QUESTIONS

1. When does the average child make the transition from middle to later childhood?

2. Describe the growth and health of later childhood.

3. In what sense is it true that boys of this age are like primitive man?

4. How do the games of later childhood show that the social instincts are ripening?

5. What is the attitude of the sexes toward one another in this period?

6. What do you understand by the "gang instinct"? Tell something of Dr. Sheldon's study of clubs organized by boys and girls. 7. Show how public opinion enters life as a moral force during later childhood.

8. How should the teacher deal with "school-boy honor"?

9. Describe the hero-worship of later childhood. Can you remember any such hero-worship of your own? Tell something of it.

10. What opportunity does the "reading craze" of later childhood afford the teacher? What dangers does it involve?

II. What is meant by the statement that the nervous system is more plastic in later childhood than in any other time of life? What evidence is there for it?

12. When is a child's first definite awakening of interest in religion apt to occur? Is a child of eleven or twelve too young to be confirmed?

LESSON VI

EARLY ADOLESCENCE

There is a world of difference between twelve and thirteen, in the mind of boys and girls. They are all glad to enter upon the 'teens. It seems to mark a great step toward that goal of every child's ambition-being grown-up.

And they are not far wrong. The passage from childhood to ado lescence is in fact life's greatest and most definite natural transition. Rooted in the development of new physical powers, it transforms the mental and spiritual life as well. It has been well called a new birth. It is the awakening of manhood and womanhood.

1. The term adolescence is applied to the whole period from this first awakening of new powers to their final ripening into young manhood and womanhood. Its boundaries cannot be exactly fixed. The age of puberty varies with different individuals, and is earlier for girls than for boys. It comes generally at thirteen or fourteen. The end of adolescence and the beginning of manhood and womanhood depends a great deal upon circumstances. The boy who must leave school early to go to work, the girl who must assume the responsi bilities of a household, mature quickly. The complexity of modern life, on the other hand, and the elaborate education it demands, have lengthened adolescence. The end of the period comes more often at twenty-four or twenty-five than at twenty-one, which is the age recog nized by law.

For our purpose, however, it will be best to regard the thirteenth birthday as the beginning of adolescence, and the twenty-first as its end-simply because the Sunday school had best recognize those transitions which are definitely acknowledged as such by the pupil himself. No boy or girl in the 'teens likes to be classed with the children; and the young man or woman of twenty-one feels a right to all that the attainment of legal majority implies.

This period, again, may be divided at the seventeenth birthday. Early adolescence thus covers four years, ages thirteen to sixteen: and later adolescence, four years, ages seventeen to twenty.

2. Physically, early adolescence is a time of very rapid growth, both in height and weight. During the three years from the twelfth

birthday to the fifteenth, boys increase in weight 40 per cent and in height 14 per cent, while girls increase in weight 36 per cent and in height 10 per cent. At fifteen a boy has attained 92 per cent of his adult height and 76 per cent of his adult weight; girls have reached in height 97 per cent and in weight 90 per cent of their full growth. After seventeen girls almost cease to grow, and boys grow comparatively little, that mainly in weight.

The years of most rapid growth in height are the twelfth and thirteenth for girls, and the fourteenth and fifteenth for boys. In weight, girls grow most rapidly from the twelfth to the fifteenth years, boys from the thirteenth to the seventeenth. Girls are taller than boys from the twelfth to the fifteenth years, and heavier from the thirteenth to the fifteenth. After fifteen boys exceed both in height and weight. The most profound changes of these years, of course, are those connected with the development of the powers of sex.

This is a time of vigor and energy. While there is an increase in liability to sickness just before puberty, this declines again immediately after; and the power to resist disease remains high throughout the period. During just those years, in fact, when boys and girls approaching puberty are most apt to be sickly, they are least likely to die. In the last chapter we saw that the period from the tenth to the fifteenth birthday contains less deaths than any other five-year period. According to the census of 1900, the death rate for the registration area of the United States was 3.3 per thousand for the period from ten to fourteen, against 5.2 from five to nine, 5.2 from. fifteen to nineteen, and 7.5 from twenty to twenty-four, with increasing rates for each succeeding period. Hartwell's tables, previously referred to, give a deathrate of 4.5 from ten to fourteen, opposed to 10.6 from five to nine, and 7.9 from fifteen to nineteen. For our own division into periods, his tables give the following death rates: middle childhood, 10.2; later childhood, 4.7; early adolescence, 5.5; later adolescence, 9.0.

3. Early adolescence is a time of expansion. Life widens in a hundred unexpected ways, and may take any one of them as its final direction. It is full of conflicting impulses, of contradictions and sur. prises. Through all, however, three fundamental characteristics stand out definitely the expansion of selfhood, a new recognition of social values, and an emotional instability associated with the development of the sexual instincts.

4. The expansion of selfhood. It is now that the boy really begins to attain selfhood. He enters into the heritage of instincts and Ideals, purposes and ambitions which is his birthright as a member of

the human race. He is filled with a new sense of power, and with a desire to use it as a man should. He becomes conscious of what the world is doing, and begins to realize its worth. He is eager to throw his energies into the real things of life and to do what there lies waiting for him.

A time of independence and self-assertion, then-but independence and self-assertion of a totally different sort from that of later childhood. Then the boy was independent because his interests were primitive; he was absorbed in the social life of the gang, and blind to the greater world beyond. Now it is the independence of vision, the self-assertion of one who has caught a glimpse of the great interests of humanity, and who feels his right to give and get, on his own account, as a sharer of the big world's life. The man is stirring within the boy, and it is a man's independence that he begins to assert. He has lived through the primitive interests of a former generation, and now claims his share of to-day. He is one of us.

This expansion of selfhood reveals itself in the desire to go to work, which every boy feels at this age. It is hard now to keep boys at school. They feel that they ought to be getting at a trade or beginning their business career, and that it is time they were making money. Recent studies show that the tendency to drop out of school is greatest within the period covered by the last two grades of the elementary school and the first two years of the high school.* Out of more than two thousand children answering a question as to what they would do with a small monthly allowance, it was found that over 80 per cent of those thirteen or more said that they would save it, against 40 per cent at seven and eight, and about 60 per cent from nine to twelve.†

Early adolescence is genuinely and passionately idealistic. The boy is no longer a mere imitator; he is more than a hero worshiper. His version penetrates the outward act, and catches the spirit within a man. He begins to discern inward qualities, and to feel the intrinsic worth of truth, faith, self-sacrifice. And it is not simply that he admires these virtues in others; he feels them to be a forthputting of his own deeper self. They are directions in which his life would expand, forms in which his self would find expression.

The power to conceive abstract ideals is man's crowning glory and strength. It lifts him above mere intelligence and brings him into co. operation with God Himself. But it can become a pitiable weakness,

*Thorndike: "The Elimination of Pupils from School." Ayres: "Laggards in Our Schools."

+Monroe: "Money Sense in Children.” Cited in Hall: “Adolescence," II., p. 393

for it makes possible a life of contemplation and dreams, whose remote devotion to transcendent things never realizes itself in action, and fails to redeem from sordidness the present deed. So the awakening of this power marks a critical time in the life of the youth. The divine moves within him. He glimpses the things of the Spirit; he feels the "torment of the infinite." He lives for that which is not yet real. He builds upon "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." He is full of ambitions; he makes decisions; he seeks service. It is life's very spring time. But he must be carefully dealt with. His ideals are yet evanescent; his decisions not abiding. He resolves things too great, and turns back in disappointment from the plodding path. He may easily enough become a dreamer and a scatter-brain—a mere idealist. He needs the friendship of one who is older, but who has not forgotten what it is to be a boy-one who can, through comprehending sympathy and co-operation, help him find himself and turn his life toward its real usefulness.

5. The social instincts now mature rapidly, and there is a definite recognition of social values. The independence of adolescence is tempered by a new sense of social dependence and by the desire to be recognized by others, to help and to be helped by them.

The social forms of later childhood persist in the first year or two of this period, but are gradually outgrown. We saw that the gang instinct, as witnessed by the number of clubs organized, is strongest at thirteen, and then declines. It is not that the youth becomes less social; rather that he is becoming conscious of a larger world. The opinion of his fellows remains a powerful moral force, as it does to the end of life; yet now he begins to recognize the wider bearings of his actions, and to look for judgment beyond his immediate companions. Later childhood had thought that it possessed reality when it lived to itself; adolescence now sees that reality is richer far than childhood had dreamed.

Life now first becomes genuinely altruistic. The youth is glad, in pursuit of his ideals and for the sake of others, to endure hardships and to make sacrifices. He wants to be more than square; he feels the worth of unselfishness. It follows that here, too, selfishness begins. The child who is a mere bundle of instincts, the boy who has not yet felt an altruistic impulse, may be self-centered, but not selfish. But the youth who feels the call to a bit of sacrifice, and rejects it, lets an unworthy thing enter his life. Genuine selfishness exists only when the higher impulse is present, but is denied. It is in adolescence, as a matter of fact, that real sin begins-the conscious choice of a worse, as opposed to a better way.