The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard.
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM. :Author: Thomas Edward Shields, Ph.D., LL.D., Associate Professor of Psychology in the Catholic University of America. Washington, D. C. The Catholic Education Press, 1909. Pp. 296.
This little book bears eloquent testimony to the possibility of training backward children, for it is the autobiography of one who was himself a backward boy. The introduction tells us, “The story in its entirety is a faithful transcript of the record that was burned into the heart and brain of the omadhaun and read by himself years after he had fought his way back to the company of normal and intellectual men.” The later fame and high position of the dullard give a vivid interest to his story. It is modestly offered as a contribution toward the solution of the backward child problem. To give it popular interest, it is cast in the form of a dialogue,?not the frozen utterances of some Philomathus, Theophile, or Philosoph, but the lively eloquence of the Studevans, O’Briens, Russells, and Shannons. They sit around the wood fire and talk modern psychology, humanized by the interest in school-boys and girls. They know what is going on, discuss familiarly The Psychological Clinic, and note with approbation Dr Witmer’s work for the last thirteen years at the University of Pennsylvania in the training of backward children, as well as other movements of like nature.
The story of the dullard gets well started in Chapter VII. The first stage is downward,?and three years of school training result in turning a fairly bright and healthy boy into an imbecile. The trouble began in jumping the pupil from Wilson’s Second Reader into the National Third Reader in order to save the teacher the work of holding an extra class session. From that moment the “humiliation of defeat began to settle into a permanent distaste for reading and a permanent discouragement concerning my ability in that direction.” Although there was for a time a fair degree of efficiency in other branches, the failure in reading gave rise to a growing “sense of shame and discouragement.” This, coupled with the teasing of the other boys, led to the removal of the dullard from school at the age of nine. At that time he was growing rapidly. At thirteen he weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. At fourteen he was five feet ten inches tall, his adult height. The lack of balance between physical growth and mental development, described by the author as “alternating phases,” was in his opinion the real cause of his backwardness, augmented by bad pedagogical methods. Rapid physical growth made it possible for the overgrown boy to be put to work on the farm. This proved his salvation. Good heredity, a strong body, five meals a day, open-air work, deep sleep, and mental rest were his, until he awoke from his long intellectual slumber and began his own eduation at sixteen. A brief experience of school at the age of thirteen had meanwhile served to establish more firmly the belief in his hopeless stupidity.
His self-education began with perceptions of numbers, not as abstract relations, but as bushels of wheat, sacks of corn, fence boards, and barn timbers. His study of mechanics began with an “old oaken bucket” swung from an iron pulley, progressed through the grindstone stage to the mechanism of a reaper, to the profound discovery that the turning of a small gear moved a larger one more slowly but with greater power, and finally broke out into an ecstasy of delight over his invention of a stump-puller. The success of the stump-puller, though reckoned of little merit by the family, lodged in the dullard’s mind and stuck there. That success brought self-reliance; it nerved him to withstand an elder brother’s domination; it fired him to go to the city alone and visit every machine shop and ask to be taken on as an apprentice.
That he was refused is not to be wondered at, for at sixteen his vocabularly was so small that he could not tell what he needed to finish his machine, and had to go all the way to the city in order to point out the ropes, chains, pins, gears, etc., which he required. The family’s fondest hope was that he might some day be able to support himself by farming. Nobody talked to him seriously. He had forgotten all he had learned in school. He could not multiply, though he could add a little; and he could neither read nor write. He learned to read only through heroic effort, stimulated by his curiosity to know the remainder of a thrilling Irish story, which his brother refused to continue reading to him, leaving the robbers in a cave in the midst of a highly exciting melee. However, the print was large, the haymow offered a safe retreat, and there in secret the “omadhaun” laboriously took his first real lesson in reading. The Fire Side Companion, and New York Ledger furnished forth his further instruction, after a prelimiary course in “Buffalo Bill,” “Rosebud Bob,” and the “The Giant of the Gulch.” Of these he says, “These stories were short; the print was large; the paper poor. In fact they were cheap in every sense of the word. The language was ungrammatical and vulgar; the moral tone was low; but they were all action . . There was not a dull line for me nor a passage above my comprehension.” Eventually the book “Self Raised, or From the Depths,” gave him the final and mighty impulse which bore him out upon the course of intellectual and moral training which resulted in an honored and useful life.
Dr Shields in his introduction voices the growing protest that is being heard throughout this country against limiting the work of the public school to the “three R’s.” He shows that the school must take the place of the industrial home of the family, which has been swept away by modern economic conditions. Yocational studies must be added to the school curriculum. His story of the dullard’s progress lends strength to this modern movement in education. We are more doubtful of his attitude concerning the value of race customs and denominational training. In a preface to the book, Dr O’Connell, Rector of the Catholic University, calls attention to the earnest efforts which the Catholic Church has made from the earliest times to bring the blessings of education within the reach of those to whom nature seemingly refuses the power or the opportunity of learning. As Dr O’Connell observes, we have enjoyed in the past the benefits that accrue from the earnest efforts of the Church to alleviate the miseries of humanity. What we have missed in the past, and what we must strive for to-day, is to bring scientific knowledge to bear upon the solution of the problem. Neither in this country nor abroad have church schools or charity schools been distinguished by a sounder scientific foundation than non-denominational schools. If the church and charitable institutions are able to sympathize with and procure the best that modern science affords, they may be expected to do all the better work by reason of the enthusiasm and social interest that oftentimes characterize the religious impulse. A. H.
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