Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/851

 REVIEWS 835

" Youth needs repose, leisure, art, legends, romance, idealization, and, in a word, humanism." It is the time for the teaching of the cultural studies. Our educators have made the great blunder of postponing this to the college period and making the high school the time for the mastery of technique of all sorts, whereas this is just the age for laying the foundations of the fundamental cultural and social attitudes. The prime purpose of humanistic studies is moral. Dr. Hall insists that adolescence is the time for the study of the vernacu- lar language and literature. He deplores the " excessive time given to other languages just at the psychological period of greatest lin- guistic plasticity and capacity for growth," "the subordination of literature and content to language-study," and " the too early sub- stitution of reading and writing for hearing and speaking." He proposes a " radical change of base in the pedagogy of the vernacular language, literature, and history," and urges that the prime purpose in all this field which should determine every choice of matter and method is moral, viz., to so direct intelligence and will as to secure the largest measure of social service, advance altruism, and reduce selfishness, and thus advance the higher cosmic order. Youth loves combat, and this may be developed into debate; it loves distinction and to exert influence, and this suggests oratory; it loves to assume roles and to widen sympathy by repre- senting .... and this suggests drama Its highest ideal is honor, and

this has its best expression in what may be called the ethnic Bible of the Saxon race in its adolescent stage, the literature of chivalry. Its religious instincts are at their very best, and to these our Scriptures make the noblest appeal.

Even the teaching of science should be humanistic at this age.

Science itself arose by working over and over to ever more refined forms old nature-myths, and to some extent, in a true pedagogy, youth must repeat

the process The normal boy in the teens is essentially in the popular

science age. He wants and needs great wholes, facts in profusion, but few

formulae The soul naturally storms its way to the center of things

with a rapid impetuosity He is in the questioning age, but wants only

answers that are vague, brief, but above all suggestive.

Only when evolution becomes a conscious method in education and the subject-matter of curricula is presented in its true pedagogic order, a genetic rather than a logical order, so that the same material is lived over and over upon successively higher levels of growth in the child's mind only then may we be said to have laid even the basis of a true educational philosophy.

Thus adolescence is the great plastic period in human infancy.