Individual Studies, Their Educational Significance
- Author:
Lucy Fildes, B.A.
(Holder of Board of Control Studentship at the Psychological Laboratory, Cambridge).
There can be no doubt that one of the main educational problems of the dayis to be found in the difficulty experienced in trying to bring many of our children up to the average level of intellectual attainment required by the school.
In all schools of the present day there are to be found children, often many children, who, though not mentally defective in the usual sense of that term, since they can cope successfully enough with the ordinary needs and conditions of living even in a complex modern society, are yet unable to compete successfully with their fellows at school. They are ‘ dull,’ ‘ backward,’ ‘ retarded ‘ in school work, while only too often the result of their school dullness becomes evident in their relation to life outside.
And it is not difficult to see how such conditions arise. The insistence on Compulsory Education (to use that word in its limited sense of receiving School Instruction) and the ever increasing social demand1 for what such education can give, has, during the last forty years, brought a large mass of mankind under conditions which it had never before been required to face. Successful dealing with these conditions requires the existence of mental capacities of a very special kind. If indeed intelligence is to be considered as the power which makes for ‘ general adaptability to new problems and conditions of life ‘ we must, it is true, regard such failure to satisfy the conditions involved in school work as failure in intelligence. But, on the other hand, school requirements,?especially in so far as they involve the fundamental arts of reading and writing and the ability to remember facts, on which things, primarily a child’s capacity tends to be judged?involve so limited and so specialized a type of mental functioning that it seems hardly fair to regard a child who fails in them, and in them alone, as truly deficient in intelligence.
It may indeed be that the general intelligence of such a child is of a low order. He cannot adapt himself as well as the majority. But, if this is so, he needs all the more help and encouragement in otder that he may become a useful member of society. In many cases, however, a low level of general intelligence is not the real cause of the trouble. Frequently the children suffer, not so much from general mental weakness as from special disabilities in certain mental powers,?such disabilities being of the kind which will interfere in particular with their acquirement of School knowledge, especially when the knowledge is conveyed under the ordinary conditions of class teaching.
In considering this problem, we need to bear in mind the extreme complexity of our mental functioning. It seems only too difficult to grasp the fact?a fact of enormous practical importance for the teacher?that there are very many ways as a rule of doing one thing?and that what appears to be the longest and most tedious path to one individual, may to another be the quickest way of reaching the desired goal.
Given a child with a very poor power of recognition of forms visually presented, it is useless to assert that for him ‘ reading is essentially a visual act,’ especially in its early stages. Nor, given a child with a poor motor memory, can we teach successfully on the assumption that ‘ writing is a motor process.’ The activities of reading and writing are so complex and the processes involved in them so many, that there are countless possibilities of failure for the individual. For, while most individuals can use any or all of the possible processes, there are those who can progress only in one way.
And this fact illustrates two points which must be borne in mind in this connection. We have seen that the backward or dull child may suffer from slight general intellectual deficiency, or from some specific disability, which tends to render difficult the acquirement of one of many forms of school knowledge. It seems clear therefore that what is most needed in such cases is the realization of such specific defects, and also of special abilities?if such exist?? as the primary basis of educational work. The child dull generally, and the child with specific failings, both need individual study if the greatest possible help is to come from us to them.
For they, finding the work difficult, need most to have it presented to them in ways which they can best grasp. And this is where the system of class teaching, with its insistence 011 a uniform result, and its use of a uniform method, fails. Imagine the effect of attempting to teach a child who has a very bad memory for sounds, or a very poor appreciation of sound differences, to read on a phonic method. And imagine still more the feelings of the child when he is expected to keep pace with a class normal in sound appreciation, it is small wonder if he despair of ever learning to read. Or think of the unnecessary difficulties put in the way of a child with a very poor power of form recognition, if he is taught to write on a visual method only.
If, as has been shown to be the case, it is possible in a month to teach a child to write the alphabet from memory on a motor method, after instruction over a period of six years on usual methods had failed to get a correct reproduction of more than two letters, it is surely worth while at the beginning of instruction to try to adapt the methods of teaching to the needs of the child, and’ so avoid such waste.
Above all, it is perhaps necessary to get away from the idea that any method is in itself right. The Tightness or wrongness of a method depends on its success in getting what we want, i.e., it depends on its power to satisfy the psychological needs of the individual concerned. These as we have seen, are not the same or all. It is true that for class teaching, some special method must be chosen, but it is equally true that the greater number of children taught (consistently on almost any method will in the end1 learn what is required1 of them. But for those who find the chosen way too hard it may be that another, in itself even a less desirable way, will be the better.
It appears then that what is needed primarily for children of the dull, backward, and retarded type, is individual teaching, and teaching in small selected groups on lines which have been shown to be those along which they can most readily develope. And such teaching is not waste. The waste is to condemn children to sit for hours every day listening to things they cannot grasp, or even to consider as some tend to do>, that because they fail under class instruction, they therefore should no longer be taught at all those things in which they have failed?a fatal policy if their failures lie in the instrumental subjects of education. For in such cases the difficulty is not merely that the child has not learnt what was required! of him. It is that only too often he has learnt what was not required?to consider himself a failure in the ordinary social order?with the resulting tendency to make a life for himself outside it. Developing no interests in School, and failing to put the powers which he has to any use there, he will either become far more incompetent than he need or will devote his energies to other and often less legitimate employments. He will become either deliquent, or seriously lacking in self-reliance arid initiative, tending in either case to be a burden on the community.
It is often argued that such effort, i.e., the effort and time necessary for individual instruction should be devoted to those children more likely to show a good return?viz., to the average or normal child. And it is true that the average child does suffer considerably from class teaching, but it suffers in a different way. The very fact that a child is average and normal means that he has no special disability, and therefore does not need special help in order to enable him to learn what others learn, and to become an individual conscious of his own power. For him the large class is a hindrance, a failure in educational opportunity. But what he needs is not so much individual instruction as the chance for an increased amount of individual work.
Further, it must be borne in mind, that even for the backward, special individual instruction is not of itself sufficient to attain its end; the instruction must be given along lines which the child can follow. It demands as a preliminary what we so sadly lack in our educational practice?i.e., the individual study of the child in the sense of the study of the way in which a given child can and does perform a given piece of work. Without such study, individual teaching may be as useless and wasteful as class teaching. Having the child alone will not enable him to learn on a method which is difficult for him as an individual. The real need is to find his best way. The methods for such finding are many, from the application of special experiments designed to test the existence and power of different mental processes, to the accurate observation of the child’s method of attack of the work set before him, and! of his relative success when taught on different lines. If, for example, it is possible to teach a boy of fifteen unable to recognize more than a few letters or to read more than two or three two-letter words, to recognize eight words after two visual presentations of them, accompanied by oral spelling, and moreover to recognize again the words when they are similiarly presented a week later, this surely is a clear indication that auditory presentation of letters and words is in his case desirable. More especially, when it is found that the words learnt by oral spelling together with visual presentation, come in time to be known when presented visually only.
The mental processes which are involved in the apparently simple activity of learning to read, are many and complex. Defect in any one of them may result in an apparent inability to learn, above all when we consider that some methods of teaching reading emphasize one process almost to the exclusion of the others. In a case, therefore, of difficulty in learning to read, a variation of method in accordance with the child’s gifts may achieve the end desired; i.e., the child will learn in some way to get meaning from printed symbols. Even the way of oral spelling generally condemned though it be, may in the end prove the shortest and best path. So with writing, other things being equal, it may be better for the child to rely chiefly upon movement in learning to write, but there are children, with whom the motor method will fail, just as there are others who appear able to learn in no other way. And so too, with other matters. To find the child’s individual capabilities is always the first stage on the road to success. Such a method requires both knowledge and patient study, but of its ultimate value there can be no doubt.
So far the individual study of a child for the profit of that particular child has been our chief point. But there is yet a further consideration. !We know far too little of the mental processes of children in general. As a rule we do not care by what means tfiey learn so long as the learning is done. We construct methods of teaching various subjects, which are logical rather than psychological, making appeal to the adult rational mind, but unfitted to the needs of the child. It is still too true that many children learn in spite of our teaching, that if only we would allow them to learn in their own way, they would! get on better than they do with our confusing explanations. Instead of trying to understand, they tend to give us what they think we expect, and are happy when they make a ‘ good shot; and satisfy us, even though the answer be a mystery to them. They are muddled and confused by excess of teaching and still more by change of teachers, bringing as its inevitable result, contradictory teaching.
One child expressed quite clearly his appreciation of this difficulty when asked why he found reading difficult. He said ‘ I could read a bit, at my first school. Then I went to a new school, and they taught me a new way, and somehow I got muddled.’ On all this confusion, light can only be thrown by actually studying the children as individuals, by finding out how they do things when put in the way of learning and left to themselves to learn, and by helping them to learn in their ways, even though the ways seem less rational than ours.
As has been said, the methods of such study are many. Definite psychological tests will be of great service if used with discrimination and knowledge, always bearing in mind the fact “which Binet makes so clear that the results of such tests are ‘ useful and interesting only in so far as one grasps the relation between the nature of the individual and the way in which the test is responded to,’ i.e., in so far as a test is given, not as an isolated thing to an unknown individual, but as part of a definite study of someone known and in a measure understood. A few such individual studies made on normal children would throw much light on what is most needed in educational method. And even without such special tests how much valuable knowledge gained in the actual practice of teaching is thrown away. A child is handed on from class to class with a record of what he knows, but with no record of how he can best learn, although of that his teacher for the past year must know something and might know much. How much too is lost because no record is kept of actual experiments in individual teaching with their relative success or failure? If only there were more chance of discovering what had been done in dealing with cases of special difficulty, for instance, and with what relative success, a flood of light might be thrown on the vexed question of method.
The result of course could only be what we most need?an increase of knowledge by which we can better help the children. A knowledge of methods of study, a knowledge of the ways by which we learn, and a knowledge of the individual which will help more than anything else, in deciding what he will most successfully be able to do in the future, so as to be as far as possible a help and not a burden to humanity.
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