INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 461 and seeking utter absorption in subject-matter," was also a good prac- tical psychologist. This is the inveterate tendency that in other ages has made pedagogic scribes, Talmudists, epigoni, and sophists, who have magnified the letter and lost the spirit. But there are yet other seats of difficulty.
III. It is hard and, in the history of the race, a late change to receive language through the eye which reads instead of through the ear which hears. Not only is perception measur- ably about three times slower, but book language is related to oral speech somewhat as an herbarium is to a garden or a mu- seum of stuffed specimens to a menagerie. The invention of letters is a novelty in the history of the race that spoke for countless ages before it wrote. The winged word of mouth is saturated with color, perhaps hot with feeling, musical with inflection, is the utterance of a living present personality, the consummation of man's gregarious instincts. The book is dead and more or less impersonal, best apprehended in solitude, its matter more intellectualized; it deals in remoter second-hand knowledge so that Plato reproached Aristotle as being a reader, one remove from the first spontaneous source of origi- nal impressions and ideas, and the doughty medieval knights scorned reading as a mere clerk's trick, not wishing to muddle their wits with other people's ideas when their own were good enough for them. But although some of the great men in history could not read, and while some of the illiterate were often morally and intellectually above some of the literate, the argument here is that the printed page must not be too sud- denly or too early thrust between the child and life. The plea is for more oral and objective work, more stories, narra- tives, and even vivid readings, as is now done statedly in more than a dozen of the public libraries of the country, not so often by teachers as by librarians, all to the end that the ear, the chief receptacle of language, be maintained in its dominance, that the fine sense of sound, rhythm, cadence, pronunciation, and speech-music generally be not atrophied, that the eye which normally ranges freely from far to near be not injured by the confined treadmill and zigzag of the printed page.
Closely connected with this, and perhaps psychologically worse, is the substitution of the pen and the scribbling fingers for the mouth and tongue. Speech is directly to and from THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE the soul. Writing, the deliberation of which fits age better than youth, slows down its impetuosity many fold, and is in every way farther removed from vocal utterance than is the eye from the ear. Never have there been so many pounds of paper, so many pencils, and such excessive scribbling as in the calamo- papyrus pedagogy of to-day and in this country. Not only has the daily theme spread as an infection, but the daily lesson is now extracted through the point of a pencil instead of from the mouth. The tongue rests and the curve of writer's cramp takes a sharp turn upward, as if wre were making scribes, reporters, and proof-readers. In some schools teachers seem to be conducting correspondence classes with their own pupils. It all makes excellent busy work, keeps the pupils quiet and orderly, and allows the school output to be quantified, and some of it gives time for more care in the choice of words. But is it a gain to substitute a letter for a visit, to try to give written precedence over spoken forms? Here again we violate the great law that the child repeats the history of the race, and that, from the larger historic standpoint, writing as a mode of utterance is only the latest fashion.
Of course the pupils must write, and write well, just as they must read, and read much; but that English suffers from insisting upon this double long circuit too early and cultivates it in excess, devitalizes school language and makes it a litle unreal, like other affectations of adult ways, so that on escaping from its thraldom the child and youth slump back to the language of the street as never before. This is a false application of the principle of learning to do by doing. The young do not learn to write by writing, but by reading and hearing. To become a good writer one must read, feel, think, experience, until he has something to say that others want to hear. The golden age of French literature, as Gaston Deschamps and Brunetiere have lately told us, was that of the salon, when conversation dominated letters, set fashions, and made the charm of French style. Its lowest ebb was when bookishness led and people began to talk as they wrote.
IV. The fourth cause of degeneration of school English is the growing preponderance of concrete words for designat- ing things of sense and physical acts, over the higher element of language that names and deals with concepts, ideas, and non-material things. The object-lesson came in as a reaction against the danger of merely verbal and definition knowledge and word memory. Now7 it has gone so far that not only INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 463 things but even languages, vernacular and foreign, are taught by appeals to the eye. More lately, elementary science has introduced another area of pictures and things while industrial education has still further greatly enlarged the material sensori- motor element of training. Geography is taught with arti- facts, globes, maps, sand boxes, drawing. Miss Margaret Smith l counted two hundred and eighty objects that must be distributed and gathered for forty pupils in a single art lesson. Instruction, moreover, is more and more busied upon parts and details rather than wholes, upon analysis rather than synthesis. Thus in modern pedagogy there is an increased tyranny of things, a growing neglect or exclusion of all that is unseen.
The first result of this is that the modern school child is more and more mentally helpless without objects of sense. Conversation is increasingly concrete, if not of material things and persons present in time and even place. Instead of deal- ing with thoughts and ideas, speech and writing is close to sense and the words used are names for images and acts. But there is another higher part of language that is not so abjectly tied down to perception, but that lives, moves, and has its being in the field of concepts rather than percepts, that, to use Earle's distinction, is symbolic and not presentative, that describes thinking that is not mere contiguity in space or sequence in time but that is best in the far higher and more mental asso- ciations of likeness, that is more remote from activity, that, to use logical terminology, is connotative and not merely denotative, that has extension as well as intension, that re- quires abstraction and generalization. Without this latter element higher mental development is lacking because this means more than word-painting the material world.
Our school youth to-day suffer from just this defect. If their psychic operations can be called thought it is of that ele- mentary and half animal kind that consists in imagery. Their talk with each other is of things of present and immediate interest. They lack even the elements of imagination which makes new combinations and is creative because they are . Sem., The Psychological and Pedagogical Aspect of Language, Decem- 464 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE dominated by mental pictures of the sensory. Large views that take them afield away from the persons and things and acts they know do not appeal to them. Attempts to think rigorously are too hard. The teacher feels that all the content of mind must come in through the senses, and that if these are well fed, inferences and generalizations will come of them- selves later. Many pupils have never in their lives talked five minutes before others on any subject whatever that can properly be called intellectual. It irks them to occupy them- selves with purely mental processes, so enslaved are they by what is near and personal, and thus they are impoverished in the best elements of language. It is as if what are sometimes called the associative fibers, both ends of which are in the brain, were dwarfed in comparison with the afferent and efferent fibers that mediate sense and motion.
That the soul of language as an instrument of thought consists in this non-presentative element, so often lacking, is conclusively shown in the facts of speech diseases. In the slowly progressive aphasias, of late so carefully studied, the words first lost are those of things and acts most familiar to the patient, while the words that persist longest in the wreck- age of the speech-centers are generally words that do not designate the things of sense. A tailor loses the power to name his chalk, measure, shears, although he can long talk fluently of what little he may chance to know of God, beauty, truth, virtue, happiness, prosperity, etc. The farmer is unable to name the cattle in his yard or his own occupations, although he can reason as well as ever about politics, can not discuss coin or bills, but can talk of financial policies and securities, or about health and wealth generally. The reason is obvious. It is because concrete thinking has two forms, the word and the image, and the latter so tends to take the place of the former that it can be lost to both sense and articulation without great impairment, whereas conceptual thinking lacks imagery and depends upon words alone, and hence these must persist because they have no alternate form which vicariates for them.
In its lower stages speech is necessarily closely bound up with the concrete world, but its real glory appears in its later stages and its higher forms, because there the soul takes flight in the intellectual world, learns to live amidst its more spiritual INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 465 realities, to put names to thoughts, which is far higher than to put names to things. It is in this world that the best things in the best books live, and the modern school-bred distaste for them, the low-ranged mentation that hovers near the coast- line of matter and can not launch out with zest into the open sea of thoughts, holding communion with the great dead of the past or the great living of the distant present, seems almost like a slow progressive abandonment of the high attribute of speech and the lapse toward infantile or animal picture- thinking. If the school is slowly becoming speechless in this sense, if it is lapsing in all departments toward busy work and losing silence, repose, the power of logical thought, and even that of meditation, which is the muse of originality, this is per- haps the gravest of all these types of decay. If the child has no resources in solitude, can not think without the visual provocation, is losing subjective life, enthusiasm for public, social, ethical questions, is crippled for intellectual pursuits, cares only in a languid way for literary prose and poetry, responds only to sensuous stimuli and events at short range, and is indifferent to all wide relations and moral responsibility, cares only for commercial self-interest, the tactics of field sport, laboratory occupations and things which can be illustrated from a pedagogic museum, then the school is dwarf- ing, in dawning maturity, the higher powers that belong to this stage of development and is responsible for mental arrest. In this deplorable condition, if we turn to the child study of speech for help, we find that, although it has been chiefly occupied with infant vocabularies, there are already a very few and confessedly crude and feeble beginnings, but even these shed more light on the lost pathway than all other sources combined. The child once set in their midst again corrects the wise men. We will first briefly recapitulate these and then state and apply their lessons.
Miss Williams x found that out of 253 young ladies only 133 did not have favorite sounds, a and a leading among the vowels, and I, r, and m among the consonants. Eighty-five had favorite words often lugged in, 329 being good. Two hundred and twenty-one as children had 1 Children's Interest in Words. Fed. Sem., September, 1902, vol. ix, pp.
466 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE favorite proper names in geography, and also for boys, but especially for girls. The order of a few of the latter is as follows: Helen, 36; Bessie, 25; Violet and Lilly, 20; Elsie and Beatrice, 18; Dorothy and Alice, 17; Ethel, 15; Myrtle, 14; Mabel, Marguerite, Pearl, and Rose, 13; May, 12; Margaret, Daisy, and Grace, n; Ruth and Florence, 9; Gladys, 8; Maud, Nellie, and Gertrude, 7; Blanche and Mary, 6; Eve- line and Pansy, 5; Belle, Beulah, Constance, Eleanor, Elizabeth, Eva, Laura, Lulu, Pauline, Virginia, and Vivian, 4 each, etc.
Of ten words found interesting to adolescents, murmur was the favorite, most enjoying its sound. Lullaby, supreme, annannaman- nannaharoumlemay, immemorial, lillibulero, burbled, and incarnadine were liked by most, while zigzag and shigsback were not liked. This writer says that adolescence is marked by some increased love of words for motor activity and in interest in words as things in them- selves, but shows a still greater rise of interest in new words and pronunciations; " above all, there is a tremendous rise in interest in words as instruments of thought." The flood of new experiences, feelings, and views finds the old vocabulary inadequate, hence " the dumb bound feeling of which most adolescents at one time or another complain, and also I suspect from this study in the case of girls, we have an explanation of the rise of interest in slang." " The second idea suggested by our study is the tremendous importance of hearing in the affective side of language."
Conradi 1 found that of 273 returns concerning children's pleasure in knowing or using new words, ninety-two per cent were affirmative, eight per cent negative, and fifty per cent gave words especially " liked." Some were partial to big words, some for those with z in them. Some found most pleasure in saying them to themselves and some in using them with others. In all there were nearly three hundred such words, very few of which were artificial. As to words pretty or queer in form or sound, his list was nearly as large, but the greater part of the words were different. Sixty per cent of all had had periods of spontaneously trying to select their vocabulary by making lists, studying the dictionary, etc. The age of those who did so would seem to average not far from early puberty, but the data are too meager for conclusion. A few started to go through the dictionary, some wished to astonish their companions or used large new words to themselves or their dolls. Seventy per cent had had a passion for affecting foreign words when English would do as well. Conradi says " the age varies from twelve to eighteen, most being fourteen to sixteen." Some indulge this tendency in letters, and would like to do so in conversation, but fear ridicule. Fifty-six per cent reported cases of superfine elegance or affected primness or pre- cision in the use of words. Some had spells of effort in this direction, some belabor compositions to get a style that suits them, some memo- rize fine passages to this end, or modulate their voice to aid them, 1 English. Fed. Sem., October, 1903, vol. x, pp. 359-404.
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 467 affect elegance with a chosen mate by agreement, soliloquize before a glass with poses. According to his curve this tendency culminates at fourteen.
Adjectivism, adverbism, and nounism, or marked disposition to multiply one or more of the above classes of words, and in the above order, also occur near the early teens. Adjectives are often used as adverbial prefixes to other adjectives, and here favorite words are marked. Nearly half of Conradi's reports show it, but the list of words so used is small.
Miss Williams presents an interesting curve of slang confessed as being both attractive and used by 226 o«ut of 251. From this it appears that early adolescence is the curve of greatest pleasure in its use, fourteen being the culminating year. There is very little until eleven, when the curve for girls rises very rapidly, to fall nearly as rapidly from fifteen to seventeen. Ninety-three out of 104 who used it did so despite criticism.
Conradi, who collected and prints a long list of current slang words and phrases, found that of 295 young boys and girls not one failed to confess their use, and eighty-five per cent of all gave the age at which they thought it most common. On this basis he constructs the above curve, comparing with this the curve of a craze for reading and for precision in speech.
The reasons given are, in order of frequency, that slang was more emphatic, more exact, more concise, convenient, sounded pretty, re- lieved formality, was natural, manly, appropriate, etc. Only a very few thought it was vulgar, limited the vocabulary, led to or was a substitute for swearing, destroyed exactness, etc. This writer at- tempts a provisional classification of slang expressions under the sug- 468 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE gestive heads of rebukes to pride, boasting and loquacity, hypocrisy, quaint and emphatic negatives, exaggerations, exclamations, mild oaths, attending to one's own business and not meddling or interfer- ing, names for money, absurdity, neurotic effects of surprise or shock, honesty and lying, getting confused, fine appearance and dress, words for intoxication which Partridge has collected,1 for anger collated by Chamberlain,2 crudeness or innocent naivete, love and sentimentality, etc. Slang is also rich in describing conflicts of all kinds, praising courage, censuring inquisitiveness and a school of moral discipline, but he finds, however, a very large number unclassified; and while he main- tains throughout a distinction between that used by boys and by girls, sex differences are not very marked. The great majority of terms are mentioned but once, and a few under nearly all of the above heads have great numerical precedence. A somewhat striking fact is the manifold variations of a pet typical form. Twenty-three shock exple- tives, e. g., are, " Wouldn't that you? " the blank being filled by jar, choke, cook, rattle, scorch, get, start, etc., or instead of you adjectives are devised. Feeling is so intense and massive and psychic processes are so rapid, forcible, and undeveloped that the pithiness of some of these expressions makes them brilliant and creative works of genius, and after securing an apprenticeship are sure of adoption. Their very lawlessness helps to keep speech from rigidity and desicca- tion, and they hit off nearly every essential phrase of adolescent life and experience.
Conventional modes of speech do not satisfy the adolescent, so that he is often either reticent or slangy. Walt Whitman 3 says slang is " an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism and to express itself inimitably, which in the highest walks produces poets and poems "; and again, " Daring as it is to say so, in the growth of language it is certain that the retrospect of slang from the start would be the recalling from their nebulous condition of all that is poetical in the stores of human utterance." Lowell * says, " There is death in the dictionary, and where language is too strictly limited by conven- tion, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also, and we get a potted literature, Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees." Louns- bury asserts that " slang is an effort on the part of the users of lan- guage to say something more vividly, strongly, concisely than the language existing permits it to be said. It is the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed." Conradi adds in substance that weak or vicious slang is too feeble to survive, and what is vital enough to live fills a need. The final authority is the people, and it is better to teach youth to discriminate between good and bad slang rather than to forbid it entirely. Emerson calls it lan- 1 Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1900, vol. xi, p. 345 ft seq.
•Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., 1895, vol. vi, pp. 585-592. See also vol. x, p. 517.
* Introduction to the Biglow Papers, series ii.
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 469 guage in the making, its crude, vital, raw material. It is often an effective school of moral description, a palliative for profanity, and expresses the natural craving for superlatives. Faults are hit off and condemned with the curtness and sententiousness of proverbs devised by youth to sanctify itself and correct its own faults. The pedagogue objects that it violates good form and established usage, but why should the habits of hundreds of years ago control when they can not satisfy the needs of youth, which requires a lingua franca of its own, often called " slanguage "? Most high school and college youth of both sexes have two distinct styles, that of the classroom that is as unnat- ural as the etiquette of a royal drawing-room reception or a formal call, and the other that of their own breezy, free, natural life. Often these two have no relation to or effect upon each other, and often the latter is at times put by with good resolves to speak as purely and therefore as self-consciously as they know, with petty fines for every slang expression. But very few, and these generally husky boys, boldly try to assert their own rude but vigorous vernacular in the field of school requirements.
These simple studies in this vast field demonstrate little or nothing, but they suggest very much. Slang commonly expresses a moral judgment and falls into ethical categories. It usually concerns ideas, sentiment, and will, has a psychic content, and is never, like the language of the school, a mere picture of objects of sense or a description of acts. To restate it in correct English would be a course in ethics, courtesy, taste, logical predication and opposition, honesty, self-posses- sion, modesty, and just the ideal and non-presentation mental content youth most needs, and that the sensuous presentation methods of teaching have neglected. Those who see in speech nothing but form condemn it because it is vulgar. Youth has been left to meet these high needs alone, and the prevalence of these crude forms is an indictment of the delinquency of peda- gogues in not teaching their pupils to develop and use their intellect properly. Their pith and meatiness are a standing illustration of the need of condensation for intellectual objects that later growth analyzes. These expressions also illustrate the law that the higher and larger the spiritual content, the grosser must be the illustration in which it is first couched. Further studies now in progress will, I believe, make this still clearer.
Again, we see in the above, outcrops of the strong pubescent instinct to enlarge the vocabulary in two ways. One is to affect foreign equivalents. This at first suggests an appetency 47° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE for another language like the dog-Latin gibberish of children. It is one of the motives that prompts many to study Latin or French, but it has little depth, for it turns out, on closer study, to be only the affectation of superiority and the love of mys- tifying others. The other is a very different impulse to widen the vernacular. To pause to learn several foreign equivalents of things of sense may be anti-educational if it limits the expansion of thought in our own tongue. The two are, in fact, often inversely as each other. In giving a foreign synonym when the mind seeks a new native word, the peda- gogue does not deal fairly. In this irradiation into the mother tongue, sometimes experience with the sentiment or feeling, act, fact, or object precedes, and then a name for it is demanded, or conversely the sound, size, oddness or jingle of the word is first attractive and the meaning comes later. The latter needs the recognition and utilization which the former already has. Lists of favorite words should be wrought out for spelling and writing and their meanings illus- trated, for these have often the charm of novelty as on the frontier of knowledge and enlarge the mental horizon like new discoveries. We must not starve this voracious new appetite " for words as instruments of thought."