Growth during school age

Front matter

O H

H

CLdju.lt

Foreword

1TAKE genuine pleasure, students, teachers and educators, in dedicating to you this work which springs entirely from continuous observation of the child and which brings together the lessons that you have followed.

The lively attention which you have accorded me, dissuades me from every formality except that which has held your kindly interest.

You desire the child to be your unique teacher according to the luminous motto of the School of the Science of Education, Discat a puero magisterl and you have felt that I was simply trying to be the interpreter of the child. For it is, indeed, the child who by his individual growth affords us a deep insight into the secrets of his life, and teaches us a marvelous lesson of things, in inviting us to discover the unity which presides over his manifold transformations and which is his very person.

If you know a good deal of his physical individuality, you also know a good deal of his cerebral function which is caused in a large measure by the condition of the brain and by its relations with the rest of the body.

You rendered homage to the enlightening power of the study of growth, when in course of a lesson which caused you to penetrate to the heart of the child, you said to me in a transport which I can never forget : "How intimately you know him, indeed !"

When in turning the leaves of this book your eyes fall on

1^ Foreword

the expressions: ''We see, we infer . . . ," imagine Ihat we are still working together at the Rousseau Institute. You are present at every page.

Paul Godin June 1, 1913.

Part I Analysis Of Growth Page

CHAPTER

I. Reasons Why Growth Has a Place Among the Subjects Taught in a School of the Science OF Education 21

School age is above all an age of growth.— Growth has a double influence on the cerebral function. — New instruction; upon what it is based.— Outline of the data which the study of growth can furnish.— Its termination is the determination of the somatic individuality of the child.

II. Method of Study of Growth or the Auxano-

LOGicAL Method 31

Methods not to follow.— Worthlessness of isolated measurements.— Measurement of stature becomes useful as soon as It is introduced.— Rhythm of lengthening of the body.— What is adolescence?— The great post-foetal lengthening of the body by the lower limbs takes place between birth and the age of seven years, and not at the time of puberty. — The method to follow is that which the nature of the phenomena and the utilitarian objective of the results of observation dictate.

III. Metrical Proportions of the Body of the

Child from Birth to Adult Age .... 39

The proportions of the human body and the artists of Egypt, of Greece, of Rome, of the Middle Ages; contemporary artists.— Anthropometric canon of the child at different ages.— Influence of growth on the variations of the proportions of the body.— Partial proportions.— Importance of functional correlations.

IV. Influences Which Act UPON Growth ... 53

Influences which act upon stature.— Influence of food, of sex, of race, of heredity, of season, of gestation, of exercise.— Reciprocal relation of illness and growth.— Influence of function of reproduction.

12 Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

V. Puberty — Influence of the Reproductive

Element on Growth 66

Determination of the dawn of puberty. — Some causes of error. — Most favorable season for the dawn of puberty. — Almost the whole of puberal phenomena escapes him who does not repeat semiannually his observations on the same subject. — What is puberty? Definition.

VI. Puberty (Continued) 76

Analysis of puberty by means of the phenomena of growth .^ which it determines. — Augmented growth, reduced or"" arrested growth, total growth or appearance of organs, disappearance of organs, involutions. — Embryogenic function of puberty.

VII. Puberty (Continued) 85

Influence of alimentation by the placenta. — Precocious puberty; delayed puberty. — Some somatic conditions of psychological puberty — an example. — Separation of pubescents from non-pubescents.

VIII. Puberty (Continued) - 94

Duration of period of puberty; signs of d^but, signs of termination. — Internubilo-pubescent period or youth. — Distance from puberty to nubility or adult state. — Some educational considerations touching these periods. — Synthesis of the relations of the reproductive element and growth: phases of life in function of reproduction. — Influence on growth of the traumatic suppression of the germen.

IX. Some Laws of Growth 104

Laws and method. — Make-up of the laws of growth. — Law of alternation. — Laws of puberty. — Laws of proportion. — Principle of irregular puberal growth. — R6sum6 and formulas of the laws of growth.

Part II Applications To Education And Pedagogy

I. Unequal Growth in the Scholar. Organic Troubles Which Provoke It and of Which THE Teacher and Educator Have to Take Account 123

Of what unequal growth consists. — Interest of education in the troubles which it determines. — Examples of puberal troubles due to unequal growth. — Pedagogical consequences of these troubles.

Contents 13

CHAPTER PAGE

II. Growth by Great Alternations. What the

Educator and Teacher Can Infer From It . 138

Alternate rhythm of growth for the spinal column and for the cranium. — Alternations in the development of the germen. — Relative independence of the evolution of growth to great alternations. — Relation between them and with puberty. — Pedagogical and educational deductions.

III. Various Pedagogical Applications .... 142

Pubescents and non-pubescents. — Their somatic and psychical differences. Pedagogical deductions. — "Educative moment" of each organ. — Deference of the law of alternation. — Growth and intelligence. — Position of scholar in school-room — necessity of varying it.

IV. Individualization of School Furniture . . 152

It is seated and not standing that the scholar makes use of it. — Error resulting from the measure of the scholar's height standing taken as guide in assigning of seat. — Height standing and height sitting. — Anatomical and physiological conditions which must govern the choice of individual furniture. — Simple means of conforming to it. — Working Manual.

V. Control of Physical Education by the

AUXANOLOGICAL MeTHOD 161

Account to be taken of growth. — Checking of the effects of exercise with the fixed bar on the development of stature, of the chest, of the pelvis, of the limbs. — Gymnasts and non-gymnasts. — Various causes of abstention. — Conclusions relative to the results of exercise aimed at and to the method of checking.

VI. Asymmetry and Education 180

Half of the body. — Variation of the length of the sternum and rickets. — The shoulders of the child. — Asymmetry of the human body; those things which it is necessary to know by reason of their educative interest. — Probable part taken by the brain in functional asymmetries. — Bimanual education (ambidexterity).

VII. AUXANOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE ScHOLAR . 191

Anatomical conditions of function. — ^Form and skeleton. — Their modification by growth. — Anthropometric guiding-marks.

VIII. Measurement of the Scholar in Accordance

WITH THE "Individual Record of Growth" . 199

The observation room. — ^The anthropometric instruments. — Care in checking one's self. — Working manual. — Heights, diameters, circumferences, contours, weights.

14 Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

IX. Notations to be Recorded on the Individual

Record Card OF Growth 211

Physiological and clinical setting of the measurements. — The alternations of growth and the semestral period. — Notations to be taken on the child stripped. — Notations to be taken on the child when dressed, among them color of eyes and of hair. — Temperament. — Relation of the duration of repose to the duration of effort.

X. Determination of "Somatic Individuality"

BY THE "Individual Formula" OF Growth 221

The individual formula of growth and somatic individuality. — The individual formula aims at function. — Make-up of the individual formula. Its interpretation.

Index 247

TABLE OF PLATES

Plate I. Proportions of the diverse segments of the body compared

to height (= 100) at the ages of evolution . . frontispiece

PAGE

Plate II. The ages of evolution compared to adult age, absolute

Plate III. Growth of the diverse dimensions of the human body (solide humain) at the ages at which it doubles, trebles, quadruples 250

Plate IV. Stature (taille). Rhythm of its elongation . . . 251

Plate V. The ages of evolution related to adult age. Relative,

total, and segmental growth 253

Plate VI. Proportions of the body at ISi/g years compared to the proportions at 17l^ years, and at 2314 years .... 254

Plate VII. Curves of proportional variations of the guiding-marks

between 13i/^ years and I714 years 255

Plate VIII. DifFerent proportions of the body in individuals of the same age 256

Plate IX. Comparative schematic increase of G (germen), of C (cerveau-brain), of V (soma). Grand alternations . . 257

Plate X. Semestral alternation of growth between 131/3 years and

Plate XI. Height erect A and height seated B of the same ten boys 259

Plate XII. Check (controle) of the effects of gymnastics (height,

perimeter, weight) 260

Plate XIII. Check (controle) of the effects of gymnastics (diameter and girth) 261

Plate XIV. Check (controle) of the effects of gymnastics (height,

girth, weight) 262

Plate XV. Guiding-marks on the skeleton and on the silhouette

at various ages . . 264, 265

Plate XVI. Guiding-marks . Geometric semi-silhouettes and curves

of growth 263

Introduction

THE pages which follow are not a collection of numbered records which had been published during the twelve years preceding. They are a key to the "individual formula," a working manual by reason of their somatic determination, and they ought rather to be entitled : "concerning growth as a means of penetrating the physical individuality of the child, and pupil."

I have caused the practice of the method recommended to be preceded by a statement of the anatomico-physiological results which I owe to it, namely, a scientific conception of growth, knowledge of the proportions of the body at the successive ages of development, analysis of puberty considered as effect and as cause, laws of individual growth, etc., and some of the principal practical applications to which it has led me.

For the educator who understands how to make an enlightened choice, it is indispensable to know the scientific results and the practical application due to the various methods, and to choose one of them only after a serious examination.

There are two general methods for the objective study of the post-foetal morphological development of the child: the simultaneous method and the periodic method. The former examines simultaneously, in some manner, a greater or les?er number of children of all ages. Each child is examined once for all. The periodic method examines the same

18 Introduction

child periodically throughout the successive phases of his development.

The first method furnishes means useful for general comparisons between different ages, between the two sexes, and between races ; but, whether or not it multiplies the number of measurements and of notations, the individual evolution of development remains none the less entirely outside its scope with all the biological phenomena which characterize individual evolution, and these are precisely the phenomena which the educator is interested in knowing.

Since here all derives from the periodic method, it is conceived that investigations conducted according to the simultaneous method have only a limited documentary role.

PART I

ANALYSIS OF GROWTH

Chapter I

REASONS WHY GROWTH HAS A PLACE AMONG THE SUBJECTS TAUGHT IN A SCHOOI. OF THE SCIENCE OF EDUCATION

School age is above all an age of growth. — Growth has a double influence on the cerebral function, — New instruction; upon what it is based, — Outline of the data which the study of growth can furnish, — Its termination is the determination of the somatic individuality of the child.

SCHOOL age, according to the studies pursued, according to the career aimed at, may stop on the eve of puberty or be prolonged beyond. It can be taken as beginning with the admission to the college ^ or from the time of entrance into the class of the smallest children in the maternal school (Vecole maternelle).

School age is above all an age of growth, — School age extends, in reality, over the greater part of the period of development which the child has to traverse in order to become an adult. School life and growth parallel, and to understand the latter thoroughly, it is of interest to trace it from birth. (Cf. Plates H, IV, IX, and XVI.)

It is quite difficult to admit that school life which places

*A secondary schoal in France. — Trl, the child in such singularly artificial conditions has no influence on the evolution of growth. It is the duty of the educator to make that influence as auspicious as possible. His first care will be to acquire a knowledge of growth in order to understand its needs and to labor unceasingly to render school life compatible with a normal development of the child subject to the tortures of which school life admits.

Growth has a twofold influence on cerebral functions. — School age is the period of cerebral culture. The brain is not an isolated organ; it forms a part of the organism of which it is a piece, from which it receives nutrition ; it cannot be dissociated from the rest of the body at any moment of existence; it must share the advantageous and disadvantageous conditions of life of that organism. The brain is really under the vegetative dependence of the organism, although relatively independent.

In its special psychical functioning, it receives the data from the senses, from touch as from sight. The condition of these senses has an influence on their acuity, on the precision of the information which they furnish, and it is according to the information that the brain estimates the medium, the setting that it judges of the opportuneness of acting, and eff*ects the first part of its functioning.

The senses are the body itself of which they reflect the alternatives of well-being and of discomfort, of good health (euphoric) or pain, alternatives, which echo on the senses functioning in an inevitable fashion. The first part of the psycho-motor operation (Manouvrier) which is the characteristic of the brain, depends on the state itself of the soma, that is, on everything in the organism, which is not the brain. The second part of the cerebral operation borrows the instruments of which it has need, from the motor apparatus whose condition partakes of that of the rest of

Study of Growth 23

the body. How could one picture a cerebral life, a psycho-motor function being realized without the body?

Among the causes capable of influencing the states of the organism, growth figures in the first rank during the whole period of elaboration of the adult.

The term growth must be understood as applicable to all the modifications which concern the dimensions of the diverse parts of the body. It provokes continual changes in the interior conditions of organic functioning, which for the reasons just given cannot fail to aff^ect the brain indirectly.

But the brain is itself subject to growth, and for that reason it undergoes modifications which would be sufficient to influence its functional activity. The brain is, therefore, tributary to growth in a twofold manner, and it is necessary for anyone who, like the educator, studies its functioning, for anyone who desires especially to grasp the direction of it, to be acquainted thoroughly with the progress of growth.

New instruction; upon what it is based, — This progress is complex and embraces a whole evolution. It is present sometimes at the appearance of organs, at transformations, at variations in the dimensions of diverse parts of the body and in their reciprocal relations. It discovers to the methodical observer the mechanism of several phenomena of life with their individual character. Growth merits indeed a study which admits of its analysis between two syntheses.

We are far indeed from the three measurements, height, girth and weight, taken as the expression of growth and with which the denomination of the measurement of the length of the body, of the thickness of the chest at a certain point, and of the ponderal weight of the mass of the body agrees precisely. These are three of the hundred twenty-nine measurements of which the metric observation of human growth is comprised, three measurements which represent two one-hundredths of the work of measuring only, to which are added physiological and clinical observations composed of approximately forty-six notations.

The results which I am presenting to you in these talks are based on two thousand observations, on three hundred thousand measurements. I do not hesitate, nevertheless, to ask you to verify them and to check them up as often as possible, when you once have possession of the processes of investigation which form the subject of a special chapter, but which continually support our lessons by the practical conferences which reenforce them.

It is not a matter of your acquiring some vague theoretical notions. You must be prepared to repeat the observations for yourselves with all the exactness of which the scientific method admits, when once the point of departure has been determined among the countless obligations of laboratory research and when the working manual has been rendered useful by daily observation.

This reduction of the technique is justified and valid only in so far as it has been preceded by patient and thorough investigation and as it has thus received the indispensable setting of notions and general ideas without which there is no science. Hence, you need, first of all, to be acquainted with results and laws, and to grasp their applications. But, up to the present time these are found in no study of growth. I shall endeavor to present to you the results, the laws and the applications which twenty years of research have enabled me to discover.

Your direction of education and your own instruction will draw a considerable benefit from these notions of growth because they will lead you to the discovery of the physical

Study of Growth 25

individuality of your pupils. Along that line you will be led to know the ground of each one's mentality ; you will be able to adapt your work as educator and teacher to the person of each child. You will realize the most desirable progress in education.

This is the first time that growth is taught; all the merits of it will accrue to the hardy innovators who have created the school of the Science of Education, the J. J. Rousseau Institute, and I pray them to receive the expression of my deepest gratitude.

n

The period of growth represents a long phase of the evolution of the human body and its life, — one-third approximately. It corresponds with the moment of transformation, by parts and by wholes, profound and superficial, concealed and apparent, of the entire body and of each of its parts.

Growth keeps up a continual ebullition of the organism which thus presents to the eye of the privileged observer of this biological phase the most intimate of its phenomena. Growth is "the continuous transformation which the body of a child undergoes in its ensemble and in each of its parts in order to become an adult." The term growth is the synthetic expression of all the manifestations of development.^

Of what countless and precious notions do those deprive themselves who limit growth to increase of heighth and of weight with or without the addition of the girth of the chest! Alas, the biological phenomena simplified by our haste to scrutinize them, often remain outside of our observation. This is the case here.

The program of the observation of growth is outlined 2 Academic des Sciences — ^my contribution of Nov. 13, 1911.

by the very nature of the phenomena, and the working manual, by the systematic stages which the constitution assigns to the phenomena of growth. No one can escape it, unless he declares that the object of his study is such or such particular point of development and not growth. It would further be necessary to establish that the elements so isolated by this transforming synthesis conserve a direction and are susceptible of an exact interpretation and capable of being turned to account. We shall see later how the eunuch can, according to the three measurements, height, girth, and weight, be classed among the best military recruits. This example is to be retained and needs no comment.

In no case could the observation of the individual, such as I propose and have proposed in my divers reports (1893- 1905) for the examination of the French soldier for enlistment, give place to a like confusion.

Nor is it growth, but anthropology with its general and some of its particular views which authors have felt constrained to give as the basis for education.

If growth borrows diverse processes from anthropology, it also takes different methods from statistics. It is furthermore an anatomical, physiological and clinical study. It is by reason of not having taken account of that fact that the attempts of educational and pedagogical anthropology, in spite of the worth and talent of the authors, have not succeeded and that nothing new or practically useful has been contributed from that side either to pedagogy or to education. On the contrary what a vast field of useful and fertile observations spreads out before the educator who gives himself up to the scientific investigation of growth ! What precision the multiple aspects of development suggest to him with regard to the individuality of the child !

Study of Growth 27

Outline of the data which the study of growth can ffirnish. Its termination is the determination of the somatit individuality of the child. — The master, it is certain, is in possession of the substance of his instruction. He is trained in the best manner of presenting it ; he is sufficiently acquainted with the medium in which he is called to teach. But does he know each of the little plants which he is going to cultivate.'* does he know of what kind they are? whether they belong to different species and what those species are? Does he know above all what culture is suited to each of them, exposure, medium, food, soil, etc.? These are some of the cares which constantly have first place in the mind of the gardener; does the master have any solicitude for them? Have the parents, before the master, thought of it?

We see the raising of cattle, of horses, succeed only at the price of a profound study of the race and the individual nature of each of its specimens. Do we not know that the horse trainer, whether he be the master of a riding-school, the trainer of the horse savant, of the circus horse, whether he have the talent of Hachet Souplet or the patience of the owners of Kluge Hans of Berlin and later of Elberfeld, and even the empiric sagacity of a tamer like Bidel or Pezon; do we not know that that educator of animals always begins by studying the person of his pupil and adopts the processes of instruction and of education, which he will employ, only after having adapted them to the individuality of the animal?

The educator of children will acquire more easily and more surely this science of the child, this indispensable knowledge of each one of his pupils if he is enabled to begin by making up an "individual" formula, a kind of abridged synthesis of the somatic individuality.

While studying the continual variations of which the organism is the seat during the development of the child, the experienced educator will discern what is stable and constant in the person of his pupil. The philosopher, Mr. P. Bovet, has said "a question of education is at once a problem of biology, of psychology and of sociology." ^

In a general way, the study of growth is that of a moving ground of individual pedagogy. It brings to the teacher the following laws according to which changes "are produced, and reveals to him the relations in which are found mingled, at different moments of evolution, these three factors of personality, — the soma, the brain, and the germen.

The following enumeration gives a general idea of the instruction and information which, for the educator, spring from the study of the development of each of his pupils and of which we shall consider only the principal ones in these lessons :

Information concerning the state of interorganic equilibrium.

Warning of disturbance of equilibrium which does not accompany disturbance of health.

Information concerning the cause of a psychic disturbance, the reason for which the educator does not know.

Information concerning the phase of development attained by each of the principal factors of the psychological field.

Indication of the "educative moment," of each of the psychological factors, that is, of the freest period for the organ, consequently the most favorable for its education.

^ Conference held at the General Assembly of the Society of Arts, March 14, 1913, on the founding at Geneva of a School of the Science of Education, by Mr. Pierre Bovet, professor of philosophy at the University of Neuchatel.

Study of Growth 29

Warning relative to the proximity of the ages of evolution.

Determination of the age of puberty, that is, of the distance which still separates the child from the dawn of his puberty.

Indications concerning the points which the care of the preparation of the ages of evolution must aim at, and concerning the opportune moment of that preparation.

Information concerning the functional cause of asymmetry, of a disturbance of equilibrium, of a deviation.

Precise formulation by the educator with an eye to the individual somatic appropriation of the processes of education and pedagogy.

Data permitting the checking up of the results of a regime, of an educative and pedagogical method, of a process of physical culture.

Data concerning the duration of the periods of repose necessary for recuperation of energy (alternations).

Indication of the "stuff" of which the infant disposes.

Indication of the point, organ, segment, function where special, intensive culture must bear when it is a question of specializing the work, or of correcting a wrong direction or of remedying a short-coming.

Description of the effects of transgression of the phases of repose (alternation) in consequence of too rapid growth; in consequence of infection or of traumatism ; in consequence of cerebral superactivity.

Notice of having to prolong the periods of repose of which the educator disposes.

Precise notion of the distance, often remote, at which are manifested the effects of a verified cause, for, the greater part of short-comings which are observed among young peopie of both sexes between the ages of fifteen and twenty years, are only remote effects of faulty preparation for puberty, etc. ...

Let us beware of falling into the error so frequent among biologists and physicians, which Bergson stigmatises, namely, never treat in any case "the living as the inert." Let us listen to that cry of the great poet, the only one who since Jean Jacques Rousseau, has understood infancy. "One does not know, one does not have the appearance of knowing that infancy forms a part of life." *

Growth preserves us precisely from this fault; creative cause of incessant transformations, of continual changes, it does not at a single moment, permit the biologist, the physician or the educator to lose the notion of mutation, the feeling of life in the being which forms the object of his observation.

*Jean Aicard, of the French Academy, L'dme d'lm enfant.

Chapter II Method Of Study Of Growth Or Auxanological Method

Methods not to follow. — Worthies sness of isolated measurements. — Measurement of stature becomes useful as soon as it is introduced. — Rhythm of the lengthening of the body. — What is adolescence? The great post-foetal lengthening of the body by the lower limbs takes place between birth and the age of seven years, and not at the time of puberty. — The method to follow is that which the nature of the phenomena and the utilitarian objective of the results of observation dictate.

METHODS not to follow. — The continued transformation which growth bears along with it in the body of children cannot be studied as if it were a fixed state. Observation needs to be renewed often so as to verify the changes which have occurred. That implies a periodical examination of the children, a fact which is far from having been understood by all the authors. The numerous necessary examinations have been reduced to a single one, made once for all.

The reductions have been worked out on the measurements, reductions sucli that of the relatively few measurements taken by Quetelet, there has now and then remained only the measure of height. The fact of considering height as the only useful measure of length has some very grave consequences. Simply reading the results furnished by the working up of measurements sufficiently numerous makes the liability of error perfectly obvious.

Height is, in effect, the sum of the lengths of the lower limbs, the trunk, the neck, and the skull. Each of these parts has, functionally, a role different from the others ; each of these segments participates in the total lengthening of one part which is peculiar to itself and differs from that of the segments situated above and beneath. We shall even see that a law controls these differences.

This segmental growth has some correlations which are more or less changed as soon as the said segment grows less or more. The relations which express a certain number of correlations change with them; the interpretations relative to the conditions of life in the organism of the child observed are profoundly different and lead to some deductions quite different in preventive hygiene and in education and pedagogy.

Worthlessness of isolated measurements. — ^Let us recognize that all isolated measurements are worth nothing; for, even as a solid (globale), growth has still to consider all the dimensions of the solid human body (Plate III) ; and fatally erroneous, in matter of development of the body of man, are the interpretations of a measurement which represents only one of these dimensions. The measurement of stature teaches us that a person is large or small. That is not enough. Weight does not teach us much more if it has only that of stature to complete its total. For its valuation is increased by the presence of fat as well as by the density of muscular tissue or that of osseous tissue.