The Normal Child and Primary Education
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM.
- Author:
Arnold L. Gesell and Beatrice
Chandler Gesell. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1913. Pp. x+342. Illustrated.
“What is a normal child?” ask Dr and Mrs. Gesell in their preface. “The prevailing standards consciously or unconsciously adopted in answer to this question are sadly slipshod. It is carelessly assumed,” they observe, “that the normal child is the average child. The sciences of education have not, however, worked out a detailed psychophysical portrait of the normal child, and at present we have more adequate pictures of types of subnormality than we have of normality. There are over seventeen millions of pupils, the majority under ten years of age, enrolled in the public schools of our country. A small fraction is in special classes for the backward and defective.”
So far there is no exception to be taken to what these authors have told us, but when they add, “The rest are all normal,” we can only retort that we heartily wish they were. The normal child is not to be defined by so hasty a method of separation. Besides the small fraction of the school population in classes for the backward and defective, there is a much larger fraction still encumbering the grades of many town and city schools, either because there are no organized classes for the backward to which these children may be sent, or because the school system lacks the services of a clinical psychologist to sort out the backward and defective from the normal. If the authors have failed to offer an adequate definition of the normal child, they have succeeded better in presenting “a psychophysical portrait” of him. They have depicted him as passing through the various processes of primary education and as responding to stimuli in ways recognized as normal. From all this one may construct workable standards of normality for children, while awaiting an exact definition from other sources.
Dr and Mrs. Gesell remark that they have not “written for the technical clinician, but for the elementary school teacher, and of course for other traditional guardians of children, as mothers, aunts, some fathers, supervisors, and childstudy and reading circles.” This being the case, they have done well in adding a selected reading list covering seven pages and containing references to yet fuller bibliographies.
Part one of “The Normal Child and Primary Education” is concerned with an historical introduction; part two, the genetic background; part three, the pedagogy of the primary school; and part four, the conservation of child life, starting with Pestalozzi and coming down to Jane Addams as the present day protectress of the rights of youth. The first three parts are able compilations of data from numerous and widely scattered sources. Part three in particular contains much valuable material of practical use to teachers and parents. An appendix on the Montessori kindergarten discusses this latest development in the education of little children, and ends with a warning which cannot be too often repeated,?”But the fulfilment of this principle in our country needs skilful personalities more than it needs didactic apparatus. Apparatus without trained personality in ‘the directress’ will be insidiously dangerous.”
A. T. (52)
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