November 17, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



673 



the race would have been eliminated long 

 ago. 



This fact may warrant the statement at 

 this point that the study of people and of 

 natural objects and forces should furnish 

 the principal material for the young 

 child's education. He must get his mental 

 set in the direction of gaining insight, first 

 into the qualities and needs of his fellows, 

 and second into the constitution of nature, 

 and the operation of her laws. Not books 

 but realities should constitute the earliest 

 nourishment of the mind. To give the 

 child a set in the beginning so that he 

 would be more interested in the symbols 

 for realities than in the realities them- 

 selves would result in arresting his mental 

 development, and in developing in him a 

 type of mind capable only of working on 

 the lower planes of mechanical association. 

 And it is easily possible to commit this 

 latter sort of crime. One who will look 

 about him in the schools will not lack for 

 evidence showing that children who have 

 early been nurtured upon symbols have 

 never gained a true feeling for or interest 

 in the real world in which they must live 

 and have their being. 



One of the most interesting phases of 

 present-day discussion of precocity is the 

 high value which the average person puts 

 upon the ability of a child to enter college 

 at an unusually early age. When a boy 

 passes college entrance examinations at the 

 age of eleven or twelve, everyone who 

 hears of it is likely to exclaim at his re- 

 markable intellectual development. But 

 one might justly say of the requirements for 

 entering college that they are mainly ver- 

 bal, conventional, and symbolic; they con- 

 cern the tools of knowledge, not true knowl- 

 edge itself. A pupil might be able to pass 

 brilliantly in every examination for admis- 

 sion to many colleges, without possessing the 

 ability to adjust himself to life efficiently. 



A boy might have to sit in a corner when 

 he was among a group of his own fellows, 

 but yet he might work out quadratic equa- 

 tions with success. A child might be quite 

 incapable of using his muscles in the per- 

 formance of any useful motor task, and 

 still he might be able to demonstrate that 

 the sum of the interior angles of a triangle 

 equals two right angles. The college en- 

 trance examinations, speaking generally 

 (it is not so true to-day as it was formerly) 

 test only a low order of knowledge, mostly 

 the variety requiring for its mastery mainly 

 mechanical memory. The colleges them- ■ 

 selves now appreciate this, and the prob- 

 lem of changing the examination system 

 so that it may measure real ability in- 

 stead of mere verbal learning is receiving 

 attention throughout the country. 



Finally, it may be said that in all times 

 students of mental development and of 

 education have recognized that if knowl- 

 edge be presented to the child in accord- 

 ance with the laws of apperception, he will 

 progress far more rapidly in comprehend- 

 ing the world around him than if he be 

 left wholly to himself, or if ignorant 

 teachers present facts to him so that he can 

 not grasp them and assimilate them. One 

 who has skill and patience in leading a 

 child always to understand what he sees 

 about him, and to discern the laws which 

 govern things, can in time give him a set 

 so that he will spontaneously come to 

 search after the real connections between 

 the objects and phenomena he observes. 

 It seems evident that this has been done to 

 some extent in the case of certain children 

 whose intellectual attainments have at- 

 tracted attention during the past two or 

 three years; and they may perhaps be 

 said to be really precocious. However, 

 there can be no doubt that many children 

 have attained just as great advancement 

 in informal education; but knowledge of 



