The Language and Mental Development of Children
- Author:
Watts, M.A. Harrap. 12s. 6d.
A late reviewer may be pardoned for not summarizing the content of this very welcome book. It is exactly described in its sub-title : An Essay in Educational Psychology. It is both a plea for verbal education and a clear-sighted estimate of its limitations. Further, it is in the I. A. Richards?C. K. Ogden tradition, lively, liberal, and learned. A glance down the index is even more illuminating than one down the table of contents ; we find Bacon, Sir F.?Ballard, P. B.?Basque?Beauty and Caesar?Castlereagh?Cause and Effect?Character ?Charles I?Chaucer and Chinese Art. Throughout, the practical problems of education are presented and analysed against the cultural background of the modern child’s life.
This is a study of the relation between experience and linguistic development and of the further experience made possible by linguistic development. The findings of educational research are examined in the light of how we may deepen appreciation of the arts and so enhance the significance of life. In these days of so much honest effort but muddled thinking about ” practical ” and ” academic ” education, about ” visual aids ” and ” learning by doing “, so clear an exposition of the function of language is particularly valuable. Mr. Watts stresses the need for teachers and others concerned with children to know what is meant by maturation, and in the course of his analysis he increases our understanding of this important concept and suggests fascinating lines of research. Too often the study of maturation is limited to observation of what children say and do and can learn ; here we are invited to speculate on what, at the conscious level, children understand or want to understand. He suggest that the content and structure of children’s language, the products of their intelligence and environment, may be regarded as guides to their emotional needs. The discussions on local idiom and on the significance to children of a colloquial and literary form of the same language are extremely stimulating ; the richness of literary allusion serves to remind the reader of the general thesis that, in the last resort, the aim of education is to increase appreciation of the subtleties of human living. The chapters on the related skills of reading and writing will, we hope, be studied by all teachers and psychologists, for here the distinction between the mechanics and the arts of reading and writing are clearly drawn. After a thorough examination of methods of teaching and techniques for measuring attainment, it is good to read that ” interest and enthusiasm are caught by a kind of psychological infection, rather than acquired by efficient instruction “. (Infection is good, very excellent good !) And further, that ” the progress … reflected in the enrichment of experience is in the final resort immeasurable “.
If one ventures any criticism of this book, it is of parts of chapter 9, on Language and Feeling. Few would quarrel with what Mr. Watts has said on this highly debatable theme, but many will wish that he had said less or more. The emphasis of the greater part of the book is on children’s intellectual development ; in this chapter we make an unexpected plunge into deeper waters. It is, of course, difficult to discuss the psychology of aesthetics without reference to the unconscious, but it is equally difficult to be, within a short space, both eclectic and convincing. May we hope that this chapter, impossibly cramping for the size of the subject, will be expanded later into a full study ? N.L.G.
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