Mind in the making; a study in mental development

Preface

The most significant tendency in educational literature to-day is the substitution of the individual for the course of study as the basis of constructive pedagogy. The rapid growth of American cities has centred attention upon the machinery of school systems, while the great increase in college attendance and the influence of the methods of German universities have too completely submerged the individual. Educators have lately been taking an inventory and have discovered racial and individual assets which had to a great extent been overlooked. Some of these formative influences are positive forces which should be directed into lines advantageous to the individual and to society; others, which are negative and tend to mental arrest, should, so far as possible, be curbed and repressed. An environment which is good in one instance may be inert in another. To foster growth it must meet individual needs, and these can be learned only by studying the native tendencies and peculiar dispositions of pupil and student. This book is a plea for the personal element in education, and for the extension of the experimental method.

Some of the chapters have appeared in whole or in

Vlll PREFACE

part in the Pedagogical Seminary, American Journal of Psychology, American Physical Education Review, Psychological Bulletin, Bulletin of the Washington University Association, Journal of Pedagogy, Pojmlar Science Monthly, and Studies in Philosophy and Psychology (Garman Commemorative Volume), The author desires to thank the editors and publishers of these several publications for permission to make this use of the material.

Edgar James Swift.

Washington University, Saint Louis, Mo., February, 1908.

Contents

JAPTER PAGE

y^ I. Standards of Human Power .... 3

II. Criminal Tendencies of Boys: Their Cause

Chapter I

Our New England forefathers seem to have been lavishly supplied with intuitions concerning the signs of the various virtues and to have delighted in exhibiting specimens before the young, both as objects of emulation and solemn examples. But it is impossible to help being amused by their naive exposure of the stage machinery, and one cannot but wonder whether the school-boys themselves did not smile, since even Puritan boys may have had a tinge of frivoli^, when they read in picturesque verse the maxims designed to kindle their zeal for learning/ We do not know how effective these amiable lures to perfection were, but probably the boy who is at chronic war with his book was quite as much of a problem then as now. Nothing to-day causes more or worse worries. Parents pine over his future, and teachers fall into despair in their perplexity about what to do with him.

' " The boy that is good Does mind his book well; And if he can't read Will strive for to spell.

" His school he does love;

And when he is there

For play and for toys

No time can he spare."

From the Youth's Instructor in the English Tongue, or the Art of Spelling

Improved, quoted by Clifton Johnson in his Old-time Schools and School-

Books, p. 61.

It would seem as though, under the stress of this parental misery and pedagogic flurry, the "dull" boy would have been a subject studied to exhaustion; yet, quite inconsistently, while conceding failure to get results, he it is about whom teachers speak with indisputable assurance. The solution of the dullard favorably received by educators is his segregation from his seemingly more intelligent classmates, and this is the sum of wisdom in his behalf. The remedy is a lame one, since the standards for the classification of dull boys are, at present, so indefinite.

Recent medical science has shown that dulness may be caused by a variety of pathological conditions far removed in their location from the immediate centre of intelligence, and it is the imperative duty of educators to locate these causes and, when possible, to remove them, instead of shirking the responsibility by grouping all backward children together. The source of some of the reflex irritations that derange cerebral processes and blunt mental acuity will be discussed later. There is, however, another class of "backwards" so clearly defined in the biographies of those whose subsequent careers revealed distinguishing ability that it is permissible to ask why educational procedure has been so little influenced by knowledge of the seeming stupidity in school-days of these eminent men and women. The subject is certainly worth investigating, and it was in the hope of getting some new points of view that the childhood days of the men and women referred to in this chapter were studied.

Linnseus's gymnasium director would have made a cobbler of him, telling* his father that he was unfit for a

* Famous Men of Science, by Sarah K. Bolton.

learned profession. Yet all this time the boy was lost in the undergrowth of thoughts which in their maturity were to revolutionize the science of botany. When he went up to the university, the director gave him this certificate: "Youth at school may be compared to shrubs in a garden, which will sometimes, though rarely, elude all the care of the gardener, but if transplanted into a different soil may become fruitful trees. With this view, therefore, and no other, the bearer is sent to the university, where it is possible that he may meet with a climate propitious to his progress." And the director's only claim to fame is that he wrote this note.

"During my whole life," says Charles Darwin in his autobiography, "I have been singularly incapable of mastering any language. . . . When I left the school I was for my age neither high nor low, and I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. To my deep mortification my father once said to me, 'You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.' " ^ Dr. Butler, the head master, once rebuked him for wasting his time on such subjects as chemistry, but no one would have heard of the Doctor had not Darwin rescued him from the dark waters of oblivion by pulling him into his autobiography.

Harriet Martineau's parents considered her mind dull and unobservant and unwieldy.^ Though a born musician, "never known to sing out of tune," she could do nothing in the presence of her irritable master, Mr.

' Life and Letters, pp. 29-30.

2 Autobiography, edited by Maria Weston Chapman, 1877, Vol. I, p. 27.

Beckwith. " Now and then he complimented my ear," she tells us, " but he oftener told me that I had no more mind than the music-book, . . . and that it was no manner of use trying to teach me anything. All this time, if the room door happened to be open without my observing it when I was singing Handel by myself, my mother would be found dropping tears over her work, and I used myself, as I may now own, to feel fairly transported." ^

"I was the first of my family," she continues, "who failed in the matter of hand-writing; and why I did re- •nains unexplained. I am sure I tried hard; but I wrote a vulgar, cramped, untidy scrawl till I was past twenty; — till authorship made me forget manner in matter and gave freedom to my hand. ... It was a terrible penance to me to write letters home from Bristol, and the day of the week when it was to be done was very like the Beckwith music-lesson days. If anyone had told me then how many reams of paper I should cover in the course of my life, life would have seemed a sort of purgatory to me." ^

Miss Martineau speaks interestingly of a visit to some cousins when she was about sixteen years old. "I still think," she says, "that I never met with a family to compare with theirs for power of acquisition, or effective use of knowledge. They would learn a new language at odd minutes ; get through a tough philosophical book by taking turns in the court for air; write down an entire lecture or sermon, without missing a sentence; get round the piano after a concert, and play and sing every new piece that had been performed. Ability like this

1 hoc. cit.. Vol. I, p. 42.

2 Loc. cit., Vol. I, p. 69.

was a novel spectacle to me; and it gave me the pure pleasure of unmixed admiration; for I was certainly not conscious of any ability whatever at that time." ^ Yet these cousins are known to-day only from a page in the autobiography of the timid, backward girl, who sat unnoticed in the drawing-room shadows made gloomier by contrast with the brilliancy of their precocious minds.

Napoleon Bonaparte does not seem to have distinguished himself in any of his studies at the military school in Paris, unless, perhaps, in mathematics. In the final examination for graduation he stood forty-second in his class.^ Who were the forty-one above, him ? *' Neither he nor his sister Eliza, the two strong natures of the family, could ever spell any language with accuracy and ease, or speak and write with rhetorical elegance." ^ Napoleon's laxity in matters of military discipline after he joined the artillery is astonishing in view of his later success, and in 1789 he fully decided to withdraw from the service.*

William H. Seward's teacher once reported to his father that he was too stupid to learn.^ Like his classmates, Seward used to while away the tedium of Dr. Wayland's Homer recitations by reading novels,

Patrick Henry "was too idle to gain any solid advantage from the opportunities which were thrown in his way. He was passionately addicted to the sports of the field, and could not support the confinement and toil which education required. Hence, instead of system or any semblance of regularity in his studies, his

> hoc. cit.. Vol. I, p. 71.

2 Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, by William M. Sloane, 1896, Vol. I, p. 33.

3 Loc. cit., Vol. I, p. 36. < Loc. cit.. Vol. I, p. 48.

6 Autobiography, 1877, p. 22.

efforts were always desultory, and became more and more rare until at length, when the hour of his school exercises arrived, Patrick was scarcely ever to be found." ^ Instead, he went fishing and hunting for days and weeks at a time. His biographer, Wirt, could not learn " that he gave in his youth any evidence of that precocity which sometimes distinguishes uncommon genius. His companions recollect no instance of premature wit, no striking sentiment, no flash of fancy, no remarkable beauty or strength of expression; and no indication, however slight, either of that impassioned love of liberty, or of that adventurous daring and intrepidity, which marked so strongly his future character. So far was he, indeed, from exhibiting any one prognostic of this greatness, that every omen foretold a life, at best of mediocrity, if not of insignificance. His person is represented as having been coarse, his manners uncommonly awkward, his dress slovenly, his conversation very plain, his aversion to study invincible, and his faculties almost entirely benumbed by indolence. No persuasion could bring him either to read or to work. On the contrary, he ran wild in the forest, like one of the aborigines of the country, and divided his life between the dissipation and uproar of the chase and the languor of inaction." ^

Started in business as a merchant by his father, his indolence brought speedy failure. Married at eighteen without any means of support, his father and father-inlaw came to his aid with a little farm, the work of which he so hated that relief soon came in failure. Another attempt at business, followed by bankruptcy, and he de-

• Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, by William Wirt, 1852.

^ Ibid., Vol. I, p. 24.

termined, as a last hope, to try law. Yet neither he nor his friends seem to have had any confidence in his success. But the rest of his hfe is the country's history.

Sir Isaac Newton has said of himself that at twelve he "was extremely inattentive to his studies and stood very low in the school." ^ At that time his position was last in the next to the lowest form. So little ability did he show that at fifteen he was taken out of school and set at work upon the farm. Later, in one of his university examinations in Euclid, he made so poor a showing as to be reproved by the examiner.^ In this instance, however, his failure seems to have been due to his unwillingness to be restricted by "approved" methods of demonstration.

John Dalton was not quick, intellectually.^ Indeed, there was nothing in his work to indicate any unusual ability.

Samuel Johnson was indolent. "My master," he once said,^ "v/hipt me very hard. Without that, sir, I should have done nothing."

"Swift's college course was entirely without brilliancy or promise; in his last term examination he failed in two out of the three subjects," ^ and he was refused his degree because of "dulness and insufficiency." He was finally allowed to take it only by "special favor." ®

When a boy in school, Wordsworth ' made but little

* David Brewster's Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, Vol. I, pp. 7 and 14.

2 King's Biographical Sketch of Sir Isaac Newton, p. 21. 5 John Dalton, by Sir Henry E. Roscoe, p. 17.

* Boswell's Life of Johnson, Vol. I, p. 53.

5 The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, with a Biographical Introduction, by W. E. H. Lecky, 1897, Vol. I. p. xiv.

* Leslie Stephen's Jonathan Swift {English Men of Letters), p. 5.

' William Wordsworth, the Story of his Life, by James Middleton Sutherland, London, 1887.

progress, spending his time chiefly in reading Gulliver's Travels, Don Quixote, The Tale of a Tub, Fielding's Works, Gil Bias and other similar books. As late as seventeen years of age he was wholly incapable of continued application to prescribed work/ His university career grievously disappointed his friends, and up to about twenty-five years of age he shifted aimlessly from one thing to another, causing his friends endless anxiety because of his seeming inability to settle down to any regular work. "In truth he was a strange and wayward wight." ^

Wordsworth himself has left on record how little pleasure he found in the lecturer's room

All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand, With loyal students faithful to their books, Half-and-half idlers, hardy recusants. And honest dunces.^

Called upon to choose his companions from among the indolent or industrious, he chose the former, and together they talked

Unprofitable talk at morning hours;

Drifted about along the streets and walks,

Read lazily in trivial books, went forth

To gallop through the country in blind zeal

Of senseless horsemanship, or on the breast

Of Cam sailed boisterously, and let the stars

Come forth, perhaps without one quiet thought.

It is decidedly significant, in view of Wordsworth's attitude toward his studies, that from the beginning to the end of his school career not one of his teachers made the slightest impression upon him. Whether this was altogether his fault is a very pertinent question.

' Emile Legouis's The Early Life of William Wordsworth, p. 71.

2 From Dorothy Wordsworth's Letter, quoted in Knight's Life of Wordsworth, Vol. I, p. 83.

3 Prelude, Complete Poetical Works.

STANDARDS OF HUMAN POWER U

Richard Brinsley Sheridan was indolent in school and ranked correspondingly low. Dr. Parr, his language teacher at Harrow, says that there was little in his boyhood worth communicating; "he was inferior to many of his school fellows in the ordinary business of a school, and I do not remember any one instance in which he distinguished himself in Latin or Greek composition, either in prose or verse." . . . He was "not only slovenly in construing, but unusually defective in his Greek grammar." ^ Dr. Parr's Greek and Latin prose was doubtless admirable, but he is known only ag the teacher under whom Sheridan could not succeed. To his teachers at Harrow he was remarkable in nothing but his idleness and winning manners.

Robert Fulton ^ was a dullard because his mind was filled with thoughts about other things than his studies; but his teachers could not understand this, and so the birch rod became a frequent persuader.

Alexander von Humboldt said of himself "that in the first years of his childhood his tutors were doubtful whether even ordinary powers of intelligence would ever be developed in him, and that it was only in later boyhood that he began to show any evidence of mental vigor." ^ "Until I reached the age of sixteen," he says,* "I showed little inclination for scientific pursuits. I was of a restless disposition, and wished to be a soldier. This choice was displeasing to my family, who were desirous that I should devote myself to the study of finance, so that I had no opportunity of attending a course of botany or chemistry; I am self-taught in almost all

' Memoirs, by Thomas Moore, Vol. I, p. 12.

2 The Life of Robert Fulton, by Thomas W. Knox, 1886.

3 Karl Bruhns's Life of Alexander von Humboldt, Vol. I, p. 31.

the sciences with which I am now so occupied, and I acquired them comparatively late in hfe." At nineteen years of age he had never heard of botany. It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of a youth of his own age who had just pubhshed a Flora of Berlin. "His gentle and amiable character stimulated the interest I felt in his pursuits. ... I became passionately devoted to botany and took special interest in the study of cryptogamia." Meanwhile he seems not to have made much progress in Greek, since at this same age, nineteen, he wrote to his friend Wegener that he "was still struggling with prophets and otters in the first declension." The preface to a letter in Greek to his friend, written shortly after, runs, "I must freely confess that I fear you will not understand a syllable of all that I have written, and then I shall have to say with Sancho Panza: 'Your worship does not understand me? No matter. God, who knows all things, understands me.' " ' Heine made a poor showing at school. His mind was too keen and alert for him to excel in the imitative class work. The dates in Roman history were an unceasing annoyance, though, as he tells us, he afterward came to appreciate their value because he has since known people with "nothing in their heads but a date or two, by the help of which they have found the right houses in Berlin and become full professors;"^ but "reckoning was worse yet," while as to Greek, "the monks of the Middle Ages were not so far wrong when they declared that it was an invention of the devil. God knows what misery I suffered with it." He hated French metres and could not write their verses, so his teacher vowed he had

' Heine's Life, Told in His Own Words, New York. 1S93, p. 11.

no soul for poetry and called him a barbarian from the German woods. He idled away his time at Bonn and was "horribly bored" by the "odious, stiff, cut-anddried tone" of Gottingen University. Nothing pleased him. The professors were more leathery than at Bonn, so he busied himself a good deal with students' duels. " It amuses me," he says, " for want of something better; and it is at least better than the wet rags of teachers, young and old, of our Georgia Augusta."

The hatred of Joseph Banks, the English naturalist, for the monotony of school routine was so marked as to bring complaint from his teachers. Yet it was not dislike for work; he simply could not travel the road by which alone the educational doctors would permit him to reach the golden gate. One day when he came out of the water in which he had been bathing, he found his companions gone and, after dressing, he walked slowly home along a meadow-path fringed on either side with fragrant flowers. Life had never shown such charms, and he exclaimed, "How beautiful! Would it not be far more reasonable to make me learn the nature of these plants than the Greek and Latin I am confined to?"^

In her early days George Eliot was not precocious. It was with some difficulty that she learned to read, though her brother Isaac, with pardonable pride, thought that this was because she enjoyed playing so much more than studying.^ "Hers was a large, slowgrowing nature," said her husband, "and I think it is, at any rate, certain that there was nothing of the infant phenomenon about her."

' The Works of Henry Lord Brougham and Vaux, Vol. I, p. 337. 2 George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals, edited by J. W. Cross, Vol. I. p. 11.

Sir Walter Scott* never took very kindly to the school pabulum but, instead, read great quantities of poetry and fiction. " Though often negligent of my own task," he says, "I was always ready to assist my friends; and hence I had a little party of staunch partisans and adherents, stout of hand and heart, though somewhat dull of head — the very tools for raising a hero to eminence." ^ In reading of Scott's boyhood one is continually impressed by the evidence that he was always brilliant in his own way but mediocre when tested by school criteria.

John Hunter, the celebrated anatomist and surgeon, is reported by one writer to have been unable to read or write at seventeen years of age, so great was his hatred for school; but he enjoyed keenly all out of door sports. He was called indolent and he himself tells why. "When I was a boy I wanted to know about the clouds and the grasses, and why the leaves changed color in the autumn; I watched the ants, bees, birds, tadpoles and caddis worms; I pestered people with questions about what nobody knew or cared anything."^ In his unappreciated condition of learned ignorance he just missed becoming a cabinet-maker through the fortunate failure in business of his brother-in-law, in whose carpenter shop he was working.

Charles Lyell states * that, when a boy, he had an excessive aversion to work unless forced to it.

A book, with colored plates, by Gesner, the Swiss naturalist, seems to have been the touchstone which united in Cuvier the disconnected powers of which he himself

1 Sir Walter Scott, the Story of his Life, by R. Shelton Mackenzie.

' Autobiography in J. G. Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, p. 26.

' Two Great Scotsmen, the Brothers William and John Hunter, by George R. Mather, Glasgow, 1893, p. 120.

* Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, edited by his sister-inlaw, Mrs. Lyell, London, 1881.

was, at best, but dimly conscious, and made them active. The works of Buffon did the rest.^

HegeP never distinguished himself in the lower schools, and on leaving the university of Tiibingen his certificate stated that he was of middling industry and knowledge, but especially deficient in philosophy.

Dr. Cardew, in whose school Sir Humphrey Davy was placed at fourteen years of age, says ^ that he did not at that time observe any extraordinary ability in young Davy nor any special talent for those scientific pursuits in which he afterward became so eminent.* He kept the good Mr. Tonkin in constant terror by explosions in the attic where he was playing with chemicals. "This boy Humphrey is incorrigible," cried the old gentleman one day; "was there ever so idle a dog?"^ At the grammar school he "had the reputation of being an idle boy, with a gift for making verses, but with no aptitude for studies of a. graver sort." ^ Indeed, at no time during his boyhood does he seem to have given any indication of superior talent or unusual quickness.^

At the Aberdeen Grammar School, Byron reached the head of his class, "for it was the custom there to invert the proper order of the classes at the beginning of the lesson, so that the most ignorant were for the moment placed first; and more than once the master said,^ bantering him, 'Now, George, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot.' " At Trinity College, Cambridge,

' Memoirs of Cuvier, by Mrs. R. Lee, New York. 2 William Wallace, in Encyclopwdia Britannica.

' Memoirs of the Life of Sir Hmnphrey Davy, by his Brotlier, John Davy, London, 1836, Vol. I, p. 20.

< Humphrey Davy, by T. E. Thorpe, p. 12.

* Kings of the Rod, Rifle and Gun, by Thormanby, 1901, VoL I, p. 300. 6 Lac. cit., p. 299.

' The Works of Henry Lord Brougham and Vaux, 1873, VoL I, p. 108.

* The Life of Lord Byron, by Roden NoeL London, 1890, p. 33.

"he was never anything but a poor scholar, bestowing little care on the studies of the place." ^

It is interesting to learn that so clever a writer as Huxley "detested the trouble of writing, and would take no pains with it"^ till long past twenty years of age. "My regular school training," he testifies, "was of the briefest; perhaps fortunately, for though my way of life has made me acquainted with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average lads, with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil as any others; but the people who were set over us cared about as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were baby farmers." '

In the Military Academy of Duke Karl Eugene, Schiller, then a lad of sixteen, did not show any proficiency in philosophy, rhetoric, or law. Greek seems to have been the only study in which he excelled. In one of his school reports we find that "Schiller has abundance of good-will, and shows great desire to learn; his negligence and lack of alertness, however, call for repeated reproof. He is sensible of his faults, and strives to correct them."^ Being behind in the studies in which he was registered, Schiller decided, shortly after this, to change his course and take up medicine. When the time for graduation came, his thesis on The Influence of the Body upon the Mind was not satisfactory and he was not allowed to graduate that year.

* Life and Letters, Vol. I, p. 22. ' Loc. cit., p. 5.

« The Life of Schiller, by Heinrich Duntzer, translated by Percy E. Pinkerton, London. 1883, pp. 41. 42, 45.

James Russell Lowell was reprimanded, at first privately and then publicly, in his sophomore year, "for general negligence in themes, forensics and recitations."^ His relatives grieved at his " indolence, " and on the 25th day of June, 1838, the college faculty voted that he be suspended "on account of continued neglect of his college duties." During this period of rustication he was required to review Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding and study Mackintosh's Review of Ethical Philosophy with a tutor, reciting twice a day.^

Oliver Goldsmith's teacher, in his early childhood, thought him one of the dullest boys that she had ever tried to teach. She said that he was "impenetrably stupid"; she was afraid that nothing could be done with him.^ Later in his school course he made no unusual progress and was considered careless and indolent. His indolence and dislike for his university tutor, who called him ignorant and stupid before his classmates, combined to make him hate mathematics, science and philosophy. "A lad," he says, "whose passions are not strong enough in youth to mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his inclinations, have chalked out, by four or five years' perseverance will probably obtain every advantage and honor his college can bestow. I would compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the tranquillity of dispassionate prudence, to liquors that never ferment, and, consequently, continue always muddy."*

His family felt keenly his failure to take a prominent

^ James Russell Lowell, a Biography, by Horace Elisha Scudder, 1901, Vol. I, p. 30.

« Loc. ciL, Vol. I, p. 47.

' Jrvlng's Life of Goldsmith, p. 19.

place in the university. "The first opportunity my father had of finding his expectations disappointed," he writes, "was in the very middhng figure I made at the university: he had flattered himself that he should soon see me rising into the foremost rank in literary reputation, but was mortified to find me utterly unnoticed and unknown. His disappointment might have been partly ascribed to his having overrated my talents and partly to my dislike of mathematical reasoning, at a time when my imagination and memory, yet unsatisfied, were more eager after new objects, than desirous of reasoning upon those I knew. This, however, did not please my tutors, who observed, indeed, that I was a little dull, but at the same time allowed that I seemed to be very good natured, and had no harm in me." *

Priestley's "whole education was exceedingly imperfect, and excepting in Hebrew and in Greek he never afterwards improved it by any systematic course of study. . . . 'When I began my experiments,' he tells us, 'I knew very little of chemistry, and had, in a manner, no idea of the subject before I attended a course of lectures at an academy where I taught.' " ^