Are Children Vegetables? A Parental Note on Education

I

THE hayfields are extensions of our lawn, or our lawn a theft from the hayfields, and from time to time a spear of timothy creeps in. Timothy, in the fertile manured fields hereabout, grows waist-high; in a wet season it will even attain the height of a tall man’s shoulder. It is interesting to watch the spear in the lawn in its summer-long struggle for self-realization. Clipped back as often as it gets a good start, the plant learns week by week to modify its aspirations and, almost, its nature. A potential giant among grasses in early May, it is a pygmy by late July. Its first answer to the discouraging environment is a frantic acceleration of growth; it is trying desperately to achieve its natural stature in the negligible interval between mowings. Thwarted again and again, it discovers that gigantism is getting it nowhere and gradually adopts a more modest aim. Taught and driven by its innate need, it seeks completion, perpetuation, on a miniature scale, and by the first week of August it presents to the hostile blade a formation as complete and mature as that of its uninhibited cousins in the field — a plant finished and perfect from root-crown to seedspike, but rearing that triumphant spike scarcely an inch and a half above the ground.

It has obeyed the law of its being; it has fulfilled itself — after a fashion.

As a father of very young children whose growth, development, and early education are matters of prime concern to me, I can never run a lawm mower over this small drama of adaptation without seeing in my act a faithful analogy of what our civilization is perpetually doing to the minds of its young. The infant intelligence enters the world with an inherent capacity for growth of which no one has ever yet ascertained the limit; and we promptly set bounds to its growth — arbitrary bounds of our own preconceiving. The young mind puts out new shoots of amazing health and vigor; and we forthwith clip them down. The mutilated organism, disillusioned and sensing that it has a hostile environment to cope with, resorts for a while to freakish and frantic behaviors; witness the number of children hardly out of the teething stage who are distraught, addled, peevish, almost impossible to interest, and incapable of amusing themselves except by experiments in deliberate mischief. (Some of them are still that way at twenty-five — forty — sixty.) In the end the child unlearns its instinct of untrammeled growth, for it finds that there is no other way to self-adjustment, survival, or any growth whatsoever. It submits itself to the conditions imposed; it curtails its aspirations; it grows here a little and there a little, stealthily, when and as it can; and presently, with luck, it attains the mental shape, the structure, the development, but not the stature, of an adult human being. When we have got through the season of running our lawn mowers over it, it is complete and mature — and a dwarf.

II

A country physician, now of blessed memory, who helped some thirty-five hundred babies into the world, — he also helped a good share of them grow up to have babies of their own, — once said soberly to me: ‘They know a lot more than we think they do.’ He had one of the thirty-five hundred on his knee at the moment; in its seventh week of life it was the victim of a parental failure to have hit on a digestible diet, and it was expressing a merited opinion with some force and lucidity.

To my sage elderly friend’s pronouncement I can still think of nothing better to say than the shambling assent I mumbled at the time: ‘I think they do.’

But the world at large does not agree with him. The branches of pseudoscience devoted to the study of the developing mind do not agree with him. Especially and above all, the sciences that ultimately determine the content and the methods of modern education do not agree with him. The conviction tacitly underlying all official opinion on this subject is that babies know a lot less than we think they do; and on this conviction all our dealing with them is based. The result is the howling imbecility of trying to build a mature civilization out of organized, enforced, artificially prolonged infantilism, a sound and healthy civilization out of mental rickets. Rickets is the characteristic infantile disease of malnutrition, and mental malnutrition is precisely the state in which we are bringing up our children, with the explicit blessing of all the accredited and certificated authorities on how they can best be brought up — the generalissimos, drum majors, and plain troopers of education.

Now any baby, like the one on my venerated friend’s knee, has all the power in the world to enforce adult mankind’s respect for its bodily digestion; but unfortunately it has no such talent for getting its own way about what shall go into its mental digestive tract. Adults put into a baby’s mind whatever they suppose to be nutritious for it, — usually what some fancied authority supposes to be so, — and the poor baby, in default and ignorance of better, just takes what he gets. Unlike the wrong physical diet, a deficiency of mental vitamins and calories lacks the most effective of all sanctions: it does not kill. Our standard, our everyday working norm, is in fact the child whom we have systematically made a victim of chronic intellectual starvation. This is an ailment from which all the babies in the civilized world suffer at one time and another. The more civilized and enlightened their particular stratum of society considers itself, the more they suffer; for the knowledgeable folk, the ones who have picked up the best current ideas of infanticulture from the highest authorities, are the most completely convinced that the new human being is a mindless vegetable, not only incapable of being taught anything of consequence for a number of years, but actually damaged by the attempt to teach him anything.

A saving remnant of us crass common folk know better, as we shall duly see.

III

It is a source of constant amazement to the thoughtful that the existence of easily tapped, still largely unutilized abilities in the young should be at once thoroughly established in the province of physical development and utterly unrecognized or denied in that of mental development.

It is now well known, for instance, that any baby not congenitally subnormal can, with some thoughtful encouragement, roller-skate almost before it can walk steadily, drink reliably out of a glass or mug at ten months or so without help, benefit by digesting much coarser food than is customarily supplied, dress itself (including buttons and ordinary knots) at half the traditional age or less, and perform a great variety of controlled motions formerly supposed to be impossible, unsuitable, or injurious. It is also known that the earliest feasible challenge to these abilities is altogether salutary. It tends powerfully toward poise and an even temper, and it helps counteract the nervous bafflement that, by all accounts, is modern childhood’s most distressing, most universal ill — the bafflement common to all, old or young, with unused powers that hunger and thirst for use.

But any suggestion that babies also possess cognate mental abilities, and that early exercise of these is quite as indispensable to full health, is instantly greeted with appalled outcries about ‘forcing,’ ‘cramming,’ ‘overtaxing the attention,’ ‘deliberate and wanton encouragement of precocity,’ and the like. How anyone, and especially a scientist, thinks he can distinguish between physical abilities that infants possess and mental ones they lack, I will not undertake to guess; everything that a child learns to do with its body involves, I should say, a tremendous leverage of mind upon matter. But discriminate we do, or think we do; and the result is our altogether artificial and crippling division of the infant’s world into obvious physical urges to be encouraged and not so obvious mental urges to be repressed or sidetracked — a body to be nurtured and a mind to be starved.

It is my steadfast conviction that all these young abilities and powers are psychophysical, all of them hungers that cannot be denied without damage to the whole organism. Anyone, psychologist or layman, who hugs the delusion that babies are vegetables ought to throw away his preconceptions long enough to study the cycle a child goes through in, for example, the forlorn struggle to convey some new perception or thought for which he has all the equipment but the words no one has taken the trouble to give him. It is a cycle that begins in eager hope and excitement, graduates through discouragement to despair, and ends in general peevishness or an enigmatic burst of rage over something apparently quite unconnected — the point at which children are slapped and shoved out of sight and sound by the outraged authors of their helplessness, who would certainly profit more by musing, better late than never, on the parable of the buried talents.

IV

It is, I think, in connection with a process just referred to, the acquisition of language, that we can most handily measure the gulf between the healthy child’s enormous appetite and the starvation diet customarily supplied by environment. Because the process of acquisition is common to all human beings except those born dumb, and because it is the one tangible accompaniment to nearly all other developmental processes, our management or mismanagement of it goes to the very taproot of education. I mean education in the deepest possible sense, as determining the kind of human beings we rear.

Contemplate, if you please, a wholly typical and very enlightening sample of how ruthlessly science and popular opinion work together to run the lawn mower over the young idea.

A friend with a sardonic taste in absurdities lately mailed me a Sunday rotogravure section containing a page of text and pictures devoted to — I quote — ‘the newest child wonder’ and captioned ‘A “Genius” by Test at the Age of 28 Months.’ A little girl of the Middle West — name and address supplied — has been put through her paces, it transpires, by a university psychologist, some of whose findings are: (1) she can talk in sentences of a dozen or thirteen words; (2) her intelligence quotient is 185, or ‘45 points higher than that normally identified with “genius”' (that is, I take it, normally identified with an abnormality); (3) her memory-span is that of a five-year-old; (4) she has picked up her remarkable mental equipment unconsciously, by close association with cultivated parents; and (5) her speaking vocabulary is 3800 words. This description of an absolutely normal little girl in a normally nutritious environment is capped by the psychologist’s asseveration that she is ‘the most remarkable child I have ever seen.’

What is truly remarkable about the exhibit, it seems to me, is the tone of incredulous amazement with which the scientist reports this instance of mental health and normal growth, coupled with the fact that a great metropolitan newspaper should regard the data reported as news. Nothing could more conclusively disclose the length to which the modern world has gone in identifying the norm with the average. So complete has this identification become that when we chance upon an instance of infant normality there is nothing left for us but to cry it up as an instance of staggering precocity and make a holy show of it, to the untold damage of the victim. Science-cum-education and the decadence of the family have brought it about between them that normal infancy is one of the most surprising phenomena in nature, especially in American urban life. When we find it we study it as intently as if it were something miraculous and end by hypnotizing ourselves and others into thinking it just that.

The whole case for precocity is given away the moment you couple the psychologist’s statement that the child is innately remarkable with his other statement that she is ‘the product of well-nigh perfect environment in the home.’ For the attributes described — particularly the twelve-word sentences and the 3800-word vocabulary — are patently impossible without such an environment, whereas with it they are strictly automatic and inevitable. What the report really boils down to is an outcry of glad wonder at the discovery of an American family fit to bring up its young. A living specimen of the dodo could not be celebrated with more excitement.

The mental development of a very young child, so far as it can be measured, is of course a direct function of (a) the kind of persons with whom he associates, (b) the amount of his association with them, and (c) the pains they take to make themselves intelligible and enjoyable to him. That is the simple principle, to our whole civilization an all-important one, to which science and education are persistently shutting their eyes.

The aberration that at present captivates educational psychology is the attempt to measure the mind in terms of its capacity — a chimera that takes principally the form of incessant experimentation with intelligence tests. Leave entirely aside the pertinent question whether any way has yet been found to test the intelligence of a human individual; leave aside the other material question how sensibly the existing tentative forms of intelligence test are applied and interpreted.¹ It is enough to remark that the whole problem of inherent capacity, or teachableness, on which the professional educator is perpetually harping, is of vanishing importance in connection with the extremely young mind, for it is a factor that simply does not come into play. Nature has seen to it that every normal baby comes into the world with many times more learning capacity than can possibly be utilized in the hours he will spend awake, or for that matter in twenty-four hours a day. The healthy baby with half a chance acquires, for instance, his first few thousand words with so unconscious and so infinitesimal an expenditure of tissue that it makes no earthly difference whether a tenth, a hundredth, or a thousandth part of his potential ability is called upon. Any attempted investigation of his total mental capacity is as academic as a dispute among hydrographic engineers about how much water could be carried by a prehistoric river channel in the Sahara Desert.

The content of a child’s mind is, be it repeated, a function and an implicit intelligence test of his environment, and we know nothing about its potential volume except by its content. All our insistence on defining the factor of inherent ability is simply a way of shirking the task of education and the responsibility of parents and dumping them back upon nature.

V

Match the Middle Western psychologist’s amazed disclosures with some data almost casually gathered by an ordinary layman from a perfectly ordinary little girl. As it happens, I kept records of the recent growth in language of a young woman whom I shall call Jane, during the interesting formative period from her sixteenth month to her second birthday. Bear in mind that Jane is no ‘genius,’ by test or otherwise, in or out of inverted commas. Her intelligence quotient is not known to be 185 or anything else, and her memory-span is certainly not that of a five-year-old, whatever that means. (A five-year-old’s memory will outreach Jane’s whole life thus far — if you give him something that seems to him worth remembering. You have to be a professional psychologist not to know that.) No claim is made for her congenital gifts except that she seems to be normally curious and acquisitive and reasonably eventempered when these instincts are gratified. The jottings that follow will, I hope, throw a small but intense spotlight on this whole matter of the connection between early mental growth and environment.

Jane’s parents talk with a fair range of diction and subject matter as ordinary household talk goes. Being too poor to delegate any of their responsibility even if they were so inclined, they are with her much more than all other persons put together. They answer her legitimate questions so far as time and their knowledge permit; from the beginning they have deferred to, but not glutted, her appetite for being read to; and they have not talked down to her. The results, so far as they touch her command of speech, have been these: —

At nearly sixteen months — to be very precise, after 476 days in this fascinatingly verbose world — her speaking vocabulary numbered 516 words. This figure excludes names of persons and places, plus some consistent sounds that were evidently words to her, plus joke words and words merely parroted, plus, of course, whatever handful of terms her scribes may have missed collecting. It includes, however, all but a negligible fraction of the English words she had then used repeatedly on her own initiative with some intelligible and consistent meaning (not necessarily the conventional adult one); and any fractional error present is necessarily on the side of understatement.

We let eight months elapse and on her second birthday once more closed the record on a speaking vocabulary as nearly complete as we could make it. This time there was no hope of reaching even an approximation by mere memory and careful listening. We actually read through the entire standard AngloAmerican vocabulary as printed in a convenient 100,000-word abridged dictionary, Webster’s Collegiate, harpooning every word that both of us could actually recall her using sensibly, without prompting, in a specific connection. A priori, we rather expected the number to approach 5000. Again with the omission of some unimportant groups, and of course not counting inflections for tense or what not, we found that the total of her words exceeded 6200 — one more small-scale illustration of the large general fact that babies know at least a little more than we think they do.

VI

Now, it is at this point that the tiresome uproar about innate precocity is certain to be raised by various classes of persons — the rich who have only a calling acquaintance with their young; the mother who, being too busy with affairs of real importance to be bothered, leaves her children’s nurture to some incompetent with no real stake in what becomes of them in the long run; the vast sorority of those who stun and abash a two-year-old with ecstatic murmurs, coos and gurgles of baby talk; the sort of psychologist who proclaims a world’s wonder every time he finds a child under three who can count twenty or compose a lucid sentence; the many dupes of this swarming breed of quack; and in general those who know little or nothing about children. It is the privilege of these to point out if they like that I am reporting an increment of nearly 5700 words in eight months, or an average of over twenty a day, and that no such rate of gain is possible for long at a time even to a highly cultivated mature mind.

To these let me say patiently, first, that I am not talking about mature cultivated minds, which have the whole nuclear stock of language already at their disposal on a scale to match their needs. I am talking about the infant mind, which is a teeming hive of brandnew, insistent perceptions and a hungry vacuum of the words to express them. What teaches babies words at a rate not approached later in life is simply the pressure of the whole stupendous volume of unknown language. For the benefit of the skeptics and in vindication of the infant intelligence, which is one of the most terrific engines in the universe and at the same time one of the least used, I am now going to add some very specific notes on where and how Jane came by large blocks of her words.

Suppose I approach the issue by asking what would be your offhand impression of a vocabulary fairly well represented by the following items taken quite at random: compliment, coffin, jig, dainties, erected, bachelor, grin, espied, petticoats, slut, forlorn, mischievous, quench, playfellows, slit, lingered, monument, lackey, chandler, clouting, vinegar, bitterly, pothered, cockleshells, betwixt, ambles, amiable, gliding, broth, utmost, gulp, deuce, victuals, buckram, constable, alarmed, monstrous, trice, gammon, charming, cravat, rout (noun), sumptuous, echoes, maintain, waggled, yonder, wench, vintner, zany.

Should you, perhaps, characterize such a vocabulary as vigorous, lively, noticeably archaic, slightly on the Elizabethan side, indubitably adult, and quite, quite foreign to the cosmos of any ordinary two-year-old? That, I am afraid, would have been about my own snap judgment of it two years ago. Well, the words cited are, one and all, from a literary source familiar to most of us long before any other; a source our familiarity with which goes back to the very cradle. They are from that classic for weanlings, Mother Goose.

Before me lies Mr. William Rose Benét’s recent Mother Goose with the exquisite and lavish pictures by Roger Duvoisin. ‘A Comprehensive Collection of the Rhymes,’ Mr. Benét calls it. Comprehensive it is, but that is not to say complete. It does not contain anywhere near all the Mother Goose a baby may easily know, or even all that Jane, at two, did know. Yet its vocabulary, I find by count, is well over 2000 words. It happens to be one of Jane’s favorite volumes. In the regular course of nightly readings at bedtime she absorbed it whole within a fortnight or so of publication. Babies treat such things on contact exactly as the dry sponge treats water, and with just about a sponge’s awareness of the absorptive process. A staggering proportion of Mother Goose consists, as you have probably noted from my random selections, of words that the very young modern child is likely to hear first from that source. (There are, indeed, many that he will probably not hear at all from any other.) In short, several familiar volumes of Mother Goose alone, swallowed whole in the second year of life, will account for a startling fraction of my subject’s 6200 words — conceivably between a third and a half of them.

VII

There you have one clue. Consider one more, also typical.

Jane at two was spending, every few days, a quiet half-hour foraging among the children’s tables of a memorial library in a town where her parents were then visiting. She picked out for her parents to take home a new edition of The Pied Piper of Hamelin; it was no nursery abridgment, but the full Browning text — also, as it happened, with Duvoisin’s superb illustrations. When a baby levies demands of this sort you comply if you have arrived at the beginning of wisdom; otherwise you say, as indeed the librarian said earnestly that afternoon: ‘Oh no, you won’t be ready for this for years yet. It is much too old.’ (You hear the whirring of the lawn mower?) By request the poem was read to Jane that night. It runs to 300-odd lines, and to read it at all expressively takes well over twenty minutes. On the next five nights in a row she also demanded what she insisted on calling ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin-in-Brunswick-byfamous-Hanover-city — Rats! ’ Late on the sixth night, being taken up sound asleep (you still have to do this with twoyear-olds who are not precocious, whatever the size of their vocabularies), she murmured clearly: —

She had most of The Pied Piper where it would say itself over in her head; you could start her off anywhere in it, and, asleep or awake, she would go on for at least a few phrases, and oftener for many lines. This is, of course, the way a child knows whatever it knows: by heart. The vocabulary of The Pied Piper, strikingly odd to an adult, is the more readily absorbable by an infant for that very reason. Also, the vocabulary is notably large in proportion to the total wordage: just over 850 words, if our count is correct, of which about 325 were previously quite unknown to Jane. Thus, in something under two hours scattered over less than a week she picked up more than 300 words from one narrative poem alone; and of course they were only a fraction of what she picked up from all sources in that same week.

Even one of the most vapid items in her small library, a Beatrix Potter animal story, yields such perfectly good adult words as elegant, uncomfortable, unsteadily, trod, smears, rockery, degrees, difficulties, advanced, dignity, various, repose, extraordinary, tremendous, and affronted. At least six or seven of those overrated, overwhimsical stand-bys, the Just-So Stories of Kipling, fit the preschool years much better than the later ages for which they were ostensibly written, — Jane at two had long known one of them by heart and others nearly so, — and they are spattered with dozens of such forty-five-calibre words as inordinate, infinite, and vitiate, most of them artfully embedded in contexts that make them chime unforgettably in ear and memory, at the same time irresistibly implying their sense.

Whatever one reads in the presence of a listening child, be it appropriate or not, intelligible or mystifying, is to him a source of words; and I have sometimes fancied that the more mystifying it is, the more words the child will take a fancy to.

VIII

But the preëminent source is, naturally, the talk of adults, whether to the child or to each other within the child’s hearing. If you do not talk down to a child, it will assuredly talk up to you; that is the whole story. If our ‘child psychologists’ want to unearth real miracles to publicize, let them find the infant prodigy who has mastered 3800 words without any traceable access to them, or, per contra, the not subnormal child who has had every linguistic encouragement and is still comparatively wordless. While they are searching for these improbables, let them intermit their astonishment at the intelligible twelve-word sentences of twenty-eightmonths-old children who speak by the only usage they ever hear.

As a matter of fact, among the 40,000,000 of us who live in small communities off the beat of Binet-Terman tests and child wonders, there are thousands of households in which these psychologists would find themselves shattered with astonishment practically all the time. Jane, being asked at two years whether she was going to ride that afternoon, replied: ‘Yes, but not in your carriage [i.e., ‘my carriage’; this early pronoun trouble is almost universal], because Mr. D— has it in A—[a neighboring town], to fix it so that Janie can ride in it more comfortably.’ That is stenographically exact, and it is the way the speaker had habitually talked for months past. To have talked any other way would have proved her either defective or remarkably perverse. She had been with us when we delivered the carriage to the upholsterer five weeks earlier; his name, that of the town, and the purpose of the errand had happened not to be mentioned in the interim. This is a very conservative sample of the way children remember such things as interest or please them, and it is in no way unlike the conversation you can have any day with farm children of decent stock, who are still brought up to notice things, know things, do things, and be generally self-reliant.

We have known a number of twoyear-olds with patently larger vocabularies than Jane’s, and known of many others; but most of them did not show the rugged physical development, the sunny temper, the joie de vivre and delight in running wild that I should want to see in them if they were mine. We have known, naturally, a good many with much smaller vocabularies, and some with nearly none; but they belonged to gross and ignorant households or to ones that transact their domestic business in grunts and growls, make two non-interpenetrating worlds of the living room and the nursery, give over their offspring to hirelings, or cripple their self-confidence by babying, by indifference, or by constant appeals to fear — households that, in ways complicated or simple, skimp and starve their young.

Of this larger group, by the way, quite the most interesting specimen I ever knew was the infant son of fantastically rich parents — a boy of obviously exceptional keenness who would nevertheless not utter a word in any one of the several languages familiar to his parents, though he communed with great fluency for hours every day of his life with one person, an elderly nurse, in some bizarre form of jabber of which none but those two could interpret a syllable. His parents, when they were not traveling abroad or visiting one of their other estates, would have been shocked at the idea that they were neglecting him; the hour or so a week that they found for him was split up into so many brief encounters as to give them the sense of being constantly with him, though to an outsider the whole relationship seemed to consist of mere friendly overtures. They looked fondly forward to the time when he would be ready to speak their thoughts in their language; they counted on his turning to them above all others and spontaneously awarding them a son’s confiding intimacy; and I suppose it never crossed their minds that they had incurred in his behalf, all told, scarcely a fair sample of the characteristic bother of being parents. Unless they have more luck than most parents ever enjoy without putting in hard, regular work at their job, they may still be waiting twenty years hence for their son to be their son; and late in life they will conceivably discover that this business of infanticulture is one more of the many provinces of human life in which, if you have not sown, you cannot count on reaping.

IX

Be the two-year-old vocabulary 9000 words, 6000, 3000, 300, or none at all, the child’s command of speech is assuredly the product of exposure, of opportunity; indeed, what else could it be in a world in which we do not create the words we use, but merely learn them as circumstances bring them our way? These matters seem to be much better understood by the common folk, who begin seriously to wonder if a child is ‘quite right’ or ‘all there’ if he does not walk alone and say a good many words at twelve months, than by those who have sat at the feet of science and can speak the patter of pedagogy.

The official view of what is normally to be expected of the young is astoundingly incorporated in a press dispatch about a hapless farm child whose parents were hoping against hope, after she had strayed off in zero weather, that some passing stranger had picked her up. ‘Being only three and a half,’ the dispatch explains, ‘she is of course too young to give her parents’ name to anyone who may have found her.’ One of our acquaintances, an old, old lady with a farm-and-district-school background, shudders sympathetically over the facts, but pity does not keep her from adding editorially: ‘Pshaw! It does n’t seem as if her parents could be quite bright, does it?’ Not the child, you perceive, but the parents. Hers is the pronouncement of popular common sense, of the folk assumptions.

The same old lady happened to pronounce the last word on Jane, unconsciously supplying still another contrast with the scientifically enlightened view. Two-year-old Jane, on plunging gayly out into a smart shower, flings back over her shoulder from the doorway: —

(Mother Goose has some apposite and quotable word for about every situation in life.) The old lady, circumspectly waiting until the door is closed, murmurs: ‘H’m! A nice bright little girl, is n’t she?’ — which is the exact outcome that science, with all its apparatus of statistics and Terman tests, would have reached in connection with the Middle Western little girl already described, if science but had our old lady’s horse sense.

It so happened that Jane was then fresh from her latest encounter with her friend the librarian — the one who had protested that The Pied Piper of Hamelin was much too old for her. This young woman had now, by interested questioning, discovered the thoroughness and dispatch with which Jane had taken possession of Browning’s jingle. She burst out: ‘But how too perfectly marvelous! ’

What the old lady said was, as usual, exact and judicious. The librarian, I am sorry to say, was permitting herself to talk the standardized nonsense that is supposed to be pleasing to all parents. (No doubt it does please some.) She had imbibed her ideas from the best pedagogical soothsayers; also, she was then locked in a hopeless struggle to get sevenand eight-year-olds to prefer Grimm, Andersen, and Uncle Remus to Thornton Burgess, in the face of what was being made of their minds by public schools conducted according to those same ideas. For progressive education has reached that community at last, with the result that plenty of thirdgrade youngsters do not know the alphabet and cannot read a monosyllable. (A decade ago they would have stayed in the first grade until they could read simple English.) The librarian’s notion of what can be done with children is naturally prejudiced by her valiant but unavailing endeavors with these starvelings.

In any event, if you seriously want usable knowledge of what children are, — what they know and what can reasonably be expected of them, — you can get the farthest the fastest by resorting, not to the psychological clinic, but to the home. You must consult such parents as have the habit of observation coupled with enough impersonal detachment to allow for their natural affections and prejudices. It is in the nature of things that babies are not telling all they know to comparative strangers, especially strangers who want to itemize their mental contents for professional purposes. The persons who can be looked to for knowledge of a child, if anybody can, are those who have watched him daily from birth. Rely upon it, for instance, that the twenty-eight-monthsold vocabulary of 3800 words reported by our psychologist falls far short of the subject’s actual words if the psychologist himself did the investigating, whether he tried to overhaul her entire stock of speech or merely applied one of the rough-and-ready vocabulary tests now in favor.²

There are a good many scientifically established ‘facts’ that no authority on earth can impose upon the layman who keeps his eyes open, and most of the current dogmas about intelligence are among them. It is, for instance, accepted among scientists — universally, so far as I am aware — that very young children cannot discriminate color. For the benefit of a psychiatrist acquaintance who is perfectly certain of this fact you send, say, a fifteen-months-old child into the next room to get a red bead. (I did this myself.) She comes back with a green one, and the psychiatrist, fairly enough, chuckles. But the moment his back is turned you hear her murmuring over and over to herself: ‘Green — green — green.’ She was just having her little joke — babyhood’s inveterate, often useful joke of pretending to misunderstand what is wanted. She knows the primary colors as well as you do, and knew them before she had any words to match. And she had the words to match long before you suspected it.

Yes, Doctor G—, they know a lot more than we think they do — and what are we going to do about it?

X

One fairly important by-product of painstaking liberality with a child in the matter of words and books is the ease with which he presently teaches himself to read without being aware of it.

Suppose he possesses a goodly number of the miniature books, 32mo or smaller, now being printed with only a few words or lines of print on each page, opposite the relevant picture. (The idea is at least as old as the earliest primers.) The works of Beatrix Potter, How Percival Caught the Python, and the classic Little Black Sambo are such books. The Oxford University Press issues many tiny ones in inexpensive paper covers. The child has not owned them long before he knows them verbatim and knows to the syllable what is said on the page opposite any given picture. You find one day that the print itself has become a picture to him — a typographic picture of the words he knows, just as often-seen, often-heard pages of music become to him so many pictures of ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ or ‘Rolling Down to Rio.’ Recognition of these words in another context and without reference to a picture is an almost transitionless step, one that he takes himself. He will accumulate thus, perhaps without your suspecting it, a substantial reading vocabulary, even if he does not know the separate letters or a phonetic principle. When, a little later, you explain the rudiments of phonetics he seizes upon them hungrily, for they connect with something he already knows; he is aware of the need before the knowledge is offered him.

Any pedagogic superstition to the contrary notwithstanding, it is the line of least resistance for a child so exposed to learn reading shortly after his third birthday, and certainly well before his fourth. Other children, knowing the letters first from their blocks or what not, easily learn to read at the same age by copying words on slate or paper, or by typewriting words of their own choice in response to letter-by-letter dictation. Either way, there is your battle of education well begun and half won in spare minutes, years before any commonly available system of education has even dreamed of taking up the gage. It is inconceivable that any normal person brought up in a well-managed, reasonably efficient civilization should have as an adult the faintest recollection of learning to read. For our part, we have to smile wryly every time we come across one of those solemnly ponderous arguments in which educators uphold the very latest ingenious method of sugar-coating the primer for six-yearolds, with bitterly sarcastic denunciations of the next-to-the-latest method. It is to our shame as parents, the shame of the culture upon which we shiftlessly dump the natural burdens of parenthood, that the methods have to be devised, the silly wranglings over them deferentially hearkened to.

But the overwhelming reason for helping our offspring realize the natural appetites of their minds is that such realization is indispensable to their growth, their happiness, their all-around health, without which any dream of a healthy civilization is the delusion of making a stream run uphill from its source.

If there is any suggestive value whatever in our own experience, the one golden rule of child-rearing, the allinclusive principle, is simply this: that to expect too much of our young is an impossibility. Their needs are always silently going ahead of our hopes, even before we have time to get the hopes formulated.