A recent writer demands a theater in every high school, where young people should be encouraged to read and some- times act parts, and to assume in fancy the roles of the char- acters of great men. Others have urged that if we could have a national drama conducted by the state which directs schools, railroads, libraries, museums, post-offices, art galleries, etc., that the Government itself would be helped by placing noble political ideals upon the stage and giving them worthy repre- 67 442 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE sentation. We are often reminded that the Greek theater was a place of worship; that entrance was free, paid for from the public treasury; that relaxation and even amusement can just as well be secured on a high educational plane, and that even recreation can be made to elevate taste, spread knowledge, and dignify ideals. The ideal pedagogy of the social nature of youth demands a national drama as a school of domestic, civic, and patriotic virtue. The lack of this devolves upon educa- tion the arduous duty of developing from the best dramatic literature of the world a school canon composed of the best plays, acts, and scenes so edited as to be most effective, not primarily for art or literature but for morality, and giving its various parts such varying degrees of dramatic rendering from merely reading up to full impersonation of parts — staging, scenery, etc. — as may be practicable to fit the all-dominant nature and needs of youth of different ages.
C. I am persuaded that Quintilian was right when he de- clared that the simple reading of great works, such as national epics, " will contribute more to the unfoldment of students than all the treatises of all the rhetoricians that ever wrote." At the dawn of adolescence I am convinced that there is noth- ing more wholesome for the material of English study than that of the early mythic period in Western Europe. I refer to the literature of the Arthuriad and the Sangrail, the stories of Parsifal, Tristram, Isolde, Galahad, Gawain, Geraint, Sieg- fried, Brunhilde, Roland, the Cid, Orlando, Lancelot, Tann- hauser, Beowulf, Lohengrin, Robin Hood, and Rolando. This material is more or less closely connected in itself, al- though falling into large groups. Much of it bottoms on the Nibelungen and is connected with the old Teutonic mythology running back to the gods of Asgard. We have here a vast body of ethical material, characters that are almost colossal in their proportions, incidents thrilling and dramatic to a degree that stirs the blood and thrills the nerves. It is a quarry where Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Scott, Tenny- son, Wagner, Ibsen, and scores of artists in various lines have found subject-matter. The value of this material makes it almost Biblical for the early and middle teens, and is increased, from whatever point of view we scrutinize it, for this purpose. In a sense it is a kind of secular New Testament of classical SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 443 myths. Lancelot's quarrel with Arthur parallels in more modern form that between Achilles and Agamemnon. The skalds, bards, troubadours, meistersingers, and old chroniclers and romancers compare with the Homeridas; the quest of the Grail with the argonautic expedition for the Golden Fleece; Vivian with Circe; Merlin with Nestor; Asgard with Olym- pus. The northern myths are more sublime and less beautiful; content predominates more over form; there is more of the best spirit of modern romance, and woman's position is higher. This rich field represents perhaps the brightest spot of the dark ages and the best expression of feudalism. It teaches the highest reverence for womanhood, piety, valor, loyalty, cour- tesy, munificence, justice, and obedience. The very life blood of chivalry is heroism. Here we find the origin of most of the modern ideas of a gentleman, who is tender, generous, and helpful, as well as brave; the spirit which has given us Bayard and Sidney, as well as the pure, spotless, ideal knight, Sir Galahad. These stories are not mechanically manufactured, but they grew slowly and naturally in the soul of the race. They, too, shape and direct fear, love, pity, anger, essentially aright. The Anglo-Saxon writer never legislates more wisely for the feelings or for the imagination than when he is in- spired by and uses this material well. It stirs those subtle per- ceptions, where deep truths sleep in the youthful soul before they come to full consciousness. Although they have no very definite geography or date, so that such events and persons existed nowhere, they might be realized anywhere. To the mind at this stage of growth nothing seems quite complete or quite actual. The air whispers secrets of something about to happen, because to nascent faculties the whole world seems a little mystic, though very friendly. It is this kind of muthos that is the mother of poetry, religion, art, and, to some extent, of morals, philosophy, and science. It is not very examinable material, for it works too deeply and unconsciously, and the best and largest objects of the soul have not yet come to con- sciousness at this age, but the great lines of cleavage between right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, are being controlled, and the spiritual faculties developed.
Morals and esthetics, which are never so inseparable as at this period, ate here found in normal union.
444 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE This material educates the heart at an age when sentiment is predominant. The very mingling of some of the best pagan with some of the more rudimentary Christian elements gives it added power. The spirit of fealty and piety in it is very akin to that which animates the best religious organizations of young men. It stimulates what the French praise in gloire and the Germans in Gemuth, combines esthetic and ethical enthusiasm in a wholesome way, ideally subordinates form to content, and is the best expression of the adolescent stage of our race. If we have anywhere the material for an ethnic Bible left at the most interesting and promising stages of in- completeness by the advent of the alien culture material brought to the Teutonic races by Christianity, it is here. I have looked over eight of the best known popular digests of all or principal parts of this matter and many lesser para- phrases, but do not find quite the right treatment, and I be- lieve that a great duty is laid upon high school teachers now, namely, that of reediting this matter into form that shall be no less than canonical for their pupils. Pedagogic art is often, as Walter Pater says of art in general, the removal of rubbish. Excrescences must be eliminated, the gold recoined, its culture power brought out, till, if the ideal were fully realized, the teacher would almost become a bard of these heroic tales, with a mind saturated with all available literature, pictures, and even music bearing on it, requiring written and oral reproduc- tion from the pupils to see what sinks deepest. Some would measure the progress of culture by the work of reinterpreting on ever higher planes the mythic tradition of a race, and how this is done for youth is a good criterion of pedagogic progress.
This spirit is organized in and its fitness shown in the growth and success of the Knights of King Arthur, an unique order of Christian knighthood for boys,1 " based upon the romantic hero-loving, play-constructive, and imaginative in- stincts which ripen at about fourteen." " Its purpose is to bring back to the world, and especially to its youth, the spirit of chivalry, courtesy, deference to womanhood, recognition 1 Described in The Boy Problem, by its founder, William B. Forbush, Chicago, SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 445 of the noblesse oblige and Christian daring of that kingdom of knightliness which King Arthur promised that he would bring back when he returned from Avalon. In this order he appears again." It is formed on the model of a college Greek letter fraternity, with satisfaction for the love of ritual, mystery, and parade. The boys march into their hall in con- clave and sit in a circle in imitation of the Round Table, with a king at their head, with Merlin, an adult leader, at his side, and the various functionaries of the castle in their places. There is constant rotation in office. Each boy takes the name of a hero, either an ancient knight or a modern man of noble life, whose history he must know and whose virtues he must emulate. The initiation is brief, but impressive, with the grades of page, esquire, and knight, and room for the con- structive instinct in making regalia, banners, swords, spears, throne, etc. " Hero worship is developed by a role of noble deeds, a castle album of portraits of heroes, the reading to- gether of heroic books, the offering of ranks in the peerage, and the sacred honor of the siege perilous for athletic, schol- arly, or self-sacrificing attainments. The higher ranks can be attained after probation by those who voluntarily accept a simple covenant of purity, temperance, or reverence. The instinct of roaming and adventure is in part gratified by ex- cursions to historic sites and deeds of kindness." In the sum- mer-camp the environs are the land of the Paynims, to be pro- tected and not ravaged. The ball team is the castle army, and its victories are celebrated by a mild wassail.
D. The Bible is coming to be understood, not only, as we saw in the last chapter, as man's great text-book in psychology, but as a library which justifies its supreme title by its merits. It is marvelously adapted to successive ages; the earlier parts of the Old Testament for childhood, the Prophecies and the New Testament, with its great message of love, for adolescence. Progressive ignorance of it is amazing, especially in view of the fact that its literary form as well as its content is adapted to the nature and needs of youth like nothing else. We have lately had many revelations of amazing ignorance of the Bible among the young, so that the school itself now often takes up the work of its study. The London School Board has a full syllabus of it occupying half or three-quarters of an hour daily 446 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE with semiannual examinations, portions being selected upon which denominations agree. Prussia requires five hours a week of religious instruction, a good portion of which is biblical, by teachers specially trained and examined for eight years, largely by the method of narration with subsequent examinations, while the Schulz-Klix Biblische Lesebuch reached its fifty- third edition in 1896. Even in France, despite the recent laicizing movement where religious instruction is forbidden in the school, every Thursday entire is a holiday, so that parents can have their children taught the religion they prefer outside the school, but the instructors, although selected by their respective churches as in Germany, must pass an exami- nation. In the volumes of the Chicago Educational Union and in Moulton's w^ell-known selections we have the beginnings of pedagogic adaptation of this material. In Germany the Rhine system spends one of the first three years of school entirely on the Old Testament. Ahrens would place classical literature between the Old and New Testaments as helping connection between them, and one of our largest universities is satisfied with the English admission requirements of youth who know the English Bible only.
E. The studies reported above in Section VII suggest that history also at this time of life should first of all both follow and guide the social instincts, should go backward from the temporal, and irradiate from the spatial present as its point of departure, instead of starting with antiquity and the East and reaching our own country in the last high school year, when two-thirds of the pupils have dropped out, as the college- dominated committee of seven prescribe. Heroes with bio- graphic elements prominent, decisive events, great institutions, movements with a unity of their own, are felt long before the unity of the historic whole, and the method and stand- point of chroniclers and the idealizing literary treatments pre- cede much appeal to original sources or the scientific methods of Stubbs and Gardiner, or even Freeman and Green. For the larger movements of history greater use should be made of all kinds of charts, tables, diagrams, maps, and especially of physico-geographical influences, and perhaps even of the glimpses and aperqus of the various philosophers of history, from Hegel to Henry Adams, partial and inadequate as they are to scholars. Social organizations and spiritual and ethical SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 4-47 direction should be the prime ends sought, and the appeal to the heart should only slowly and late give place to the intellect. Historic scholarship itself is too noble a thing to ripen properly without this long incubation, and to develop political and com- munal virtue is higher and should be ever its condition pre- cedent. To train youth to social service as useful members of society is primarily the education of the feelings and the will, that are both larger and older than the intellect, which is their servant, and even self-interest rightly understood ripens naturally into altruism.1 The few years of schooling is only the very end of a process that in a sense has run through eons. The school merely puts on the final touches; for all organic evolution may be regarded as educational. Letour- neau speaks of spontaneous and organic training. Nature first adjusts the body 'to the physical environment; then the social adjustment marks a higher stage. The body is now essentially complete. Heredity is stored-up experience. The second stage or division of education we may call, with I. W. Howerth,2 artificial or telic. Art is here teleological control of nature; if directed by another it is altrotelic; and when it becomes subjective, it is autotelic. The telic aspect begins when we enter the social sphere.
Literature and history should teach moral experience by proxy and should shed the light of other days on present duties, so that we may avoid error and waste and organize our social relations and institutions aright. Faithful as the historian may be to his task of letting no good example or warning go unrecorded, zealous as literature may be to set forth all man's reactions to his environment, and greatly as all their products exceed the utmost power of individual comprehension, each soul abounds in traces of long series of events in the history of the race that are utterly lost, and of impulsions not yet ex- pressed in all the world of letters and institutions. There are momenta in each soul from phyletic periods that have utterly lapsed from racial memory, unconscious, half-organic pro- cesses and instincts, the correlates of which in the macrocosm now seem hopelessly lost. The individual who has studied his own stages of development as faithfully as Goethe did his to 1 See my Methods of Teaching History. Boston, 1889, pp. 391. * Educational Review, January, 1902.
448 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE acquire the maximum of self-knowledge of each stage in the attainment of maturity, always finds much he can not explain, and even when he turns to the history of the race for additional help there is still residuary mystery. So the effort to explain all the present by the historic past is forever, at best, but partially successful. Only the superficial half of history is past politics, only a part of the rational has become real, and the final philosophy has not taught all its lessons by example. When men thought they were doing these things by these means, it was later apparent that they were really doing very different things by different means. History, in fact, is at every period very different from the history of the conscious pur- poses of those who made it. Hence it must ever be rewritten from new and higher standpoints. So the literature, philoso- phy, and institutions of one age become only data, like questionnaire returns, for the psychological critic of the next, who finds in them very different meanings from those in the intent of their makers. The conscious intellect and will of an individual, a period, or a race are only a partial and inadequate expression of the whole soul, and one must always reason from what is said to what is meant in quest of another and deeper continuum, always finding what were thought to be causes turning out to be only effects, what seemed finalities to be be- ginnings or means, forces deemed supreme only provocatives of others that lie deeper. Could we reconstruct the buried ob- jective, phyletic correlates of all the social and other tentatives that stir in the soul of youth, we should have the real and truly formative history of that period which is, for every age, of greatest practical importance, and if we can ever create the literature and the types of associations that best express youth- ful needs, it will be the realization of the highest of all human ideals. Youth, when properly understood, will seem to be not only the revealer of the past but of the future, for it is dimly prophetic of that best part of history which is not yet written because it has not yet transpired, of the best literature the only criterion of which is that it helps to an ever more complete maturity, and of better social organizations, which, like every- thing else, are those that best serve youth. The belief that progressive ephebic needs will be met is the chief resource against pessimism in the modern world, for there is no better standard of the true worth of every human institution.
CHAPTER XVI INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION.
Curiosity the bud of mind — Training from the age of eight to twelve — Intellectual changes of puberty. I. The vernacular language and literature the root of education — Present degeneration in command of the English language due to: (a) translation English, (b) the subordination of literature and content to lan- guage study, (c) too early substitution of reading and writing for hearing and speaking, (d) restriction of language work to sense and action — Children's favorite words — Slang, its age curve and its moral purposes — Development of the sentence-sense — Stqries by children — The pubescent reading craze and its forms — An ideal series of readers. II. Other new mental aptitudes — Begin- ning of the historic sense — Reason — Drawing — Art — Puzzles — Collections — Superstitions — Growth of the power to define — Attention and seasons. III. Memory, for digits, for a narrative — Changes of mental quality — Loss of early and permanence of memories of pubescence and their kinds. IV. Normal Schools — Their defects— Psychology — Place of history of education — Methods — Central place of the model school — Needed changes — Relation to universities and pedagogic chairs. V. High Schools— Growth — Excess of girls— Curves of diminution up the grades and of candidates for college — Fallacies of the Committee of Ten and evils of college dominance: (a) for colleges and professors, (6) for high schools and teachers, (c) for pupils — The next step needed. VI. The college. VII. College philosophy: its history and central function: (a) the aberrations of epistemology and its causes, (b} the six necessary postulates, (i) space, (2) ether, (3) force, (4) law, (5) fulness of life, and (6) good-will seen in the survival of the best, (c) the proper philosophy (i) of nature, and (2) of mind, in colleges. VIII. The university: its methods and present dangers from the standpoint of culminating adolescence.
OF all the conventional groups of psychic activities, the intellect, next to the senses, has been most studied, but its genesis is perhaps even less known than that of the feelings and will. The latter are better representatives of the race, while intellect is more a product of individual experience and culture and hence varies more with age, education, etc. It is, however, a more partial expression of the soul as a whole, many and perhaps most of the activities of which do not in any given person or even period rise to consciousness. On the other hand, it expresses more fully those that do emerge. Intellect is thus related to the more unconscious psychic life 45° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE somewhat as accessory are related to fundamental movements. So far as thought involves playing upon muscular tonicity, and as attention means tension (as we saw in Chapter III), this is more than an analogy. From the oldest trophic and vaso-motor functions and organs mediating pleasure and pain and perhaps other fundamental feeling-instincts, up the com- plex hierarchy of powers when the projection system itself slowly comes under some, perhaps tangential, organ of thought, and during adolescence when a suddenly widened area of life is governed and perhaps reconstructed by intelli- gence, this viaticum is easily and rapidly passed in normal psychogenesis, but for the full understanding of it the entire animal series extinct and extant, comparatively and exhaust- ively studied, is none too large a basis. Conscious thought, noetics, intellect, reason, are popular and provisional terms for the last or neopsychic stages in this process, and all their higher forms are probably rarer and developed • later in the average human being than is usually held.
Their bud is curiosity, often seen in the animal world, and in the infant its first dim prelusion is the reflex victimization of the eye by any patch of light. Staring, experimenting with sensation, surprise, active observation, the passion to touch, handle, taste everything, often apparent cruelty due to the lust to know, the question mania which may become a neurosis at about the earliest school age, anxiety to know the origin of life that is suppressed to stealthiness at about the same age when it really grows more intense, baffling theological queries, interest in, death and in theological questions, in the hoiv of mechanical processes that often motivates what seems destruc- tiveness, desire to travel, the conquests of timidity by curiosity, its function in prompting to take the first drink, as Partridge has shown,1 truancy and runaways, according to Kline 2 and Arnett; 3 all these expressions of a pure desire for knowledge are phenomena of the crepuscular dawn that precedes the sun- rise of reason in adolescence.4 1 Psychology of Alcohol. Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1900, vol. xi, p. 320.
2 Am. Jour, of Psy., October, 1898, vol. x, pp. 1-81. 8Ped. Sem., September, 1902, vol. ix, pp. 324-365.
4 See Curiosity and Interest, by T. L. Smith and myself. Ped. Sem., September INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 45 *