Language and Speech Training Stories
MENTAL WELFARE 49 :Type: Book Reviews & Abstracts :Author: R. K. and M. I. R. Polkinghorne. Univer- sity of London Press, Ltd. Pp. 238. 3/6.
This book contains a number of useful sug- gestions for the teacher who finds some diffi- culty in formulating an independent scheme for language training.
The age of the children for whom the book !s intended ranges from five to eight years. The work is divided into months, each section containing four stories, followed by various language training and activity exercises. The animal stories are those most calculated to hold the interest of young children. Some of the remainder are rather trivial and the graduation in difficulty is not very apparent. One could wish that the authors had used a few of the nursery ” classics ” as the basis for the excellent language training and vocabu- lary exercises which follow. These form the most useful section of the book, and show a Welcome realisation of the need in the infant school for some very definite training in word values.
Speech and action are correlated and the child’s natural love of activity will find full expression in carrying out the work planned in the section entitled ” Things to Do.”
D.E.W. Hostels in London for Professional and Working Women and Girls (Fifth edition). Compiled by the Central Council for the Social Welfare of Women and Girls in Lon- don. Price 1 /-.
Sir Oscar Warburg contributes a preface to this handbook, which has been issued to assist girls and women to obtain suitable hostel ac- commodation in London at a cost of ?2 2s. Od. or less per week. The addresses of some 150 hostels are given, together with a useful list ?f ” Emergency Addresses,” to which women requiring temporary lodging may apply, and Particulars of the Central Information Bureau, 53, Victoria Street, S.W.I, and its activities.
invaluable handbook for every social Worker concerned with the welfare of women and girls. Love : An Outspoken Guide to Happy Marriage. By X. Ray. C. W. Daniel Co. 1 /- net.
In the few pages of this little book, the author attempts a summary of humanity’s emotional experiences where the affections are concerned. Some of the chapters seem ad- dressed to parents, others to young men and women who may some day enter married life; this divided aim detracts from their value and makes the book in part inappropriate to one or the other group. There is no lack of plain speaking, but one asks oneself, for whose bene- fit exactly is this analysis of states of feeling and physical conditions, and will such an analysis really make love stronger and more enduring ?
General Principles of Human Reflexology : An Introduction to the Objective Study of Personality. By V. M. Bechterev. Trans- lated by Emma and William Murphy. Lon- don : Jarrolds, 1933. Pp. 467. Price 21/-. The work of the celebrated neurologist, Pavlov, on animals, has given us in terms of the nervous system, a schematic explanation of behaviour, and the experiments of his pupil, Krasnagorski, has extended the doctrine of conditioned reflexes to the behaviour of child- ren. In Pavlov’s latest writings an attempt was made to explain all animal behaviour, in- cluding man, as a growing complexity in the pattern of reflexes conditioned by experience and experiment. But Pavlov never ventured to construct a more philosophic theory of men- tal activity on the basis of experiment. Pro- fessor Bechterev, world famous for his re- searches in the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, has in this work attempted to construct an Objective Psychology which bears close affinities with the work of Pavlov. He is, however, not committed to a thorough-going Behaviorism which must necessarily follow if we accept the fundamental axioms which Pav- lov’s work presupposes. While Pavlov and the Behaviorists are satisfied with a pure des- cription of behaviour in terms of muscle movements initiated by the brain, Bechterev refers all neural activity back to some funda- mental energy in the universe of which neural energy is but a special form. Like them, how- ever, he does not allow for the existence of a special mental energy, but as he says, his Re- flexology ” draws its general premises from the final generalisations of the natural sciences.” He contents himself with defining energy as the initiator of movement. Although he terms this neuro-psychic, he is against any form of interactionism, and what we call sub- jective phenomena are merely a function of the resistance met by neuro-psychic energy in its normal flow and outlet. Subjectivity, there- fore, is nothing more than those processes in- itiated by resistance within the organism, or in other words, they are nothing more than interpolated processes between stimulus and response.
Throughout the book there is a refreshing adherence to the fundamental laws of Nature, made clear to us in the natural sciences, and from chapter to chapter Bechterev uses with persistence, if not always with accuracy, such terms as the Conservation of Energy, Economy (Chatelier’s Principle Theory), and Periodicity or Rhythm. In this respect his philosophy of the Personality bears some resemblance to the recent work of Raymond Wheeler in America, but unlike the latter, who is prepared, we be- lieve, to accept the higher manifestations of the organism as ” Emergence,” Bechterev would not allow for any difference whatsoever in kind as between the highest and the -lowest actions of the human organism. The result of this is a rather naive and facile explanation of such processes as Creativeness which he ex- plains on the basis of so-called Mimico-Somatic activities.
One feels, in reading this book, a profound admiration for an attempt at systematisation in terms of brain process, but careful reading dis- closes from time to time some of the funda- mental axioms of the Marxian dialectic, for al- though he strangely enough admits uniqueness in the work of the greatest creators, he states that all creativeness is ” intended for the social environment ” and ” that every artist is also the child of his own time and reflects through the glass of his social environment in which he lives the climate around him.” This by 110 means vitiates his principles but it is important to read his work in the light of what is after all an attitude towards human experience, which is admittedly largely social.
A work of this kind?a great work?necess- arily calls for a more extended and detailed critical analysis, and one closes the book having been enriched by much thought, many valuable facts and some stimulating, if pro- vocative, arguments. E.M.
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