Aspects of child life and education

Front matter

^'AM i(r' :.ii

Ipilii

H iii'M.

Preface

"The highest study of mankind is man,'* but we can never know man without knowing the stages of his ''father/* the child. The wave of interest in child study which swept over this country some three decades ago, and even inundated Europe, was a culture movement of great significance, no matter what value we attribute to its scientific results. It taught us that the child and its characteristic traits are ages older than adulthood, which is a comparatively recent superstructure, and that success in life is far more dependent than we had realized on a happy childhood. ^Another effect of the movement was to give psychology, which has been slower and more reluctant than even religion to recognize evolution, something of a genetic trend, which has been greatly reinforced of late, at least for a large and important group of scientific minds, by the new conceptions of childhood contributed by the psychoanalysts. The latter, holding that unconscious trends in the soul are really more important than those that are conscious, believe that during the first three or four years of life the foundations of character, not only emotional but volitional and intellectual, are laid, and they practically identify childhood with this larger, stronger, subliminal soul {Das Unbewussfe ist das Kindliche).

The school and most teachers under our "mass and class system" are eternally prone to look primarily at the subject matter they have to teach and to follow logical methods. Paidology brings a Copemican revolution here, and regarding primarily the nature and needs of the child, considers chiefly the genetic order and gives interest and zest almost the preeminence that the early Christian Church gave to the Holy vi PREFACE

Ghost. "The child is what it becomes" (Est ist was es imrd), as Schleicher defined language, and the first care of teachers and parents should be to get out of Nature's way and allow her free scope, and avoid excessive checks and inhibitions. This is quite in the line of the homely old conception of Socrates that the teacher was the midwife of the soul whose life function it was to help Nature along her own lines and to erect every safeguard against disaster. From this standpoint the real value of every subject in the curriculum and every method is whether and how much it helps orthogenic development, and the value of not only the school but every institution is how much it contributes to bring individuality to the fullest and most mature development of which it is capable.

It was in accordance with this conception that we began at Clark University,, more than three decades ago, to apply the questionnaire method, already in various forms so serviceable to anthropology, to the study of special aspects of child life, utilizing childish memories of adults and direct observations of children, whether made at first hand or from literature. I find, in looking over the more than six-score themes that have been thus studied, that most of them fall into certain general groups, each having been a theme of special study;

(i) Relations to Nature, including the child's experience with light and darkness, day and night ; his feelings toward the infinite vault of blue sky above us ; the stars ; the sun in all the stages of its progress through the sky; the moon, our nearest celestial neighbor, so often worshiped and so indispensable in the romance of poetry and love; clouds and their forms as schools of the imagination ; the phenomena of storm, including rain, thunder, and lightning; heat and cold, along with fire and frost ; rocks and earth ; trees and forests ; flowers and the sentiments they inspire; animals, with special studies on the cat and dog, revealing the infantile bases of totemism. ^Thus we sought roughly to delineate the spontaneous feeling of children towards Nature, animate and inanimate, a theme, the

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influences of which in the history of literature have been so carefully traced by Riese, and to show how fundamental these responses of the soul of the child in its earliest years toward country scenes and life are as affording the bases for the art and literature that deals with these objects, sentiments toward which are the foreschools of reHgion and the foundation of natural science.

y. (2) Another group of these themes dealt with the development of the sense of self. Closely connected with this also is the compilation of children's early concepts as to the nature of the soul, which are found to be in such close rapport with those of primitive people. With this, too, are connected other special studies of children's foods and appetites, including their infantile experiments; the topic of shame, modesty, and self-consciousness generally; the psychology of dress, clothes, and ornaments ; early experiences with illness ; children's ambitions or the motives of emulation and self-affirmation and aggressiveness; jealousy, rivalry, and envy; egoism and altruism.

(3) Closely connected with this was the group of studies made on the fundamental affectivities of the child. Here belong the papers on pleasure and pain, including crying and laughing, the development of the algedonic scale, leading up to the sense in which education is teaching us to take pleasure in things we ought and to feel pain and displeasure as we ought to do. Then came the study of shock and children's fears, which are in a sense the beginning of wisdom, because fear has always been the schoolmaster of the world and, as Aristotle said, education might be defined as teaching us to fear aright. We are also now coming to realize the great importance of morbid fears or phobias, of which medical literature records many score, and these studies enable us to realize how many forms of arrest and even mental perversion are due to unwise fears. Next came the studies of anger, which at its best typifies the aggressive nature of man which has made him ruler of the world and enabled him to attack and

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overcome so many of the difficulties that have beset his path, and the sthenic energy of which has prompted the expression that the sum of wisdom is teaching us to be angry aright, viz., at the things that really deserve condemnation and removal, making it thus in a sense the opposite of fears, which make for docility. Then came the studies of sympathy and pity so basal for the herd instinct in gregarious man, the classic expression or masterpiece of which in Christendom is the story of the Cross.

(4) This led to the studies of the social impulses, and these are illustrated in monographs on the gang and rudimentary society among boys; the dangers of being the only child; reactions of children, youth, and even adults to solitude versus the opposite tendency to think, feel, and act group-wise until individuality is lost; studies of suggestion and imitation, including some score of fads; the instinct of leadership; the impulse of teasing, fooling, and cruelty versus hypersensitiveness to the pain and suffering in the world. Here, too, belong the study of most plays and games; and perhaps we might place in this group also the emulation, competition, and rivalry; the first burgeoning of the sense of justice; studies of the early manifestations of sex; calf love; prepubescent and adolescent phenomena, and the effects of coeducation.

(5) Besides these rougher groupings, various studies were made of juvenile manifestations of fun, wit, and humor ; the development of the instinct of rhythm and dancing ; children's dreams, along with revery and daydream, which mark the dawn of imagination; response to folklore; studies of their curiosity and interest, of their spontaneous drawings ; attempts at artistic creations ; their fetishes ; collections ; the beginnings of property ownership; punishments, both in school and home; conceptions of and attitude toward childhood in different nations, races, and stages of development; the childish attitude toward authority; the earliest expressions of the religious instinct ; a few studies on the development of the idea of number,

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and more than a score of special ones on the growth of language in young children, including their vocabularies, etc. It is out of this large field that I have selected these nine papers as samples of the rest and illustrations of the questionnaire method, which has both its strong and weak points as applied to children. From its very nature it can never be accurate, but its highest merit lies in its suggestiveness.

From this general movement toward an embryology of the soul has sprung up a new interest in the original or primal nature of man, the chief traits of which are developed in the earliest stages of life.-^ While the method of these later studies has been far more accurate, and hence these studies have made remarkable approximations toward finality in some directions, they have chiefly been directed to intellectual qualities and very few can be called in any sense dispositional, so that along with great advance in thoroughness the field has been very greatly narrowed to a study of more measurable qualities, such as accuracy in spelling, writing, number work, the accuracy and span of memory, with many a test of general ability. These newer studies were mostly based on the Binet-Simon tests until the war, and the application of these methods to soldiers and in personnel work and in college entrance examinations has, although we are thus taken into the teens and twenties, resulted as yet in less consensus regarding methods and results than the Binet data had given us before puberty. We have still no methods of gauging the great fundamental impulses such as the capacities for pleasure and pain, fear, anger, sympathy, or even interest ; nor have we made any progress in studying the very significant and characteristic phenomena of second breath in its various aspects, which gives us power to call upon our reserve racial energies, so important in the battle of life.

The following papers have been selected from the above long list, not with a view to unity but rather to suggest as wide and diversified a range of topics as possible.

(i) The first paper, "The Contents of Children's Minds on

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Entering School," appeared more than thirty years ago and marked the beginning of this type of child study in America. Something like it had already been tried in Berlin, and this inventory was made possible by Mrs. Pauline Agassiz Shaw, who placed four of her expert kindergartners, headed by Miss S. E. Wiltse and Miss L. H. Symonds, at my disposal for this work. As the child's mental content differs so much in different localities, it has often been suggested that something of this kind should be undertaken in every community so that a teacher may have some idea as to what she can assume, and especially what she cannot assume, as already present in the child's mind. An official report published some years ago of the children who entered the schools of London indicated that those who entered later did better than those who entered earlier because the educational influences of the street and of the country had enabled the late-comers to acquire a number of facts and concepts which gave them better apperceptive organs and more ability to assimilate the matter of instruction than those whose school life began earlier.

(2) The article on "The Psychology of Daydreams" touches a subject to which psychoanalysis has since given the very greatest prominence and the importance of which is now more adequately appreciated. 'It is in these moments of revery that the mind often grows most rapidly, and not only are experiences and tales rehearsed and amplified and sometimes idealized, but impressions and images are grouped in new orders. Vaschide well says in substance that creative imagination is by no means chiefly founded on memory or even sense. Indeed, its richness seems often inversely as these. The ordinary laws of association do not dominate here. Instead of explaining the unknown by the known, the child often reverses this process. In daydreams he is often only semiconscious and may be sometimes faintly rehearsing the experiences of his remote forbears. Archaic laws often rule even where the material digested is made up of the facts of individual Hfe.

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While it may be excessive and, as we know, may become morbid and tend to arrest or dementia praecox, it is generally a natural function and should be allowed free course and sometimes actively stimulated.

(3) Curiosity and interest play a great role in the natural history of the mind. They are the muse of education. They represent the impulses of the soul of the young to expand to the dimensions of the race, to know what the life of man and his world is and means. They impel the soul upward and onward and resist the tendency to linger in the early stages of its development, as revery sometimes tends to do. Its quest is for the objective and away from the subjective, and in general toward the new and away from the old, or the opposite of regression.

(4) *The Story of a Sand Pile'* should be read in connection with J. Johnson's "Rudimentary Society among Boys" (cited on page 156), in which the pupils ranged over a farm of eight hundred acres and spontaneously evolved the germs of most social, political, and business institutions. The *'Sand Pile" shows what a group of boys can do when wisely left to themselves, and their ingenuity suggests that of Crusoe on his desert island. Such studies take us back, in a sense, to prehistoric times and suggest how primitive society arose.

(5) Dolls have played a great role in child life from the dawn of history, and are found wherever man is. They rarely, if ever, for boys represent babies but are simply adults reduced to the dimensions of the child's mind so that it can take in the details of their form, apparel, and environment at a glance. They also, as Professor Ellis shows, have relations to idols, and nowhere is the fancy of the child more fecund in the various forms of play. We are beginning to utilize this instinct in education, but so far have only made a beginning.

(6) What child has not some time undertaken to make a collection ? The impulse to do so is generally prompted not so much by the instinct to acquire as by the love of the activities xii PREFACE

involved in gathering and accumulating similar objects for comparison, as wdl as, of course, for mere enumeration. Such collections are often highly cherished, labeled, and many objects have their ow^n associations. Imitation, of course, plays here its usual large role. In younger children it is likely to be the impulse to hoard, but it is very educable and is often nowadays turned to account in making school museums, and the impulses from which it arises are very fundamental for science.

(7) Property and ownership arise from the impulse to extend the dominion of self over the objects in the environment, animate and inanimate. Like the Sammeltrieh, or the impulse to collect, it begins in the animal world. Food, implements, ornaments, dress, are the first forms of property with the child as with the race. Here we also have certain communal instincts. The school is beginning to utilize this function in regulating the acquisitive instinct by its school savings banks.

(8) Child fetishes are a strange recrudescence of a very ancient and widespread psychosis and the cases here are very significant for the recapitulatory phenomena of child life, which so often serves as a key to unlock the secrets of the past stages of human history,

(9) In the last paper I undertook to set down, with as much fidelity to fact and details as I could, certain memories of my own boyhood, the type of which was probably very near that contemplated by the founders of our government, but which is now fast passing away. ^ It illustrates the early life of very many boys two generations ago in this country, when rural predominated over urban life, farms were small, agricultural machinery undeveloped, and interest in religious and political questions intense. With the decay of this type of farm life certain elements of education, which all agree were very valuable, became obsolete, and many new pedagogical departures of recent years are only an attempt to restore artificially the vestiges of this vanished or vanishing stage of boy life.

In fine, the child is vastly older than the adult in the sense

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that its traits existed earlier in the world than those which characterize the mature man or woman. The qualities of the latter were acquired and superposed later, and are by long ages younger and more recent and therefore less firmly established. They are often successfully appealed to and revived by modern methods of psychotherapy. Studies like those in this volume might be called research into the archaeology of the human soul. The best knowledge of anything is a complete description of its developmental stages from its origin up, but in the mind of man, paidological studies can be supplemented by those of primitive or savage man and also by those of animals. The study of the complex processes of the adult mind is like the anatomy of his body, but the foundations for an embryology of the soul have already been laid, in part by studies like these, and all students must acknowledge the valuable contributions that have been made in this field by the Freudians, who have done so much to broaden and enrich our knowledge of the early years of life and have especially shown their very great significance for the nervous and mental health of the adult.

The author hopes that these studies may be received with sufficient favor by the public so that he may be able to bring out in revised form volumes on one or more of the above groups into which these studies naturally fall.

G. Stanley Hall

WoKCESTSK, Massachusetts,