children may get them to do almost anything by appealing to the desire for personal approval; but as children get older, they care more and more for the group sentiment of their class, gang, or group. The successful intermediate and Junior High teacher must therefore learn to understand and use group sentiment in governing her school. 52. Desire for Approval of Group [FISKE, G. W., Boy Life and Self-Government, pp. 215-216. New York, Association Press, 1910.] The sobering influence of responsibility naturally fosters true manliness and reduces cases of petty discipline to the minimum. The fact that the boys themselves are the government (in a self-government plan) takes away all the attractiveness of lawlessness and makes it unpopular. . . . The only effective punishment is ostracism by one's fellows; or, as Professor Scott says, "the disapproval and repression of the group one feels he belongs to. Nothing else is punishment." Any other punishment may be turned into the glory of martyrdom; this cannot. Real social loss is loss of caste with one's cherished comrades. 53. Play and Development [SEASHORE, Carl Emil, Psychology in Daily Life, pp. 5-8. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1923.] The higher mental powers normally develop in close connection with the use of the senses and the muscles. Children's games characteristically involve the expression of the whole being; in this lies one of the charms of child play. The child is ever responsive. He is alive to the total environment; and play is the main channel for the free outpouring of his soul in action. His memory is not as yet selective; his remembering is correspondingly indiscriminate. His imagination is not yet schooled; possibilities are not yet distinguished from desires; all he sees is his, the impossible is easy, the easy is impossible, and inanimate nature is animate. He is not yet bound down to systematic thinking in a prescribed channel; his wonder goes out equally to heaven and earth, to his origin and his destiny, to the most trivial details on a par with the riddle of the universe, and his inventions and solutions keep pace with his imagination. His feelings are as yet neither blunted nor refined; he lavishes his tenderest affection upon mud puddles, hobby-horses, and cats, as well as upon members of the family; he tortures and abuses the work, his playmate, or his mother. His instincts have not yet been suppressed; he lives the animal life of his species and is sympathetic with the elemental forces of nature. He is not yet bound to a trade or a profession; his fancy finds expression, his ingenuity is exercised, and his attention is strained, in the effort to copy the patterns of nature, and particularly those set by other human beings. He has not yet developed an organized system of habits; his conscious will is ever free to act out its motives. And in the resulting free action he is strenuous, persistent, indefatigable; he is overcoming difficulties in play. Growth through play is evident in the development of the social nature of the child, and is especially marked in the development of his consciousness of kinship with a group. The child comes into the world socially inclined, with tendencies toward altruistic as well as toward self-protecting and self-enhancing expressions; but the altruistic nature needs enforcement and direction. Child play reproduces on its level the struggles and achievements of developed social life. . . This conception shows how both mind and body develop more through exercise of play than through work. Sensory experience gradually acquires associations and responses, comes under control of voluntary attention, and becomes differentiated and serviceable through play; memory, imagination, conception, judgment, and reasoning are whetted, strengthened, and enriched through their exercise in play; the affective life becomes sensitive, adapted, balanced, and serviceable through play; habits are formed, instincts are developed, impulses trained and brought under control, etc. . . . In short, play is the principal instrument of growth. It is safe to conclude that, without play, there would be no normal adult cognitive life; without play, no healthful development of affective life; without play, no full development of the power of the will. Such a statement does not deny the value of work and of tasks deliberately undertaken for immediate ends other than pleasure; it does not deny the place of drudgery, the dull routine, the wearing and tearing obligatory exercise of mind and body; it does not overlook the benefits of the plain everyday work; but it emphasizes the fact, that in mental development as a biological process, spontaneous self-expression, characteristic of play rather than of work, is the larger influence. 54. Effect of Praise and Blame of Others [MCDOUGALL, William, Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 194. Boston, John W. Luce & Co., 1923.] For the praise and blame of our fellows, especially as expressed by the voice of public opinion, are the principal and most effective sanctions of moral conduct for the great mass of men; without them few of us would rise above the level of mere law-abidingness, the mere avoidance of acts on which legal punishment surely follows; and the strong regard for social approval and disapproval constitutes an essential stage of the progress to the higher plane of morality, the plane of obligation to an ideal of conduct. 55. Importance of Rivalry [MCDOUGALL, William, Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 300. Boston, John W. Luce & Co., 1923.] With us [Western nations] it [rivalry] supplies the zest and determines the forms of almost all our games and recreations; and Professor James is guilty of picturesque exaggeration only, when he says "nine-tenths of the work of our world is done by it. We know that if we do not do the task some one else will do it and get the credit, so we do it." Our educational system is founded upon it; it is the social force underlying an immense amount of strenuous exertion; to it we owe in a great measure even our science, our literature, and our art; for it is a strong, perhaps an essential, element of ambition. . . . 56. Dangers and Benefits of Rivalry [GRUENBERG, B. C., Outlines of Child Study, p. 102. Copyright, 1924, by the Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission.] The value of rivalry for the developing child lies in bringing to his attention, and stimulating his efforts for, a variety of activities and so in acquainting him with the degrees to which he may hope to master the different kinds of activity. His successes, in addition to the skill derived from the effort and practice, contribute to his self-esteem; his failures ought at least to contribute to his respect for others. There are dangers, however, in too insistent an emphasis upon the importance of attaining the extreme of achievement, or of excelling. After all, we cannot excel in everything; and most of us cannot excel in anything. To make the child value too highly the winning in every competition or contest, instead of the game, is not only to destroy his sportsmanship, but to lay the foundations for more or less serious inferiority complexes. These hurt the child by destroying his self-esteem, by driving him to socially undesirable modes of self-assertion, and by making him rationalize his own status through disparaging the achievement of others. This makes for envy, discontent, and hostility to the group. 57. The Sex Instinct [MCDOUGALL, William, Introduction to Social Psychology, pp. 399-400. Boston, John W. Luce & Co., 1908.] It is generally recognized that in men and animals alike the sex impulse is apt to manifest itself in very vigorous and sustained efforts toward its natural end; and that in ourselves it may determine very strong desires, in the control of which all the organized forces of the developed personality, all our moral sentiments and ideals; and all the restraining influences of relegion, law, customs and convention too often are confronted with a task beyond their strength. 58. Sex Instinct and Its Sublimation [EDMAN, Irwin, Human Traits and Their Social Significance, p. 69. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920.] There is considerable agreement among students of the subject that the emotional energies aroused in connection with the sex instinct may be drained off into other channels, and serve to quicken and sustain both artistic creation and appreciation and social and religious enthusiasms of various kinds. And the sex instinct . . . is the basis of the family. ... 59. Play [PILLSBURY, W. B., Essentials of Psychology, pp. 279-280. Copyright, 1920, by the Macmillan Co.] (Adapted.) Play is not a specific tendency or a single instinct. It is rather the expression of a number of instinctive and integrated tendencies. Emulation and rivalry are important elements in all games and plays. 60. Imitative Tendencies [THORNDIKE, E. L., Educational Psychology, Vol. I, p. 122. New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1914.] On the whole, the imitative tendencies which pervade human life and which are among the most powerful forces with and against which education and social reform work, are, for the most part, not original tendencies to respond to behavior seen by duplicating it in the same mechanical way that one responds to light by contracting the pupil, but must be explained as the results of the arousal, by the behavior of other men, of either special instinctive responses or ideas and impulses which have formed, in the course of experience, connection with that sort of behavior. 61. Nature of Imitation [SMITH, Stevenson, and GUTHRIE, Edwin R., General Psychology in Terms of Behavior, pp. 130-133. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1924.] When a response resembles its stimulus, we call the response imitation. We laugh on hearing others. laugh. A fright response spreads from individual to individual in the herd... Tickling is probably the original stimulus that causes a baby to smile. He does not at first smile by imitation, but in order to learn to imitate he must have some one present to smile back at him. If the sight of a smiling face accompanies the baby's act of smiling, it thereby conditions his response and will later cause him to smile in the absence of the tickling. Practically all imitative behavior is made up of conditioned responses, there being very few cases of instinctive imitation. . . . The dependence of imitation on learning is well illustrated by language acquisition. The baby is at first moved to make a great variety of vowel and consonant sounds by such stimuli as he receives from a moderately full stomach, a soft bed, and a warm, well-lighted room. The sounds he makes accompany the movements that produce them and, because the vowels are sustained and the consonants either sustained or repeated, these sounds also precede the movements that continue or reiterate them. They thus become the conditioning stimuli for their own production, so that when uttered by others they are imitated by the baby. A period of practice during which the baby plays with these sounds is necessary before imitation is possible, and |