Henderson ^ found that of 2,989 children from nine to fifteen, least books were read at the age of nine and most at the age of fifteen, and that there was "a gradual rise in amount throughout, the only break being in the case of girls at the age of fourteen and the boys at the age of twelve." For fiction the high- water mark was reached for both sexes at eleven, and the subsequent fall is far less rapid for girls than for boys. "At the age of thirteen the record for travel and adventure stands highest in the case of the boys, phenomenally so. There is a gradual rise in history with age, and a corresponding decline in fiction."
1 Report on Child Reading. New York Report of State Superin- INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK Kirkpatrick^ classified returns from 5,000 children from the fourth to the ninth grade in answer to questions that concerned their read- ing. He found a sudden increase in the sixth grade, when children are about twelve, when there is often a veritable reading craze. Dolls are abandoned and " plays, games, and companionship of others are less attractive, and the reading hunger in many children becomes insatiable and is often quite indiscriminate." It seems to "most frequently begin at about twelve years of age and continue at least three or four years," after which increased home duties, social re- sponsibilities, and school requirements reduce it and make it more discriminating in quality. "The fact that boys read about twice as much history and travel as girls and only about two-thirds as much poetry and stories shows beyond question that the emotional and intellectual wants of boys and girls are essentially different before sexual maturity."
Miss Vostrovsky ^ found that among 1,269 children there was a great increase of taste for reading as shown by the number of books taken from the library, which began with a sharp rise at eleven and increased steadily to nineteen, when her survey ended; that boys read most till seventeen, and then girls took tne precedence. The taste for juvenile stories was declining and that for fiction and general literature was rapidly increased. At about the sixteenth year a change took place in both sexes, "showing then the beginning of a greater interest in works of a more general character." Girls read more fiction than boys at every age, but the interest in it begins to be very decided at adolescence. With girls it appears to come a little earlier and with greater suddenness, while the juvenile story maintains a strong hold upon boys even after the fifteenth year. The curve of decline in juvenile stories is much more pronounced in both sexes than the rise of fiction. Through the teens there is a great increase in the definiteness of answers to the questions why books were chosen. Instead of being read because they were " good" or " nice," they were read because recommended, and later because of some special interest. Girls relied on recommendations more than boys. The latter were more guided by reason and the former by sentiment. Nearly three times as many boys in the early teens chose books because they were exciting or venturesome. Even the stories which girls called exciting were tame compared with those chosen by boys. Girls chose 1 Children's Reading. North-Western Monthly, December, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 188-191, and January, 1899, vol. 9, pp. 229-233.
2 A Study of Children's Reading Tastes. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 523-535.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE books more than four times as often because of children in them, and more often because they were funny. Boys care very httle for style, but must have incidents and heroes. The author says " the special interest that girls have in fiction begins about the age of adolescence. After the sixteenth year the extreme delight in stories fades," or school demands become more imperative and uniform. Girls pre- fer domestic stories and those with characters like themselves and scenes more like those with which they are familiar. "No boy confesses to a purely girl's story, while girls frankly do to an inter- esting story about boys. Women writers seem to appeal more to girls, men writers to boys. Hence, the authors named by each sex are almost entirely different. In fiction more standard works were drawn by boys than by girls." ''When left to develop according to chance, the tendency is often toward a selection of books which unfit one for every-day living, either by presenting, on the one hand, too many scenes of delicious excitement or, on the other, by narrowing the vision to the wider possibilities of life."
Out of 523 full answers, Lancaster found that 453 "had what might be called a craze for reading at some time in the adolescent period," and thinks parents little realize the intensity of the desire to read or how this nascent period is the golden age to cultivate taste and inoculate against reading what is bad. The curve rises rapidly from eleven to fourteen, culminates at fifteen, after which it falls rapidly. Some become omnivorous readers of everything in their way; others are profoundly, and perhaps for life, impressed with some single book; others have now crazes for history, now for novels, now for dramas or for poetry; some devour encyclopedias; some imagine themselves destined to be great novelists and compose long romances; some can give the dates with accuracy of the different periods of the development of their tastes from the fairy tales of early childhood to the travels and adventures of boyhood and then to romance, poetry, history, etc.; and some give the order of their development of taste for the great poets.
The careful statistics of Dr. Reyer show that the greatest greed of reading is from the age of fifteen to twenty-two, and is on the average greatest of all at twenty. He finds that ten per cent of the young people of this age do forty per cent of all the reading. Before twenty the curve ascends very rapidly, to fall afterward yet more rapidly as the need of bread-winning becomes imperative. After thirty-five the great public reads but little. Every youth should have his or her own library, which, however small, should be select. To seal some knowledge of their content with the delightful sense of ownership helps to preserve the apparatus of culture, keeps green INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK early memories, or makes one of the best of tangible mementoes of parental care and love. For the young especially, the only ark of safety in the dark and rapidly rising flood of printer's ink is to turn resolutely away from the ideal of quantity to that of quality. While literature rescues youth from individual limitations and enables it to act and think more as spectators of all time, and sharers of all existence, the passion for reading may be excessive, and books which from the silent alcoves of our nearly 5,500 American libraries rule the world more now than ever before, may cause the young to neglect the oracles within, weaken them by too wide reading, make conver- sation bookish, and overwhelm spontaneity and originality with a superfetation of alien ideas.
The reading passion may rage with great intensity when the soul takes its first long flight in the world of books, and ninety per cent of all Conradi's cases showed it. Of these, thirty-two per cent read to have the feel- ings stirred and the desire of knowledge was a far less frequent motive. Some read to pass idle time, others to appear learned or to acquire a style or a vocabulary. Romance led. Some specialized, and w^ith some the ap- petite was omnivorous. Some preferred books about or addressed to children, some fairy tales, and some sought only those for adults. The night is often invaded and some become ' ' perfectly wild ' ' over exciting adventures or the dangers and hardships of true lovers, laughing and crying as the story turns from grave to gay, and a few read several books a week. Some were forbidden and read by stealth alone, or with books hidden in their desks or under school books. Some few live thus for years in an atmosphere highly charged with romance, and burn out their fires wickedly early with a sudden and ex- treme expansiveness that makes life about them uninter- esting and unreal, and that reacts to commonplace later. Conradi prints some two or three hundred favorite books and authors of early and of later adolescence. The natural reading of early youth is not classic nor blighted YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE by compulsion or uniformity for all. This age seeks to express originality and personality in individual choices and tastes.
Suggestive and briefly descriptive lists of best books and authors by authorities in different fields on which some time is spent in making selection, talks about books, pooling knowledge of them, with no course of reading even advised and much less prescribed, is the best guid- ance for developing the habit of rapid cursory reading. Others before Professor De Long, of Colorado, have held that the power of reading a page in a moment, as a mathematician sums up a column of figures, and as the artist Dore was able to read a book by turning the leaves, can be attained by training and practise. School pres- sure should not suppress this instinct of omnivorous read- ing, which at this age sometimes prompts the resolve to read encyclopedias, and even libraries, or to sample every- thing to be found in books at home. Along with, but never suppressing, it there should be some stated reading, but this should lay down only kinds of reading like the four emphasized in the last chapter or offer a goodly number of large alternative groups of books and authors, like the five of the Leland Stanford University, and per- mit wide liberty of choice to both teacher and pupil. Few triumphs of the uniformitarians, who sacrifice in- dividual needs to mechanical convenience in dealing with youth in masses, have been so sad as marking off and standardizing a definite quantum of requirements here. Instead of irrigating a wide field, the well-springs of liter- ary interest are forced to cut a deep canyon and leave wide desert plains of ignorance on either side. Besides imitation, which reads what others do, is the desire to read something no one else does, and this is a palladium of individuality. Bad as is the principle, the selections INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK are worse, including the saeeharinity ineffable of Tenny- son's Princess (a strange expression of the progressive feminization of the high school and yet satirizing the scholastic aspiration of girls) which the virile boy abhors, books about books which are two removes from life, and ponderous Latinity authors which for the Saxon boy sug- gest David fighting in Saul 's armor, and which warp and pervert the nascent sentence-sense on a foreign model. Worst of all, the prime moral purpose of youthful read- ing is ignored in choices based on form and style; and a growing profusion of notes that distract from content to language, the study of which belongs in the college if not in the university, develops the tendencies of criticism before the higher powers of sympathetic appreciation have done their work.^ * Perhaps the best and most notable school reader is Das Deutsche Lesebuch, begun nearly fifty years ago by Hopf and Paulsiek, and lately rupplemented by a corps of writers headed by Dobeln, all in ten volumes of over 3,500 pages and containing nearly six times as much matter as the largest American series. Many men for years went over the history of German literature, from the Eddas and Nibelungenlied down, including a few living writers, carefully selecting saga, legends, Mdrchen, fables, proverbs, hjonns, a few prayers, Bible tales, conundrums, jests, and humorous tales, with many digests, epitomes and condensation of great standards, quotations, epic, lyric, dramatic poetry, adventure, explora- tion, biography, with sketches of the life of each writer quoted, with a large final volume on the history of German literature. All this, it is explained, is "statarie" or required to be read between Octava^ and Obersecunda. It is no aimless anthology or chrestomathy like Chambers's Encyclopedia, but it is perhaps the best product of prolonged concerted study to select from a vast field the best to feed each nascent stage of later childhood and early youth, and to secure the maximum of pleasure and profit. The ethical end is dominant throughout this pedagogic canon.
1 The Prussian gj^mnasium, whose course is classical and fits for the University, has nine classes in three divisions of three classes each. The lower classes are Octava, Septa, Sexta, Quinta, and Quarta; the middle classes, Untertertia, Obertertia, and Untersecunda; the higher classes, Obersecunda, Unterprima, and Oberprima. Pupils must be at least nine years of age and have done three years preparatory work before entrance.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE {B) Other new mental powers and aptitudes are as yet too little studied. Very slight are the observations so far made of children's historic, which is so clearly akin to literary, interest and capacity. With regard to this and several other subjects in the curriculum we are in the state of Watts when he gazed at the tea-kettle and began to dream of the steam-engine; we are just recog- nizing a new power and method destined to reconstruct and increase the efficiency of education, but only after a long and toilsome period of limited successes.
Mrs. Barnes ^ told a story without date, place, name, or moral, and compared the questions which 1,250 children would like to have answered about it. She found that the interest of girls in persons, or the number who asked the question "who," culminated at twelve, when it coincided with that of boys, but that the latter continued to rise to fifteen. The interest to know "place where" events occurred culminated at eleven with girls, and at fifteen, and at a far higher point, with boys. The questions "how" and "why," calling for the method and reason, both culminated at twelve for girls and fifteen for boys, but were more infrequent and showed less age differences than the preceding question. Interest in results of the action was most pronounced of all, culminating at twelve in girls and fifteen in boys. Details and time excited far less interest, the former jointly culminating for both sexes at eleven. Interest in the truth of the narrative was extremely slight, although it became manifest at fifteen, and was growing at sixteen. The number of inferences drawn steadily increased with age, although the increase was very slight after thirteen. Both legitimate and critical inferences increased after eleven, while imaginative inferences at that age had nearly reached their maximum. Interest in names was very strong throughout, as in primitive people. Boys were more curious concerning "who," "where," and "how"; girls as to "why." In general, the historic curiosity of boys was greater than that of girls, and culminated later. The inferences drawn from an imagined finding of a log-house, boat, and arrows on a lonely island indicate that the power of inference, both legitimate and imaginative, develops strongly at twelve and 1 The Historic Sense among Children. In her Studies in Historical Method. D. C. Heath and Co., Boston, 1896, p. 57.
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK thirteen, after which doubt and the critical faculties are appaient; which coincides with Mr. M. A. Tucker's conclusion, that doubt develops at thirteen and that personal inference diminishes about that age.
The children were given two accounts of the fall of Fort Sumter, one in the terms of a school history and the other a despatch of equal length from Major Anderson, and asked which was best, should be kept, and why. Choice of the narrative steadily declined after eleven and that of the despatch increased, the former reaching its lowest, the latter its highest, point at fifteen, indicating a preference for the first-hand record. The number of those whose choice was affected by style showed no great change from twelve to fifteen, but rose very rapidly for the next two years. Those who chose the despatch be- cause it was true, signed, etc., increased rapidly in girls and boys throughout the teens, and the preference for the telegram as a more direct source increased very rapidly from thirteen to seventeen.
Other studies of this kind led Mrs. Barnes to conclude that children remembered items by groups; that whole groups were often omitted; that those containing most action were best remembered; that what is remembered is remembered with great accuracy; that generalities are often made more specific; that the number of details a child carries away from a connected narrative is not much above f fty, so that their numbers should be limited; and from it all was inferred the necessity of accuracy, of massing details about central characters or incidents, letting action dominate, omitting all that is aside from the main line of the story, of bringing out cause and effect, and dramatizing where possible.
Miss Patterson ^ collated the answers of 2,237 children to the question "What does 1895 mean?" The blanks "Don't know" decreased very rapidly from six to eight, and thereafter maintained a slight but constant percentage. Those who expanded the phrase a little without intelligence were most numerous from eight to ten, while the proportion who gave a correct explanation rose quite steadily for both sexes and culminated at fourteen for girls and fifteen for boys. The latter only indicates the pupils of real historic knowledge. The writer concludes that "the sense of historical time is altogther lacking with children of seven, and may be described as slight up to the age of twelve." History, it is thought, should be introduced early with no difference between boys and girls, but "up to the age of twelve or thirteen it should be presented in a series of * Special Study on Children's Sense of Historical Time. Mrs. Barnes's Studies in Historical Method, D. C. Heath and Co., Boston, 1896, p. 94.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE striking biographies and events, appearing if possible in contemporary- ballads and chronicles, and illustrated by maps, chronologic charts, and as richly as possible by pictures of contemporary objects, build- ings, and people." At the age of fourteen or fifteen, another sort of work should appear. Original sources should still be used, but they should illustrate not "the picture of human society moving before us in a long panorama, but should give us the opportunity to study the organization, thought, feeling, of a time as seen in its concrete embodiments, its documents, monuments, men, and books." The statesmen, thinkers, poets, should now exceed explorers and fighters; reflection and interpretation, discrimination of the true from the false, comparison, etc., are now first in order; while later yet, per- haps in college, should come severer methods and special mono- graphic study.
Studies of mentality, so well advanced for infants and so well begun for lower grades, are still very meager for adolescent stages so far as they bear on growth in the power to deal with arithmetic, drawing and pictures, puzzles, superstitions, collections, attention, reason, etc. Enough has been done to show that with authority to col- lect data on plans and by methods that can now be operated and with aid which should now be appropriated by school boards and teachers' associations, incalculable pedagogic economy could be secured and the scientific and professional character of teaching every topic in upper grammar and high school and even in the early college grades be greatly enhanced. To enter upon this laborious task in every branch of study is perhaps our chief present need and duty to our youth in school, although individual studies like that of Binet^ belong elsewhere.
(0) The studies of memory up the grades show char- acteristic adolescent changes, and some of these results are directly usable in school.
» L'Etude exp6rimentale de I'intelligence. Schleicher Freres, Paris, INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND SCHOOL WORK Bolton^ tested the power of 1,500 children to remember and write dictated digits, and found, of course, increasing accuracy with the older pupils. He also found that the memory span increased with age rather than with the growth of intelligence as determined by grade. The pupils depended largely upon visualization, and this and concentrated attention suggested that growth of memory did not necessarily accompany intellectual advancement. Girls generally surpassed boys, and as with clicks too rapid to be counted, it was found that when the pupils reached the limits of their span, the num- ber of digits was overestimated. The power of concentrated and prolonged attention was tested. The probability of error for the larger number of digits, 7 and 8, decreased in a marked way with the development of pubescence, at least up to fourteen years, with the suggestion of a slight rise again at fifteen.
In comprehensive tests of the ability of Chicago children to re- member figures seen, heard, or repeated by them, it was found that, from seven to nine, auditory were slightly better remembered than visual impressions. From that age the latter steadily increased over the former. After thirteen, auditory memory increased but little, and was already about ten per cent behind visual, which continued to increase at least till seventeen. Audio-visual memory was better than either alone, and the span of even this was improved when articulatory memory was added. When the tests were made upon pupils of the same age in different grades it was found in Chicago that memory power, whether tested by sight, hearing, or articulation, was best in those pupils whose school standing was highest, and least where standing was lowest.
When a series of digits was immediately repeated orally and a record made, it was found ^ that while from the age of eight to twelve the memory span increased only eight points, from fourteen to eighteen it increased thirteen points. The number of correct repro- ductions of numbers of seven places increased during the teens, al- though this class of children remain about one digit behind normal children of corresponding age. In general, though not without ex- ceptions, it was found that intelligence grew with memory span, although the former is far more inferior to that of the normal child than the latter, and also that weakness of this kind of memory is not an especially prominent factor of weak-mindedness.
1 The Growth of Memory in School Children. American Journal of Psychology, April, 1892, vol. 4, pp. 362-380.
2 Contribution to the Psychology and Pedagogy of Feeble-minded Children. By G. E. Johnson. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1895, YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE Shaw ' tested memory in 700 school children by dividing a story of 324 words into 152 phrases, having it read and immediately repro- duced by them, and selecting alternate grades from the third grammar to the end of the high school, with a few college students. The maximum power of this kind of memory was attained by boys in the high school period. Girls remembered forty-three per cent in the seventh grade, and in the high school forty-seven per cent. The in- crease by two-year periods was most rapid between the third and fifth grades. Four terms were remembered on the average by at least ninety per cent of the pupils, 41 by fifty per cent, and 130 by ten per cent. The story written out in the terms remembered by each percentage from ten to ninety affords a most interesting picture of the growth of memory, and even its errors of omission, insertion, substitution and displacement. ''The growth of memory is more rapid in the case of girls than boys, and the figures suggest a co- incidence with the general law, that the rapid development incident to puberty occurs earlier in girls than in boys."
In a careful study of children's memory, Kemsies^ concludes that the quality of memory improves with age more rapidly than the quantity.
W. G. Monroe tested 275 boys and 293 girls, well distributed, from seven to seventeen years of age, and found a marked rise for both visual and auditory memory at fifteen for both sexes. For both sexes, also, auditory memory was best at sixteen and visual at fifteen.
When accuracy in remembering the length of tone was used as a test, it was found there was loss from six to seven and gain from seven to eight for both sexes. From eight to nine girls lost rapidly for one and gained rapidly for the following year, while boys were nearly stationary till ten, after which both sexes gained to their maxi- mum at fourteen years of age and declined for the two subsequent years, both gaining power from sixteen to seventeen, but neither attaining the accuracy they had at fourteen.^ Netschajeff^ subjected 637 school children, well distributed be- 1 A Test of Memory in School Children. Pedagogical Seminary, 2 Zeitschrift fiir padagogische Psychologie, Pathologic und Hygiene. February, 1900. Jalirgang II, Heft 1, pp. 21-30.
3 See Scripture: Scientific Child Study. Transactions of the lUinois Society for Child Study, May, 1895, vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 32-37.
* Experimentelle Untersuchungen iiber die Gedachtnissentwickelung bei Schulkindern. Zeits. f. Psychologie, u. Physiologic dcr Sinnes-organe, November, 1900. Bd. 24. Heft 5, pp. 321-351.