be observed by the teacher — Lines of observation suggested.

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Five examples of backward children, their diagnosis and treatment given as narratives — The types illustrate, (1) slow rateof development, (2) nervous intractability, (3) sullen intractability,

(4) listlessness, and (5) hysteria.

Chapter XVI

The mental processes in reading and writing analysed in their simplest form — This analysis accounts for confusion of letters, for inversion, i. e.t reading “was” as “saw,” and for the inability to read what has just been written — A similar analysis is applied to arithmetic to explain inversion of figures and the difficulty of adding a column of figures correctly but writing the answer wrong — The stimulation of initiative should underlie all training.

Chapter I

THE BACKWARD CHILD HE backward child is often a subtle and baffling personality. In the long list of school problems there is none more difficult than his, none which yields more grudgingly to direct attack. He stands on the border-line between the normal and feeble-minded, and the way in which his mental shortcomings are treated may determine whether he joins ultimately one class or the other. To put it in another way, the backward child must be brought up to the mark; otherwise he will grow to maturity as an incompetent or as a potential criminal.

The work of breaking down the barriers which hedge him in is the peculiar business of the schools. Teachers in every large city know how many backward children are presented to them each year and how seriously they clog the classes. At the same time, the hope of the backward child lies in the teacher, for he comes to school at that period of his life when his mind is most readily shaped.

Backwardness manifests itself in diffuse and indefinite ways — a complete and apparently impenetrable dulness, irritability in small matters, inability to master this subject or that. Teachers know that continual drilling has very little effect. The child is as dull, as irritable, as uncomprehending as he was before. In other words, general measures do not reach general effects. But as a matter of fact, in the make-up of every backward child a specific cause lies at the root of his retardation. This cause can be determined ; it can be directly attacked, and its removal means the clearing up of the general haze.

The direct way to make such a determination is by mental analysis. Certain intellectual faculties come into play with every thought and every act ; consequently the clearness of the thought and the effectiveness of the act depend upon the individual quality of these faculties and on the harmony with which they work together. The impression which the teacher gathers is the result of this co-ordination or lack of it, and to understand the case she must analyse the factors in the co-ordination.

Mental analysis is not a substitute for any of the agencies in the educational field. It does not duplicate the work of the neurologist or medical specialist because it is concerned with mental diagnosis. Physical building up improves a child’s general mental action just as rain stimulates the yield of the earth, but it does not cure a special mental fault any more than the rain supplies the peculiar chemical elements which the ground needs. Neither does the scheme of mental analysis set forth in this book touch in any way the purposes of the Binet and Simon tests, which are aimed solely at classifying backward children, and which throw no light on individual peculiarities and offer no suggestions for cure. Nor does this mental analysis meet at any point the system of the Dottoressa Montessori, which is devised for the development of young children largely through sense stimulation.

The principle of mental analysis, in striking at the cause and not the effect of backwardness, is applied in the use of simple tests which the child performs and in so doing reveals to the teacher the unconscious mechanism of his mind. The scheme of mental analysis set forth in the following pages equips the teacher with the means to find out where a child’s mind is at fault. While it uses some of the classic Binet and Simon tests, the point of departure is entirely different. The tests have been selected as bringing into play the mental faculties which must be analysed, and in selecting them it has been a special point to avoid any device which would illustrate the effect of the school training on the child rather than the native ability of the child himself. Laboratory conditions and the measurements of the neurologist’s examination are dispensed with because the slight hitch in the working of a child’s mind is too subtle to be detected by charts or pulse tests. But the examiner, sitting casually with the child as if playing with him, makes a comparative determination as to which faculties are weak, without attempting the misleading exactness of a percentage.

The psychological basis of the tests is explained in the following chapters in as much detail as is practical. Experiments in training are described as foundations which a teacher can build upon and broaden. These experiments were made upon individual children in daily periods of three-quarters of an hour, and they were made by untrained persons working under precise directions based upon the showing of the examination. The results show that just as a person’s physical health is improved by using a prescription of medicine which takes very little time as he goes about his affairs, so a mentally backward child can be brought up to par by daily attention to the actual root of his trouble. Three points are especially important: the training must be individual, or the effect will be blurred; it must be for a short period at a time or it will be neutralised by fatigue; and all the devices used must be focused on the deficiency revealed by the examination.

So essential is this last point that we revert to the independent value of the examination itself. Even when a teacher can not arrange for special training, she gains immeasurably in her general classwork if she understands her backward children in the light of mental analysis and can bring an appreciation of each child’s mental peculiarities to bear upon the persistent types of backwardness.

Chapter II

IMITATION is a child’s self-defence. He * very soon finds out that most grown people like him best when he makes himself a pattern of something which they already have in mind. He is praised when he measures up to their standard, and he is blamed when he falls below it. So at the first suspicion of trouble, he takes refuge in conforming to a mould created by what other children demand and his elders prescribe.

If the normal child has to shelter himself in a common standard, the slightly abnormal child feels a much greater impulse to do so. He is dimly conscious, it may be, of some difference between him and other children which is not in his favour. If he were actually

THe DacKward CHild feeble-minded, he would not be sensitive enough to know where he missed or what he should imitate. If he were entirely normal, there would be times when his sense of mental and physical fitness would give him assurance to be individual. But if he is on the border-line between the feeble-minded and the normal, he is always wanting to be like others and so hide from observation and possible disapproval.

The teacher who would persuade the child into showing how his mind actually does its work, must not allow the possibility of praise or blame to enter the child’s mind, for the instinctive defence of imitation makes him, for the sake of approval, do everything as he thinks the teacher wants it instead of following his natural impulse. And in order that the teacher should have the observing rather than the critical attitude she must approach the examination with the idea of bringing into play certain mental activities which are fundamental to the thought processes of everyone, whatever his degree of intelligence. In other words, she must have a clear notion of the psychological structure which she is about to explore.

The following outline of mental faculties and their relations to each other will serve as a basis to the more detailed discussions of psychological analysis.

We will regard the child’s mind as having roughly four primary processes with which to work:

Sense impressions ;

Recollections of sense impressions; Association channels which partly determine and partly are determined by them ; and Abstraction processes by which impressions are translated into ideas.

And as the child grows, these fundamental faculties, by increasing and interworking, elaborate into Imagination,

Reasoning,

Expression.

Sense impressions — sights and sounds and touches, and, of slightly later development,

IO tastes and smells — are the first impressions that the world makes on a baby. He sees a rattle and he hears it go, and his idea of the rattle becomes a combination of how it looks and sounds. His idea of his milk bottle is a combination of the long white thing that he sees, and his empty feeling going away.

And then later he gets more elaborate combinations. If he throws a stone at a window, it makes a noise as well as when he throws it at a board fence; but the first noise means breaking the window, and that in its turn brings some unpleasantness which he comes to understand as punishment.

But one of the first abstract differences that a child learns is the difference between wrong and inexpediency. It is impossible to delude a child into believing that punishment is as inevitable as other consequences. For instance, if a child climbs on a chair and stands too near the edge, the chair tips over and he gets a fall. But not for a moment does he confuse the fall, which he sees must

II happen under those conditions, with the punishment he gets for breaking a window, which he cannot help seeing is quite unrelated to the cast of the stone and the smash of the glass. So the first moral idea is the difference between wrong and inexpediency, and the lessons of inexpediency bite deeper, because Nature’s laws work more inexorably than those of man.

In fact, so convinced was Rousseau that left to herself Nature would bring up a child with perfect wisdom, that he based a whole system of education on letting a child bear the consequences of his own acts. Do not punish the child for breaking the window; let the window stay unmended, and let the child suffer cold. But it is precisely the moral sense that would suffer under such a system. Suppose that the child did learn, through suffering cold, not to break windows, the lesson would apply only to windows, it would carry no general idea of respecting property, and since he must live in a manmade world, would prolong the process of education beyond patience. So much is evident. Rousseau’s idea was a reaction against the prevailing method of corporal punishment. He saw such a punishment to be ineffective, but he did not realise the reason : that it is useless to imitate in punishment the methods of chastisement which Nature has reserved for violations of herself, for we can never give to corporal punishment the fatalistic swiftness that makes Nature’s retribution chiefly effective, and if we must raise moral issues, we must develop abstract sensibilities to meet them.

One takes an illustration like this dawning distinction between wrong and inexpediency to understand a little the infinitely complex interweaving of sense impressions, memories, associations, and abstractions. But, after a certain point, this mental complexity gets beyond the range of description, and it straightens out, even partially, only under analysis.

Now as the child grows, conditioned by a thousand infinitesimal incidents which

PsycKolo^ical Basis 13

we can neither predict nor trace, he develops faint tendencies which in their turn determine the more pronounced qualities of his later years. He is more sensitive to colour and form, for instance, than to sound, so that he will call up more readily how he saw a thing than how he heard it. Many people will say that their idea of a concert, when they think of it, is the strokes of the conductor’s baton. Or he may be sensitive to sound, that is ear-minded, and will say that the humming of bees is his mental image of a sunny meadow. But besides the tendency to favour one or the other sense, many people lose their mental sensitivity to sensations in general, the sensations which originally were the foundation of all their ideas. This sense dulness that one finds is often not a physical matter (since examination shows no defect in the sense organ), but it is a mental quality which is of some importance in understanding the interplay of faculties.

Now as the primitive impressions of the

14 THe BacKward OKild

senses expand and elaborate into ideas, so that most of the impressions come to us directly as ideas instead of formerly as sensations, it appears that we can get an impression in two ways: we can get it as a whole, or we can get it in parts. If we introspect, we shall find that either we are more disposed to ask in such and such circumstances, what will the outcome be, or our interest is more excited to know, in such and such a combination, why is it, what has brought it about? The normal person’s mind is receptive to both kinds of impression, is active in both kinds of inquiry, just as he gets facility with both hands, but he nevertheless remains a little more apt in one direction or the other. This psychological mould, as one might call it, has determined two great schools of philosophy, the inductive and the deductive.

The inductive turn of mind is the one which makes for details, for working the outcome of a chain of events; it is the turn of mind which produces scientists, and farseeing business men, and which in the schoolroom makes a child better at arithmetic than grammar, but better at composition than geometry. In psychological terms, the inductive turn of mind is the synthetic mind, seeking to bind parts into a whole, working to make something out of the given materials.

The deductive or analytical turn of mind is less practical, and therefore less often met with in its pronounced form nowadays. Until modern times, the two casts of mind were for the most part the sign of a man’s calling. The deductive men were scholars, the inductive were practical men of affairs. But with the spread of knowledge these same men of affairs began to apply general principles to get particular results, until Bacon once and for all split off science from philosophy by declaring that the truth can be arrived at only by following a train of particular circumstances to their conclusion; in other words, by experiment. The inductive man, the synthetically-minded i6 man, therefore, is the type of successful man to-day. But leaving the extreme case with which we have pointed the distinction, there remains a predisposed cast of mind. It is not the part of education to foster one or the other, but if the teacher knows in which of two ways an idea is most readily grasped, the business of explanation is simplified.

This constitutional cast of mind and the distribution of sensitivity previously described, determine the process of presentation. But interwoven with presentation so closely that the distinction is largely figurative, is the process of representation, the vehicles of which are attention and memory. The close analysis of attention and memory are of prime importance in understanding school children. To say that a child does not pay attention, explains nothing, for analysis shows not one but three kinds of attention.

In the first place, there is the faculty of getting a very definite impression without, as we say, “paying attention.” The appearance of a room, in which we were absorbed in talk, how someone looked in the street whom we saw and did not look at, and a thousand fleeting impressions whose haziness or clarity is of the utmost importance in mental activity — this is simultaneous attention. When, however, we give conscious thought to a thing in hand, our effectiveness depends partly on will power and partly on the quality of the second type, or homogeneous attention, which is another way of saying the persistence of attention, and which of all faculties responds best to training. The degree of facility in doing two things at once is roughly the meaning of disparate attention.

Again, in commenting on a child’s memory, it is futile to say, “He never seems to remember anything,” for it may be that of his three types of memory, two may be fairly normal and will become quite so when the third type is trained. Faulty memory of some kind underlies a great deal of backwardness, but to correct it the teacher must know whether the child has trouble in rei8 membering a series of impressions that come too fast to allow the formation of associations, which is automatic memory ; or whether his difficulty is in the conscious effort to memorise by forming associations, which is voluntary memory; or whether with both these processes working properly, he cannot seem to hold what he has in mind, which is retentive memory.

One cannot experiment much in memory without realising how largely it is interwoven with and determined by associations. The whole training of voluntary memory in fact is primarily to increase and direct associations. But most of our associations are unconsciously formed, so that by the time a child has reached the age of ten, he has a considerable mass of associative material and some well-marked tendencies which are worth studying for the clues they give to his habits of thought.

Habits of thought, in turn, depend for their very existence on the process of abstraction, or the translating of impressions into ideas, which is so fundamental that we usually take no account of it. But the teacher who finds a difficulty with arithmetic or with reading will go to the root of the matter if she examines the way in which the child is turning concrete symbols into the ideas of word and number which are expected from him.