Part 18 (1/2)
But in this utilization of original interests and capacities lies the only possibility of genuinely effective education.[1]
In the first place to try in education to give individuals habits for which they have no special innate tendencies to begin with, is costly. Secondly, to train individuals for types of life or work for which their gifts and desires are ill adapted is to promote at once inefficiency and unhappiness. One reason why the chance to identify one's life with one's work (as is the case with the artist and the scholar) is so universally recognized as good fortune, is because it is so rare. A general and indiscriminate training of men, as if they were all fitted with the same talents and the same longings, does as much as underpayment or overwork to impair the quality of the work done and the satisfaction derived from it.
[Footnote 1: A beginning in the application of this principle has been made by the vocational guidance and employment management work which is being done with increasing scientific accuracy throughout the United States. Individual differences and interests are studied with a view to putting ”the right man in the right place.” This slogan is borrowed from the Committee on Cla.s.sification and Personnel, which during the Great War, through its trade tests and other machinery of differentiation, utilized for the national welfare the specific abilities of thousands of drafted men.]
It has latterly been recognized that industry offers the crucial opportunity to utilize to the fullest individual differences.
By ”getting the right man in the right place,” we at once get the work done better and make the man better satisfied.
If adequate attention is given to ”placement,” to the specific demands put upon men by specific types of work, and to the specific capacities of individuals for fulfilling those demands, we will be capitalizing variations among men instead of being handicapped by them. As it is, specific differences do exist, and men enter occupations and professions ignoring them. As a result both the job and the man suffer; the former is done poorly, and the latter is unsuccessful and unhappy.
It must be noted that the existence of specific differences between individuals does not altogether, or often even in part, imply superiority or inferiority. It implies in each case inferiority or superiority with respect to the performance of a particular type of work. Whether scientific insight and accuracy is better than musical skill, whether a gift for salesmans.h.i.+p surpa.s.ses a gift for mathematics, depends on the social situation and the standards that happen to be current among the group. An intensely disagreeable person may be the best man for a particular job. All scientific observation can do is to note individual differences, to note what work makes demands upon what capacities, and try to bring the man and the job together.
It must be emphasized that, while individual capacities determine what an individual can do, social ideals and traditions determine what he will do, because they determine what he will be rewarded and encouraged to do. There is no question but that in our industrial civilization certain types of ability, that of the organizer, for example, have a high social value. There is no question but that there are other abilities, which under our present customs and ideals we reward possibly beyond their merit, as, to take an extreme case, that of a champions.h.i.+p prize fighter. We can through education and vocational guidance utilize all native capacities.
To make provision for the utilization of all native capacities is to have an efficient social life. But to what end our efficient human machinery shall be used depends on the ideals and customs and purposes that happen to be current in the social order at any given time.
In the words of Professor Thorndike, ”we can invest in profitable enterprises the capital nature provides.” But what profiteth a man or a society, is a matter for reflective determination; it is not settled for us, as are our limitations, at birth.
The net result of scientific observation in this field is the discovery, in increasingly precise and specific form, that men are most diverse and unequal in interest and capacity. The ideal of equality comes to mean, under scientific a.n.a.lysis, equality of opportunity, leveling all social inequalities; the fact of natural inequalities and divergences remains incontestable.
There may even be, as recent psychological tests seem to indicate, a certain proportion of individuals who are not competent to take an intelligent part in democratic government, who, having too little intellectual ability to follow the simplest problem needing cooperative and collective decision, must eternally be governed by others. If these facts come to be authenticated by further data, it merely emphasizes the fact that in a country professedly democratic it is essential to devise an education that will, in the case of each individual, educate up to the highest point of native ability.
Where a country is ostensibly democratic, a few informed citizens will govern the many uninformed, unless the latter are educated to an intelligent knowledge and appreciation of their political duties and obligations. Furthermore, the citizens of a community who are prevented from using their native gifts will be both useless and unhappy. Certainly this is an undesirable condition in a society where all individuals are expected, so far as possible, to be ends in themselves and not merely means for the ends of others.
CHAPTER X
LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION[1]
[Footnote 1: Much of the technical material for this chapter is drawn from Leonard Bloomfield's _The Study of Language_, and W. D. Whitney's _The Life and Growth of Language_.]
It was earlier pointed out that human beings alone possess language. They alone can make written symbols and heard sounds stand for other things, for objects, actions, qualities, and ideas. In this chapter the consideration of language may best be approached from the spoken tongue, under the influence of which, except in the simplest type of pictorial writing, the written form develops.[2]
[Footnote 2: Bloomfield: _loc. cit._, pp. 7-8.]
From the point of view of the student of behavior, language, spoken language especially, is a habit, acquired like walking or swimming. It is made possible primarily by the fact that human beings possess a variety and flexibility of vocal reflexes possessed by no other animal. All the higher animals have a number of vocal reflexes, which are called out primarily in the expression of emotion or desire. Cries of pain, hunger, rage, s.e.x desire or desire for companions.h.i.+p, are common to a great number of the animal species. But these cries and vocal utterances are limited, and comparatively unmodifiable.
They are moreover expressed, so far as experimental observation can reveal, with no consciousness of the specific significance of particular sounds and are used as the involuntary expression of emotion rather than as a specific means of communication.
... The primates have a much larger number of such vocal instincts than the other mammals, and a much larger number of stimuli can call them out, _e.g._, injury to bodily tissue calls out one group; hunger calls out a certain group; s.e.x stimuli (mate, etc.) another; and similarly cold, swiftly moving objects, tones, strange animals call out others. When attachments are formed between the female and her offspring another large group is called into action. There is no evidence to show in the case of mammals that these vocal instincts are modified by the sounds of other animals.... These throat habits may be cultivated to such an extent in birds that we may get an approximation, more or less complete, to a few such habits possessed by the human being. Such throat habits, however, are not language habits.[1]
[Footnote 1: Watson: _Behavior_, p. 323.]
In human beings language, it is clear, may attain extraordinary refinement and complexity, and may convey extremely fine shades and subtleties of emotion or idea. This results from the fact that man is born with a vocal apparatus far superior in development to that of any of the animals.
It is pretty clear that the mutant man, when thrown off from the primate stock, sprang forth with a vocal apparatus different from that of the parent stock, and possessing abundant richness in reflexes, even far surpa.s.sing that found in the bird. It is interesting to observe, too, in this connection, that within the narrow s.p.a.ce occupied by the vocal apparatus we have a system of muscular mechanisms which has within it, looking at it now as a whole, the same possibilities of habit formation that we find in the remaining portion of bodily musculature.... It is probable that in a few years we shall undertake the study of such habits from exactly the same standpoint that we now employ in studies upon the acquisition of skill in the human being.[2]
[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, pp. 323-24.]
The human baby starts its expressive habits by emitting with wide-open mouth an undifferentiated shriek of pain. A little later it yells in the same way at any kind of discomfort.
It begins before the end of the first year to croon when it is contented. As it grows older it begins to make different sounds when it experiences different emotions. And with remarkable rapidity its repertoire of articulatory movements has greatly increased.
Speech that begins in the child as a mere vague vocal expression of emotion soon begins to exhibit a marked element of mimicry. The child begins to a.s.sociate the words uttered by his nurse or parents with the specific objects they point to.
He comes to connect ”milk,” ”sleep,” ”mother” with the experiences to which they correspond. The child thus learns to react to certain sounds as significant of certain experiences.
Unlike Adam, he does not have to give names to animals, or for that matter to anything else on earth. They all have specific names in the particular language in which he happens to be brought up. In the case of other habits, largely through trial and error, he learns to a.s.sociate given sounds expressed by other people about him with given experiences, pleasant or unpleasant. He learns further to imitate, so far as possible, these sounds, as a means of more precisely communicating his wants or securing their fulfillment.