Suggestions of modern science concerning education

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SUGGESTIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE CONCERNING EDUCATION

Foreword

The Joint Committee on Education was formed to arouse an intelligent interest in public schools. Its work was threefold : to secure newspaper publicity for educational topics, to encourage school visiting based on recent school surveys and a study of experimental schools, and to seek what new light on the subject might be obtained from modern science.

Some mothers whose daily care of little children during the years when they were acquiring knowledge and developing their powers naturally, instinctively, were convinced that school hampered rather than helped them. They argued — if "sensation tends toward motion," why, during the years when life is largely sensation, do we screw our children into desks five hours a day; if variety of type is desirable, why strive for uniformity; if surplus energy is necessary to further evolution, why not conserve that wonderful superabundant vitality of childhood.^ Might not biology, psychology, psyvi FOREWORD

chopathology, sociology offer suggestions concerning a school program which should secure physical, mental and moral health, and the development of individual initiative and creative power ?

The committee feel in duty bound to share with all parents and teachers the remarkable series of papers written in response to their

need.

E. S. D.

For the Committee,

Contents

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The Biology of Children in Relation to Education Herbert S. Jennings 1

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CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 109 THE LIFE-CHART

To-day we study mental activity and behavior, i.e., the topic of psychology, as the function and activity of the unified organism, just as we view physiology as the science studying the behavior and function of the various organs and parts. The study of the total behavior of the individual and its integration as it hangs together as part of a life-history of a personality in distinction from the life-history of a single organ, that is our great interest in psychology and psychopathology. No words of mine can give you a more graphic picture of the concreteness of what counts than the life-chart — a record, on the one hand, of the condition and of the performance of the various bodily functions and special organs, and of the role each of these plays in shaping the biography or life of the person ; and, on the other hand, the various experiences expressing the lines of habit-and-resource formation constituting the accumulated mass of habits, memories, and the reactive resources of the individual. The result of this integration is not an abstract mind but a living body in action, a unified personality, an individual with capacity for reflexes and instincts and habits and memories and imaginative reactive resources.

A life can be presented graphically as a record of the special organs (arbitrarily represented in the form of a weight curve of the principal parts), and at the same time as a record of total behavior. The interrelation of the parts and the whole, as I said, constitutes a system of integration. The plan depicts clearly the welding of the parts into an organism, and the interrelation of the organism as a whole with the events and the facts of the outside world, in the form of reactions of the personality or individual, constituting the sum total of the life-history of the parts or special functions as well as of the whole. Thus we can appreciate the fact that the respiration has to serve properly the total need of oxygen and the elimination of carbon dioxid, but the same combination also has to serve the functions of voice and language production as integrated by the nervous system ; and this has to blend with even the larger needs and aims of the total organism, since most of our thought is couched in language, forming an important part of those habits and trends which we specify as "the mental and moral life" and its resources. Thus we see in thought and speech an integration of an organ simultaneously serving simple physiological demands and also serving such a function as the one I am at present engaged in, in a full-fledged observable mental activity.

The great advantage of this simplification, of viewing Tnind primarily as the adaptive and creative activity of a biological organism in terms of a biography and record, is that it gives us a practical way of putting forth our facts and problems — whether we try to educate a person or whether we apply mental orthopedics to the correction of behavior, whether it be in connection with any special organ or any special function, or activities involving the whole personality. Moreover, it gives us a valuable sense of proportion between what counts in the life and what is purely incidental ; the overt and demonstrable life brought out by overt action and expression, and the mere thoughts ; the performance rather than the mere knowledge, the result rather than the mere step to it.

THE BIOLOGICAL CONCEPTION OF MAN

Besides the practical emphasis, the simplified scheme shows us human life with its material and spiritual aspects as a consistent whole. We are no longer worried and confused by the apparent chasm between nature and the world of human life and its ambitions, which seems to have staggered even Huxley so that it drove him into the transitory phase of agnosticism and doubt as to the possibility of harmonizing the laws of nature and of life with the great human world of ambitions and of dreams of perfection and ideals, the laws of the mores, or ethics, and religion. As we said before, a complex and yet simple organization of natural and creative forces into actual living individuals is what we have to deal with — an organization starting from lowly origins but reaching as high as its support will carry ; the product of a long process of growth and function, an unfolding of instincts and their application and transformation, a readiness for and attraction to many experiences and performances, an evolution through a wealth of reactions and capacities gradually wrought into habits and resources, rising to full-fledged individual and social life with its heights of appreciative and creative attainment. There is but one way to learn to know such an organism and that is through its life-history, the record of past and present reactions, from which we can foretell the range of capacities of the future.

LANGUAGE AS A GREAT STEP OF PROGRESS AND SOURCE OF SERIOUS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

In comparing the simpler biological organisms and man in respect to growth and education, we are at once struck by a contrast which is very significant and which entails the great preeminence of man in the scale of evolution but also a great risk in the sphere of health. The development of language and its symbols, the development of the silent language, and language memory, and imagination in terms of language, gives man at once the great privilege and the great task of maintaining the proper balance, so much more difficult than where life consists more conspicuously of overt and direct activity, as in animals.

The ability to store knowledge in terms of word-memories and principles, in terms of written and transmitted doctrine, creates the human atmosphere and brings with it the temptation to change the system of education from that of training to one of teaching and instructing. So great is this temptation that the traditional scheme of education has limited itself almost exclusively to this one I

• type of human attainment, and indeed there are many who would not Hke to see the school do anything else; and all this in the face of the fact that our very nature is a product of the growth and nurture of an organism in which impulse, instinct and differential activity and performance make up what counts in the biography or life-record. Activity is the natural setting and very nature of all mental growth. As has been said, *'The laws of mental health and of character require the completion of thought or feeling by expression in action." Mere feeling and thought and fancy which are not brought to the test of action, to their fulfilment in action, tend to become one of the danger points of human nature.^

Even in the prebiological period of human thought as among the Greeks, the school aimed at the development of the entire organism and the development of all-round fitness for adult life. Later the medieval tendency to treat an abstract mind as an entity by itself, and the sectarian tendency to keep important aspects of life out of the curriculum, tended to focus attention upon but one feature of the personality. When we look at biographies, the schooling clearly gives the main setting to a long series of years. Even if the ideal of the scheme of education aimed mainly at knowledge and at the acquisition of the arts of reading and writing and arithmetic and a certain amount of historical, linguistic and natural history information, the period of school-life is the time during which the habits acquired in earlier childhood become more definitely shaped. Between home, social environment and school, the young citizen spends six, eight and more years to attain the ideal of education of his or her generation. The traditional school aims at conveying systematized knowledge, the results of centuries of human evolution, — the paper money of experience, a set of capacities which a democracy must be able to expect of its citizens, and which life at large would supply only very unsystematically. For this purpose the school practically takes possession of the child and the adolescent, and it determines the principal features of that period of life. Need we wonder that it is more and more concerning itself with a broader conception of education than that of mere ''mental training"?

THE MODERN TESTS OF A SCHOOL SYSTEM

The questions we might ask about a school system are : Can the result be called well rounded, making for preparedness for an efficient and wholesome thirty or forty or more years of adult life ? Does the product of such training know what he or she is fit for ; what he or she wants and will try to do as his or her share of the work of sustenance and productiveness? Is the school training in harmony with our best knowledge of the integrated human organism and personality : Does it satisfy the principle that life ultimately be judged in terms of a biography of objective achievement and that knowledge is merely an incidental asset and telling only when it shows in effective or expressive activity? Does it succeed in forging the natural assets into power ? And finally, what share can any type of school have in favoring or damaging the individual chances for mental and moral health and efficiency ?

Paton, in his Psychiatry (pp. 198-199), attributes "the enormous increase of nervous and mental diseases, one of the most serious menaces to the public welfare," to the attempt to educate numbers of individuals whose central nervous systems are functionally unable to withstand the strain imposed upon them. He would limit the advantages and risks of education in the public schools to those who have sound bodies and sound minds. "To render it possible for an individual who is physically and mentally unfit for the stress associated with the effort to undertake the acquirement of what is termed a liberal education should be regarded as an offense against the public health and morality no less culpable than if one were to deliberately place him in an environment where he is exposed to an infectious disease. What particular form of education is best adapted to the average child .^^ How far should the negro be carried in his schooling .^^ Of what degree of mental activity is woman capable without impairing her physical vigor ? These are not questions that can be solved by mere amateurs, but involve problems calling for the earnest consideration of those who are at least familiar with the methods of investigating the difficulties connected with the functional activity of the central nervous system."

Here are questions which we may not expect to answer to-night, unless we should care to risk becoming classified with the amateurs. But they open our eyes to the necessity of studying the problem as far as facts are available and to some ways of using especially what methods we have acquired through the biological conception of man.

STUDIES IN MENTAL HYGIENE

There are two ways of being interested in health ; the common one is that of making a list and plan of all the things that are good and desirable in life and giving the best possible description of utopia and of perfection with recommendations as to how to get there. The way of the worker in modern hygiene is that of making a survey of the actual activities and conditions, and then of taking up definite points of difiiculty, tracing them to an understanding in terms of causes and effects and to factors on which fruitful experimental analytical and constructive work can be done. The first type leads mainly to moralizing ; the second type leads to conscientious and impartial study and to constructive experimentation. It is one thing to study the problem of mental and moral health in the abstract and another to take up the definite points at which the human being is apt to fail and to trace them specifically to factors which can receive consideration in experimental creative work and in a constructive school program.

To get help from the field of the abnormalities and difiiculties of children and of methods of teaching, naturally requires familiarity with the well-studied overt major and minor mental disorders and the methods of getting at their understanding — and also with the aims and methods of pedagogy. These are quite obviously matters which can be acquired only by practical work and collaboration in the fields concerned. What I can survey here is merely a sketch of some fundamental facts and principles to show possibilities and methods as a basis for recommendations of organization.

THE PSYCHOBIOLOGICAL VIEW OF PROBLEMS MET IN SCHOOL

Let me state as the first requirement that the school-physician should have a clear conception of the school child's nature as an organism to be studied in its parts and also as a psychobiological whole, a personality and individual — a conception which implies training in psychobiology for at least a certain number of the school physicians. The school physician who has the analytic-constructive biological conception approaches the pupil with due attention to disorders of eye and ear, of the breathing and the possible adenoids, and the state of nutrition ; but he also knows that the pupil brings to the school an endowment not merely of special organs but also of habits of total-function ; good or bad foodhabits expressing themselves in appetites and more or less orderly habits of feeding and of digestion ; a more or less adequate equipment of habits of sleep and waking and resting and activity ; the kind of life characteristic of the infant or child or adolescent, different from that of the adult or old person ; he recognizes individual differences in the scope of endowment and resources ; endurance and concentration and interest ; or weakness, distractability and indifference ; a varying ability to control with foresight the momentary notions, temptations and desires ; a capacity of contentment and satisfaction, or of unrest; habits of self-dependence or of dependence upon others and craving for attention ; habits for team work or a lack of social instincts ; an ability to mix, to respond to others and to make them respond — an ability to understand and to be understood and to enjoy and be enjoyed. Within this large sphere of resources and activities and qualifications we may further single out features such as varying preparedness to meet the unusual or perhaps the undesirable, such as sickness, and varying amenability to discipline and to guidance, and capacities to assume responsibilities and duties. Here there is a mass of vital facts requiring consideration if the child is to be put into the best balanced situations. Dr. Watson has singled out from the greatly varied life of the infant the emotions of rage and fear and love and joy; and a similar sifting will have to be done, with similar care, for the instinctive factors and the lines of acquisition of training of the older child so that we may get a natural picture of the inheritable dispositions and the lines in which they can be brought out and shaped or, as the Latin word has it, educated, and studied as fundamental units.

Until we shall have our nursery and childhood laboratories, might we not be guided in a helpful manner by the grave school of life, with its exhibits of the blundering of human nature ?

HELPS FROM MEDICAL EXPERIENCE

Nine years ago I formulated my experience in a paper on *'What do histories of cases of insanity teach us concerning preventive mental hygiene during the years of school-life ?" (published in Vol. II of the Psychological Clinic). I shall not attempt to restate my facts and conclusions as fully to-day as I did then, but shall choose a few cases from a somewhat different angle, so as to reinforce our conception of man and also so as to throw some light on how to proceed in the study of the simpler but often equally difficult problems you meet in schools.

An attempt to find in the literature discussions of common difficulties of pupils in schools — the kind of thing that one would expect teachers to try to find help for — left me with a remarkably small return. Apart from the Paedagogische Pathologic oder die Lehre von den Fehlern (faults) der Kinder by Prof. Ludwig Strlimpell (Leipzig — 1892), I know of no systematic presentation even in the recent works on the hygiene of the child's mind, of the very problems which the teacher would seem to me to meet almost daily in his or her efforts to attain mental and moral health in the children. The most noteworthy specific beginning comes from your own midst, in Dr. Healy's recent book on Honesty, which naturally deals with but a limited though widely pervading topic.

I have no doubt that there is in a way a healthy feature to this abstinence from excessive discussion. Most of the efforts at remedy are properly made in the very biological foundations: in better feeding, better rest and the creation of more contentment on the part of the pupils. These efforts are clearly the basic substitute for the effete and long-winded discussions of a merely moralizing type. But there certainly are conditions in which the fundamental helps of food, rest and contentment are insufficient, and where nothing but a thorough personality study will reveal the causes at work. The problems of shyness and fear of recitation and other fears, of carelessness, absentmindedness, of unexpected slumps of performance, of obstinacy and unruliness, of lying, etc. are issues which may call for as careful a study and understanding as those clearly morbid conditions which even to-day are brought to the physician, because they attract the attention of the family as well as that of the teacher.

I take the liberty of mentioning a few cases of disorders of this period of life, as we could not take up a full discussion of specially difficult temperaments and specially difficult situations without getting too technical for a brief lecture. We can only pick out a few samples which may broaden our horizon, although they did not come up primarily as school problems.

A little girl of 8 comes to us with nervous restlessness and a twitching of the face which she is said to have acquired two years ago from wet applications used during an attack of tonsilhtis. She leads her class, memorizes poetry for pleasure, must be the first in everything ; is restless and fidgety. She has slightly enlarged tonsils and perhaps a slightly enlarged thyroid. In the Binet scale she ranks one year above normal, especially in the points in which she has been drilled at school, but lower where she had to depend on her own wits and her own imagination.

Now what conditions does she live in.f' What is her mental background ? She is afraid to sleep alone. She sleeps in her mother's bed, with the father in the same room ; she talks in her sleep, is restless, and the mother wakes her once a night to avoid bed-wetting, although this has not occurred for a year. The child has her own way about food and everything. She knows how to keep her mother on the rack by telling her of what horrible things the girls talk about at school. The girl asks the mother questions and is told not to ask her again about such matters ; and back she goes to where her curiosity is satisfied. You can judge where her fancy turns from the fact that the patient, who is anxious for a baby brother, was rather dehghted when her mother had a headache, as that made her suspect a pregnancy.

Whose tonsils shall we have removed in that family? Almost every point mentioned calls for a modification of the way of living and instruction under the guidance of a trained social worker, and we may be sure that the girl can be saved from many and graver dangers than the bad effects from her tonsils.

Another girl of 6 is brought to the dispensary because, since her mother's death three years ago, and especially since her father died, one and a half years ago, she is nervous, stands up in bed, screams, grabs her grandmother with whom she sleeps, is scared, bites her nails, does not play; she is bashful and timid, hides behind the grandmother, but can be interested at once when candy is mentioned ; she is curious and rather characteristically so, tears up the toys to see their insides ; most of her talk is about her father and mother, with such questions as whether her father gets anything to eat. She does not go out because she has so often been told that she is "the only grandchild." The little patient buys candy incessantly. The nightmares are helped by bromide ; but a simple readjustment of the conditions of life with reasonable emancipation from the grandmother has helped her much more generally. The grandmother states that she is like another child, so much less nervous and so much more reasonable.

Let us take an instance from the much larger group where all trouble was tided over until the period of puberty brought a new strain. A boy of 15^ years is brought with choreiform movements of his right arm and fingers, headache and loss of appetite. The maternal grandmother was nervous; the mother is nervous and has been mentally deranged in connection with two of her childbirths. The father too had a nervous breakdown "due to overwork."

The boy had cried much during the first months of his life. He went to Kindergarten at 4, and entered High School at 12 and now is described as too fond of study for his strength. He is called a "night hawk"; laughed at by his sisters, etc.

After a slight burn in 1908 choreiform twitches of the right arm had developed with jerky movements and some numbness of the hand lasting about six months. Lately the nights have become restless and, during a writing test, the hand began to jerk again. He began to feel the lack of air in school, felt as if he should vomit unless he got out; once he ran away from home. His father suspected self -abuse and as we learned ourselves, justly so ; but not knowing how to get near the boy, he charged him in the presence of the family with playing with himself, which only aggravated the boy's discomfiture. To teach the boy to understand himself and the parents to understand him, was the main problem of treatment, and after a hygienic summer, the boy resumed his normal standing in school.

THE NEED OF STUDYING THE INDIVIDUAL CASE

The reason why I should like to give you also a bird's-eye view of the varied troubles of the adult as well is this: there is a widespread notion current among the public,

CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM m

and possibly also in the medical profession, that what you have to do in these disorders is to get a formal diagnosis as the result of some more or less specific and remarkable test or trick, and that this diagnosis is then used to prescribe a very particular treatment. If you mean by diagnosis a knowledge and understanding of what the moving forces are and how they work and how they can be modified, you are on safe ground; if, however, you think you have gained much when you have found a name for the condition, you deceive yourselves. If I may turn once more to the life chart which I brought with me, you find there in brief a record of a patient who was driven into invalidism through many misunderstandings. Call the condition neurasthenia or hysteria; the fact is that you only describe and classify it dogmatically that way. In order to understand it, you have to trace the various factors, and you find from the age of five a habit of headaches, a dependence on others, lack of emancipation, the tendency to appeal for sympathy by her complaints; then after her marriage and the birth of a child and subsequent interference with her normal instinctive life, fear of losing the affection of her husband, more ns MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A

invalidism; then several unfortunate and mutilating operations, a real evisceration instead of a study of the facts in the case, but finally a readjustment under a treatment reestablishing better habits, a better understanding of the difficulties and an end of making the stomach and the head the scapegoat of failure of adaptation. In this case, as in many similar ones, the school missed an opportunity to trace the situation which tolerated and possibly encouraged the persistence of the habit-headache, the reasons for dependence and lack of emancipation, etc.

THE PROBLEMS OF PHYSICIAN AND TEACHER THE PROBLEMS OF ALL LIFE

Does this recital of concrete medical experience suggest to you the close similarity of the problems of the physician and those of the teacher, those of all life? What you see in this brief sketch of our adult patient is what we must learn to determine even in the minor disturbances and especially also in the disciplinary difficulties of the child ; we must not be satisfied with mere descriptions and with distress over the regrettable difficulties and with off-hand efforts to apply traditional measures of correction which may not fit the case or may only smooth over the trouble. But we must devise methods of getting at the facts in a judicious, helpful and constructive manner, and that means the systematic use of what we physicians and you teachers alike have learnt to recognize as obligatory — a study of the individual case in the light of his or her development and home and school situation.

Where nervous and behavior disorders are corrected by attention to special organs as in eye strain, or adenoids, it is of the utmost importance not to neglect, in an optimistic mood, the weak spot in the psychobiological balance which may show again under some other strain or which may persist as evidence of deficit or of sources of irritation.

SCHOOL PROBLEMS

There are problems of the management of life in and out of school and there are ways of getting at the facts and of adjusting them. The school undoubtedly has its share in producing or favoring the disorders of balance at the bottom of the smaller and greater failures of adaptation. It is my impression, however, that the modern school is open in the main to fewer charges of commission than to charges of omission. Most abnormalities undoubtedly have their foundation laid in the home, by heredity, and by a poor start in habit-formation. In the European schools there is much concern about the tjberburdung, the overtaxing of the school child, a problem which might be considered an exception here, except when a child does not know how to work and how to play. The school is more apt to furnish a more or less innocent aggravation of more deeply rooted difficulties, traits which come to the front as much or even more in the extrascholastic life of the youngster. A more specific school problem is the frequent recurrence of weariness and ennui, with puzzling and meandering in thought mazes. With this goes a tendency to develop false standards, habits of putting up a sham front of performance where the pupil is hardly doing more than serving time; a formal obedience and formal attention without any real interest and performance. This actual training in the intellectual dishonesty of maintaining appearance of interest and work where the interest is plainly wandering, inevitably warps the development of the fundamental instincts of action and its appreciation and incentives.

It stunts the appetites and capacities the child actually has, and it creates pockets for dangerous ruminations, fancies and daydreams which are not apt to be drawn out into the world of activity, test and correction — the very things that stand out all over the cases I have cited. Even among the best we have to face a pitfall that comes from man's unique development of mere language and thought habits favoring a difficulty of balance of thought and fancy on the one hand and the capacity and output of performance on the other.