Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/491

 SOCIAL CONTROL. XIV.

EDUCATION.

The hackneyed metaphors, "potter's clay." "wax tablet," "bent twig," "tender osier," and other images used for child- hood are so many ways of emphasizing its high suggestibility. The mark of the young mind is an absence of fixed habits, of stubborn volitions, of persistent ways of acting. The staunch personality that can plow through counter-suggestions as tremorless as an iron-clad in a flight of arrows we look for only in the adult. The child gradually builds it as a worm builds its worm-cast — out of material taken in from without. And this original dependence on surroundings holds true alike of martyr and of milksop, of moral hero and of weakling. They differ only in their power to form fixed habits. "The ethical life itself, the boy's, the girl's conscience is born in the stress of the conflicts of suggestion, born right out of his imitative hesitations."' Not long ago it was the fashion to magnify heredity and belittle sur- roundings. But the close study of infancy has shown that much we charged to blood is really due to example. The close mental and moral resemblances to parents are largely the result of imita- tion. " Heredity does not stop with birth ; it is then only beginning."' "Under limitations of heredity" the child "makes up his personality .... by imitation out of the 'copy' set in the actions, temper, emotions, of the persons who build around him the social inclosure of his childhood. "^ He "reflects the whole system of influences coming to stir his sensibilities. And just in as far as his sensibilities are stirred, he imitates, and forms habits of imitating; and habits? — they are character ! "'•

Now, this early suggestibility, which has become so huge and pregnant a fact to the psychology of today, has always been more ore less clearly apprehended by thinkers. For upon this

■ J. M. Baldwin, Menial Development in the Child and the Race, p. 360. 'IHd.,-p.iti. ^ Hid., y>. 3S7- «/*»</., p. 35S.

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