Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
IV. The fourth cause of degeneration of school English is the growing
preponderance of concrete words for designating 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. Now it has gone so far that not
only 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 artifacts, globes, maps, sand
boxes, drawing. Miss Margaret Smith[7] 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 dealing 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, which, 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 associations
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 requires abstraction and
generalization. Without this latter element higher mental development
is lacking because this means more than word-painting the material
world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account