The education of behaviour, a psychological study ...

Preface

This little book is an attempt to bring our present knowledge of psychology to bear on the problems of behaviour which have to be faced by those who are in charge of boys or girls during their adolescence. It is intended primarily for the student of education who wishes to teach young people between the ages of nine and seventeen, but it is hoped that it will also appeal to parents, as well as to foremen and social workers who are interested in the welfare of adolescents.

The reader who is acquainted with the literature of the subject will see how much my exposition owes to Professor McDougall's Social Psychology, and to the standard books on analytical psychology. At the same time, I have not scrupled to give my own explanation of a psychological phenomenon when I could not find one which seemed to satisfy the conditions as I saw them. Since the book is intended for the beginner, I have, however, contented myself with stating where my view is not the one which is generally accepted, giving the reader at the same time such references as should enable him to make up his own mind on the vi PREFACE

subject. Lengthy discussions of different points of view seem to me to be out of place in a book of this kind.

The references which are given in the text will indicate to which writers I am most indebted. Unfortunately most of the book was written before 1 had the opportunity of reading Professor Nunn's Education, its Data and First Principles and Miss Alice Woods' Educational Experiments in England. This accounts for the fact that the text contains no references to these interesting books.

In conclusion, I should like to thank Miss E. R. Murray for many helpful suggestions, and to express my great obligation to Miss Alice Woods and to Dr. Stanley Watkins for reading the whole of the manuscript and for giving me much valuable criticism and advice.

I, B. Saxby.

Cardiff, December 1920,

Contents

I. INTRODUCTION ....

II. IMPULSES AND REFLEXES.

III. SOME IMPORTANT IMPULSES .

Introduction

Education as preparation for efficient citizenship. Citizenship as the joint product of natural power and environment.

Stated in its most general terms, education may be said to be preparation for adult life, and this in turn may be described as preparation for efficient citizenship. If we are now asked what exactly is involved in this, we cannot do better than turn to Herbert Spencer for an answer. In his book entitled Education : Intellectual, Moral and Physical, he points out that the ideal education of a citizen should include : ( i ) that which prepares for direct self-preservation ; (2) that which prepares for indirect self-preservation ; (3) that which prepares for parenthood ; (4) that which prepares for citizenship in the narrower sense of the word ; and (5) that which prepares for the miscellaneous refinements of life.

To put the same thing in different words, an efficient citizen should be ahle and willing: (i) to keep himself fit and in good condition ; (2) to do his share of the world's work ; (3) to give his children the necessary care and training ; (4) to do his duty by his neighbours ; and (5) to occupy his leisure in such a way as to provide a desirable outlet for those of his longings which would otherwise remain unsatisfied.

It is the object of this book to give the student some insight into the conditions under which he is likely to succeed in turning his pupils into efficient citizens in the sense just defined.

At the outset it is important to determine how much responsibility rests on the child and how much on the educator, for our whole attitude towards the problem necessarily depends on our answer to this question. If the child's mind is of the nature of a waxen tablet on which we can write what we like, then the environment must be entirely responsible for the result ; if heredity practically settles the child's future at the outset, then it is useless to attempt any sort of interference. As usual, the truth appears to lie somewhere between these two extremes. The natural endowments of the child present as it were the sum total of his possibilities, but it depends on the environment how they develop, and far more persons fail through lack of right

INTRODUCTION environment in youth than through lack of inborn ability.

In order to see how heredity and environment act and react on each other, we shall begin with a brief investigation into the origin of standards of conduct and attainments. Superficial observation may suggest that these two important " springs of action " have come into existence in absolutely different ways, for we can remember acquiring most of our attainments by conscious efforts of our own, whereas many of our standards of conduct seem so much part and parcel of ourselves that we are sometimes tempted to think we must have been born with them. However, further reflection soon shows that both are really the joint products of natural power and environment.

I will consider attainments first. The knowledge which a child acquires at school depends partly on himself, but much more on the school. He may, for instance, have only slight ability for mathematics, and yet learn more than another with greater natural talent, merely because he happens to have a better teacher. Even exceptional ability may never develop in an unfavourable environment, for we need opportunity to discover what we can do, and we may exhaust ourselves in overcoming real or imaginary obstacles when we have discovered it.

In the sphere of conduct the conditions under which a child grows up are even more important, for the young child has no inborn ideas of right or wrong, and has therefore to acquire them through personal experience. It should be noted, too, that this " personal experience " is only his own in a very limited sense. He can be allowed to find out for himself that fire burns, but not that certain berries are poisonous. In this and many other cases his discovery is limited to the fact that we approve or disapprove of certain acts, and he has to take on trust that we know better than he, or that the reasons which we choose to give him are really correct. This is particularly the case with conventions. Why, for instance, should you say " Please " and " Thank you " at every turn ? It would puzzle the average adult to give the child of three to five an answer that would really convince him ; yet the child often shows by the tone of his voice that he is anything but satisfied. None the less, he usually acquiesces in the end, partly no doubt because he is so dependent on us, but perhaps mainly because he is continually being made conscious of the superior knowledge and power of his elders, and is therefore inclined to assume that they probably know best in every case, however incomprehensible their demands seem to be. Thus he gradually adopts the standards of conduct which are accepted in his environment.

INTRODUCTION 5

For most persons there comes, however, a time — usually during adolescence — when they begin to mix with others whose standards of conduct differ more or less from their own, and whom they have yet every reason to respect. Then one of two things may happen : they may learn to close their eyes to everything that threatens their peace of mind ; but, failing that, they must modify their views sufficiently to enable them to fit into the old what they feel to be true in the new. Whichever path the adolescent chooses, he is now for the first time actively affecting his standards of conduct and his beliefs. It is, however, well to bear in mind that most of us would grow up without ever questioning the absolute finality of what we had been taught as children, if we did not come across others who have been taught to think differently, and are therefore not prepared to accept our point of view. Thus our'standards of conduct seem to be derived almost entirely from our environment. They are, however, not sufficient to decide behaviour alone, for right action involves a knowledge of what is right coupled with the desire to act in accordance with that knowledge, and it is possible to approve of a certain course of action without experiencing the least desire to adopt it. We have therefore still to consider how far this desire is dependent on the environment.

This problem: will be considered in detail at a later stage. Here it is sufficient to note that our desire to control anti-social wishes springs in the main from our desire to win the approval, or at least to avoid the disapproval, of those whose opinion we value for any reason. In adult life, we may ignore the wishes of such persons on occasion because we think that we know the facts of the case better than they do, because we imagine that we are sure not to be found out, or because our desire is so great that we cannot withstand it. During the early years of life the first of these is rarely a cause of disobedience, for a child is continually being made aware of his own weakness and ignorance, and is therefore not likely to question the opinion of his elders. It should therefore be a comparatively easy matter to teach children what is right and what is wrong and to make them want to do right. All that is needed is to win their love and respect, then the rest should follow almost automatically. Yet wc fail again and again. What is the cause ? There is certainly no lack of goodwill on the part of the child, at any rate initially. Those of us who know children intimately know that they will try to do the most unreasonable things in order to please those they love. Here is a case in point. A little girl of five or six was travelling with her grandmother from Cardiff to London.

INTRODUCTION

The grandmother told the child to " sit nice and still," and then got out a paper and began to read it. The little girl evidently tried to obey, but she had been provided with neither picture-book nor toy. Needless to say she began to fidget before long. The grandmother asked her once more to keep quiet ; then turned to her neighbour and said : "I am always telling her to sit still and she does try, but she finds it very hard to remember." It was evident from the attitude of the child that it had never struck her to question the wisdom of her grandmother's demands. She was merely trying to " remember," and possibly rather vexed with herself for forgetting. It must be said for the grandmother that she was wiser than her words ; for when the young fidget began again a few minutes later, she simply cast her neighbour a glance which said : " You see, she has forgotten again," and left the child to amuse herself in her own way until she went to sleep through sheer boredom.

Here there was failure on the part of the child, but not rebellion. The grandmother had succeeded in inculcating the desire to sit still, the little girl was merely finding it difficult to obey. She was not defying her grandmother in any sense of the word.

At other times we have to deal with true rebellion. The child disobeys us deliberately when he cannot possibly have forgotten what we told him to do. We tell him to weed the garden, and he goes off to play with his companions ; we tell him not to climb a certain tree and presently find him ensconced on its topmost branch.

We may take it for granted that the young child who disobeys us in this fashion does not do so because he thinks that he is in the right and that we are in the wrong. He does not as yet question our right to lay down the law. His choice lies between obedience with a good conscience and disobedience with a bad conscience. Yet he may disobey us all the same, and that because the desire for approval is by no means the only desire with which he is equipped. Nature has provided the child with a large number of impulses, or desires to act. There is the impulse to find out about something new, the impulse to try one's powers, and so forth. All these impulses vary in strength, not only in different children, but in the same child at different times, and some chance occurrence may render any one of them so strong that the child is unable to resist it for the time being. The result is disobedience. Under wise guidance such disobedience will, however, only lead to a firm determination not to fail again. It is only when the adult demands too much, when failure succeeds failure, that the child presently decides that

INTRODUCTION it is no good trying to be good, and that it is less trouble to be naughty and take the consequences. But even in such a case the young child does not, as a rule, reject the standards of his environment, for he is still convinced that he is in the wrong. He merely decides that these things are not for him, and thus loses all desire to try to be " good."

The same applies, of course, to the acquisition of knowledge. The child who finds the work consistently too difficult, sooner or later gives up attempting to attend in class, with the result that he does not even learn the little that is within the range of his ability. Under suitable tuition such a child will often discover, to his own surprise and delight, that there are things which interest him and which he can do as well as another. Then lessons become worth while, inattention disappears, and he begins to work at least as hard as his more gifted fellows.^

It follows from aU this that the environment (including therein both the persons and the things with which the child comes into contact) is to a large extent responsible for the ideals and attainments of the child, but that it is not all-powerful. You can take the horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. So, too, you can give the child

1 I have been definitely told by such a child : " I was always supposed to be hopelessly stupid."

lo THE EDUCATION OF BEHAVIOUR

the opportunity to develop right ideals or to acquire necessary knowledge and skill, but you cannot force him to make the eiFort against his will, nor to learn more than his natural ability will allow him to learn. The environment of any child represents as it were the sum total of the possibilities that fate has provided for him. If it includes a wise educator, one who knows how to stimulate right desires in the child and to make him want to control undesirable impulses, his chances of success will be by so much the greater. But in the end it is the child himself who must acquire the knowledge and the ideals which he will need if he is to become an efficient citizen. He must be active, not passive ; an individual who uses his environment to develop his powers and organise the impulses with which he is born, not a mere phonograph that will reproduce faithfully whatever is said into it.

Chapter II

A. Definition of Impulse as an Inborn Tendency to Seek a Certain End in Certain Situations.

B. The Effect of Blocking the Usual Outlets of an Impulse.

C. The Relation of Emotion to Impulse.

D. Definition of Reflex as an Inborn Tendency to React in one Specific Way to one Specific Stimulus.

E. The Relative Survival Value of Reflex and Impulse : —

(i) In a fixed environment, and (2) in a variable environment.

We saw in the last chapter that the student of human behaviour is primarily concerned with the origin and growth of desires. It will, however, be necessary to do some preliminary work before we can understand the problems connected with this subject. We shall, therefore, study impulses and reflexes in this chapter, and return to the psychology of desire at a later stage.

A. The Definition of Impulse

Impulses are many and varied in character. If we think we are in danger, we want to run away ;

if we see something strange, but not too strange, we like to examine it ; if we are faced with an obstacle, we want to surmount it. All these desires are due to impulses, that is to say, to inborn tendencies to act in a certain way under certain conditions. It is characteristic of an impulse that it urges us to some mode of action which seems for the time being absolutely obvious, though we could often give no satisfactory reason for our behaviour. Further, the true impulsive act is always conscious. I may blink and breathe without knowing it, but I do not run away unless I am conscious of danger. It is convenient to use the word perceive for being aware of an object, no matter whether we hear it or see it, touch it or smell it, etc., and to call the thing that has been perceived in this way a percept. An impulse is, therefore, an inborn desire to attain a certain end in the presence of certain kinds of percepts. It should, moreover, be observed that the actual percept is not always necessary, at any rate in the case of human beings. Thus the candidate for an examination may be so afraid of failure that he decides not to sit for it : here it is not an accomplished fact, but the mere thought, " I shall not pass," which is responsible for his action. The actual percepts or ideas that are able to arouse a particular impulse vary greatly from person to person and from day to day, but it is none the less possible to classify them. Thus the impulse to avoid danger is roused by every percept which suggests danger, but it depends on the previous experience and knowledge of the individual whether a particular percept does or does not have that effect on a particular occasion. For instance, the sound of an aeroplane normally causes no more alarm than that of a passing motor ; during the air raids It was, however, impossible to hear it without experiencing at least a momentary pang of fear.

Moreover, the means which are chosen to attain the end of the impulse are also liable to variation. It may be well to run away literally if we wish to escape from danger, but it may be safer to hide, or to tell a lie, or to ask for mercy. So, too, we may examine a strange object ourselves, or we may consult either a book or another individual about it : whichever course we adopt we are satisfying our Impulse to investigate.

In general there are a large number of percepts that may arouse a given impulse and a large number of acts through which any one impulse may seek to attain its end. It will, however, always be found, both in regard to the different percepts and ideas and in regard to the resulting acts, that they beilong to definite classes (e.g. things that are dangerous or methods of escape), and that they owe their connection with the impulse to the fact that they are, for the time being, members of the corresponding class.

We may, therefore, define an impulse as follows : An impulse is an inborn tendency to seek a certain end in certain situations. (It makes us want to avoid danger, to remove obstacles from our path, etc.) // is roused by all percepts and ideas which seem to the individual to suggest one of these situations, and it may seek to attain its end by any of the means which he has learnt to use for that purpose.

B. The Effect of Blocking the Usual Outlets of an Impulse

When the usual outlets of an impulse are blocked, one of two things may happen ; the individual in question may feel that it is hopeless for him to try to get what he wants, or he may think he can overcome the obstacle. In the first case the nervous energy that has been set free by the percept tends to be driven into some unhealthy channel, such as worrying, fussing or self-pity, all of which use up energy without producing results of any value. In the second case it is expended in attempts to attain the end of the impulse by removing the obstacle. It must not, of course, be imagined that the choice of one or other of these alternatives necessarily involves deliberation. Often circumstances make it obvious whether it is or is not worth while to assert oneself : a child of four will fight another child of his own age who tries to spoil his game, but he will merely cry helplessly if a boy of twelve chooses to bully him. If there is actual danger to life and little chance of escape the individual will, however, often fight, even though he knows that his case is desperate. Thus the criminal who is caught red-handed will at times aggravate his ofFence by trying to kill his captors. The weapons we use in the fight necessarily depend on the obstacle we have to overcome. Sometimes mere physical strength is all that is required : we fight with the fist, the spear, or some more modern weapon. But these are often insufllicient by themselves ; they may even be useless. Suppose, for instance, that I want to solve some mystery and find I cannot do it. My curiosity may be too strong to leave me in peace, my pride may be involved as well, so that I am determined not to be beaten. In such a case I begin to cudgel my brains. I bring all my knowledge and all my power of synthesis and analysis to bear upon my problem. I work at it until I either solve the mystery or am forced to give it up as a task beyond my powers. It is worth while to notice the metaphors we use in this connection. "To be beaten," and "to cudgel," and to be "forced" to do a thing are evidently all taken from the act of fighting. And this is true to life ; the process does feel like a fight whenever we are finding it difficult to solve a problem, and most of us have reason to know that defeat in such a case may mean a loss of self-respect which is quite out of proportion to the importance of the task in which we have failed.

We may, then, state generally that an obstacle to the free functioning of any impulse normally produces an impulse to overcome that obstacle. It is only when success appears to be out of the question that the individual tends to give way without a struggle. As for the weapons we use, they naturally vary with the needs of the case and with the means at our disposal. At different times we may have recourse to our fists, or to our powers of verbal expression, to an elaborate engine of war, or to a fine scientific instrument, and our use of any of these may be guided by a highly trained or by an absolutely untrained mind.

C. The Relation of Emotion to Impulse

So far we have discussed impulse as though it only involved the percept that sets it in motion and the act by which it seeks to attain its end. A moment's consideration will show that this is not true to life. Take the case of a person who is running away from a mad bull. He is obviously actuated by the desire to avoid danger, and at first, while he is running at the top of his speed, he is probably aware of little but the bull behind him and the gate at the end of the field. But suppose that the gate proves insurmountable, or that his strength fails him before he is able to reach it. Then his original form of reaction, that of running away, is checked, and he is likely to experience an acute attack of fear, unless an alternative form of , activity happens to present itself almost immediately. Similarly, the person who is overcoming his opponent in a fight is not likely to experience much anger, whereas the one who is being worsted in the conflict, and who is therefore not able to satisfy his impulse to assert himself, will probably feel angry both during and after the event. ' The reader will easily collect other examples to the same effect. We are thus led to conclude that an emotion tends to be ■produced when more energy is set free by the percept than is used up in action.

It is a matter of common knowledge that each of the well-known emotions is a characteristic phenomenon which only occurs in connection with one particular impulse. The question thus arises whether all impulses are liable to be accompanied by specific feeling tones. The first thing to observe in this connection is that popular usage has at any rate not provided them all with names for their feeling tones. We are, for instance, endowed with an impulse to construct. It appears very early, in the young child's love of making and building things, and seems to persist through life if too much energy is not absorbed in the mere struggle for existence. We see signs of it in every well-kept suburb garden, in the make-shifts that some of us like to invent for our own use, and in the pleasure that others take in designing or making their own clothes. The impulse to construct is therefore a fairly strong and a well-established impulse ; yet popular usage provides no special name for any feeling tone connected with it. We just say that we enjoy making things, and do not difFerentiate the special form of enjoyment any further.

If there is, none the less, a special feeling tone, we should become aware of it when we try to recall our state of mind during the process of constructing immediately after the impulsive activity has come to an end. If we do this, we shall, I think, find that the pleasure we take in "making for the sake of making" has a special flavour about it which differentiates it from all other pleasures. Often, no doubt, the actual pleasure we experience is mixed with others, such as that derived from admiration, but at times {e.g. when engaged in certain hobbies) it is difficult to account for our occupation in terms of any impulse other than the impulse to construct. Any one who has worked under such conditions knows that the pleasure we experience on these occasions is, if anything, increased by the absence of ulterior motives. It is a characteristic experience, which belongs to the same genus as the emotions, and it has only not been diiFerentiated from other forms of enjoyment because it is so much less intense than anger or fear. It seems probable that other impulses, such as the impulse to collect, are also accompanied by characteristic feeling tones when more energy is being set free than can be used in action, and that these, too, have not risen to the dignity of a special name because they are experienced in so slight a degree that they do not attract the attention of the man in the street.

D. Definition of Reflex

We saw above that neither the percepts which rouse an impulse nor the acts by which it seeks to attain its end are fixed at birth. If we find that a certain percept is not followed by pain, we no longer seek to avoid it ; if we fail to attain the end of an impulse by one form of activity, we are able to try another on the next occasion.

We have now to turn our attention to a form of activity which is also inborn, but which differs from the impulse in that it is fixed in every detail at birth, and is therefore either not at all or only indirectly under our control. We can make the heart beat more quickly by running, but we cannot change its rate by an act of will. We can hold our breath for a while, but the strain soon becomes too great for us. No amount of practice will prevent our starting at an unexpected noise or blinking when the wind blows dust into our eyes. And there are countless movements going on within us of which we do not even become aware unless we happen to take up the study of physiology.

All these forms of reaction may be classed together for our purpose. Different as they are in some respects, they all have the one point in common, that they are fixed more or less completely at birth, and consequently either predetermined in every respect or only educable within comparatively narrow limits. When a form of behaviour is fixed in every respect it is usually called a "reflex." A reflex may therefore he defined as an inborn tendency to react in one specific way to one specific stimulus or set of stimuli.