Personality Adjustments of School Children
EE VIEWS :Author: Caroline B.
Zachary. New York: Scribners, 1929, 304 p.
In the past the elementary school has emphasized only the more intellectual aspects of education and has neglected what the author considers as emotional education. An increasing number of schools are now adding to their staff a visiting teacher whose duties are numerous and varied but which usually combine those of school psychologist, social worker and any other which may arise. The visiting teacher by the method of individual treatment offers an opportunity for the development of those phases of education which have been neglected. This book contains five case histories written from the point of view of the visiting teacher and they are good examples of social investigation. They are full, sometimes to the point of redundancy, and in some cases might be given with more of an effort to distinguish between the important and the unimportant. In each case the underlying mechanisms involved in the failure of the individual child to make a satisfactory adjustment are discussed. The concepts of psychoanalysis such as compensation and identification as well as the concepts of behaviorism are made to serve for these explanations. A case of polyglandular dystrophy is described to show the relation of this important branch of medicine to maladjustment.
In an attempt to understand the mechanisms involved in cases of maladjustment such as those described in this book it is unfortunate that we do not always have a method of checking and control to verify theories. This fact can be illustrated by a criticism often offered in connection with cures effected by psychoanalysis. In these cases one does not doubt that the symptoms described the psychoanalyst existed, nor indeed that the patient recovered, but whether the mechanisms by which he recovered are those suggested by the analyst is not so certain. It is somewhat like a journey of which we know the starting point and the end, the intervening distance, however, was traversed in the dark and is consequently obscure. In her chapter on the Elements of Personality the author takes the position that personality is made up largely, if not entirely, of the individual’s habitual adjustments to other individuals and to social situations, a point of view* which is widely accepted. The book is a contribution to the rapidly growing literature on mental hygiene and lays special stress on the contribution which the school can make to the mental hygiene movement. It shows the importance of past efforts at adjustment for the understanding of present maladjustment and consequently the value of complete histories. It is written in a relatively simple and readable manner which will make it available to a large number of readers who are not specialists.
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