and what magic will guard the modern man against the propaganda of
militarism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism?
The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can be taught
sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. There are many
books on mind and memory training, some of which are useful, and some of
which are trash. There is an English system widely advertised, called
"Pelmanism," of which I have personally made no test, but it has won
endorsements of a great many people who do not give their endorsements
lightly.
This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in medicine, or
in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount of charlatanry,
but there is also genuine knowledge being patiently accumulated and
standardized. When the United States government had to have an army in a
hurry it did not make its millions of young men into teamsters or
aviators at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction
times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently I visited
the Whittier Reform School in California, where delinquent boys are
educated by the state. A boy had been set to work in the tailor shop,
and it had been found that he was unable to make the buttons and the
buttonholes of a coat come in the right place. For nine years the state
of California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been laboring to
teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; the effort had cost
some five thousand dollars, to say nothing of all the coats which were
spoiled, and all the mental suffering of the victim and his teachers.
Finally someone persuaded the state of California to spend a few
thousand dollars and install a psychological bureau for the purpose of
testing all the inmates of the institution; so by a half hour's
examination the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective.
Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was only eight
years old, and so he would never be able to achieve the feat of making
buttons and buttonholes meet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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