Читать книгу Child Psychology I: Development in the First Four Years - Vilhelm Rasmussen - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The foundation of inquiries into the soul life of children is, of course, ultimately the self-investigation of the adult human being. Each person individually learns to know the activities of the soul by immediate and direct apprehension. In reality, no one knows, by direct experience, any other part of existence than his own ego. That I see, hear, or taste only means that images are formed, that presentations of sound or taste arise, in me. To explain their occurrence I assume that there really is something which sends rays of light to my eyes, waves of sound to my ears, or influences to my organs of taste. We thus know our environment only because it occasions manifestations of soul life in ourselves. These manifestations are what we know directly; from them we infer the world around us.

For us, the souls of other men are also environment; for it is only from their actions, and from the sensations which these arouse in ourselves, that we infer their soul life. If they speak, we hear their words, and thereby learn that something is happening in the speaker of the same nature as what happens in our own souls. If they write, and we read what has been written, their souls become known to us in a similar manner. It is always by actions that others reveal the life of their souls; their play of feature betrays it; their moods come to light through their use of histrionic means, and so forth. The chief condition for being able to understand the soul life of others is to be an attentive observer of one’s own; and this self-observation is at the same time a condition for the understanding of what other observers have to communicate.

The fund of experience which can be acquired by self-observation and by the interpretation of other persons’ actions is the foundation of the psychological information which may be obtained by experimental methods. If we did not know immediately, by self-observation, “emotions,” and the conditions for their emergence, we could not show by experiment what changes in the circulation, and so on, may be produced by joy or fear. Even simple experiments, such, for example, as those by which we ascertain the facts about a person’s colour-sense, could not be undertaken unless we could ourselves lay two similarly coloured plates by the side of each other in order to verify their similarity.

So long as psychological investigation deals with adults, the difficulties are comparatively easy to overcome. Even if adults differ greatly among themselves, they yet always have this in common, that they are adults; we can talk with them, make ourselves intelligible to them, initiate them into our intentions with regard to the experiments, and question them when we are in doubt. With children, especially small children, the case is otherwise. The quite young cannot talk at all; and even the older children cannot give trustworthy explanations of their actions. If we ask them, they are influenced by the question and give a wrong answer. Besides, small children live in the unconscious, and do not possess the adult’s well-practised means of expressing states of the soul. An infant smiles in its cradle—at least it appears to do so; but is it a twitch due to a griping in the stomach, or is it a real smile?

The investigation of children’s souls is much in the same case with that of animals’ souls. It is so extraordinarily difficult because the interpretation of what one observes is often so uncertain. When an animal acts “intelligently,” as when, for example, a young pewit ducks in order not to be seen, that is not to be taken without further inquiry as meaning that it has reason or even sagacity. In the same way children may do much that looks highly intelligent without putting a grain of thought into the action. In Australia there is a kind of fowl, the Tallegalla, which allows its eggs to be hatched out by the heat of fermentation in large heaps of plants. When the chickens come out, they are fully developed, covered with feathers, and the first thing they do is to scrape with all their might to get out of the heap. Extremely “intelligent,” to all appearance. But once when chickens of that species were allowed to hatch out in an incubator, it was observed that there, too, they set to work scraping with all their might, though there was nothing to scrape at. Thus the scraping of the chickens is not rational. It is an innate characteristic, an “instinct” inherited from their ancestors; and without it they would be choked in the plant-heap before they had collected their wits and discovered that it was necessary for them to begin scraping. In the same way the actions of small children may very well bear the stamp of intelligence and yet not be due to intelligent deliberation; but one cannot question them, for even if they are capable of answering they cannot give trustworthy information.

Although one cannot question small children, it might be thought possible to obtain knowledge of their soul life by the aid of adults’ recollections of their childhood. But this source is very meagre and highly untrustworthy. No one has the least memory at all of his first year; and that which one thinks one remembers of one’s early childhood may very easily be self-deception. One may hear incidents related which in reality have been totally forgotten; afterwards one comes to imagine one remembers the incidents themselves.

That now and then trustworthy recollection does occur, without any possibility of self-deception, is quite certain; but this happens only when events make a very strong impression and are at the same time of such character that they are confided to no one. For my own part I have a recollection, dating from far back in my childhood (from what year I do not know and have no means of ascertaining), of stealing from a girl playmate. One day when I went to see her I found no one at home, but on a doorstep outside the house there lay an interesting potsherd, the bottom of a jug with the edge ground smooth. This was more than I could resist; I picked it up and sneaked off. Fortunately, I must have had an uneasy conscience over the matter, or else I should not have remembered an experience of that kind; and it cannot have been fixed in my memory by my hearing it related, for I naturally kept silence about it.

If, then, we wish to make acquaintance with the soul life of children, there is no other safe procedure but to observe their behaviour carefully.

But in our observations we must, of course, be on our guard, that the child as a rule may not feel itself under notice. Even fairly big children cannot stand that. Once when I was noting down some question which eleven-year-old pupils asked during a lesson, one of the most ingenuous of them, after putting a question, asked: “Has that to be written down?” He thus betrayed the motive behind his question. In the same way a small child will readily come out of its shell if it feels itself the object of interested observation. The art lies just in taking a snapshot of the child’s unfalsified ego. It is therefore well worth the trouble to find out how this ego is falsified.

Observations of children may be carried out in several different ways.

The most easily applicable method, and that which has the greatest importance for parents, is the thorough observation of the individual child. This form of child-study is naturally carried out by all parents on a small scale, but somewhat unconsciously, without the purpose of acquiring full knowledge of their children’s soul-development, and without the definite aim of discovering rules for the rational education of each individual child in accordance with its special nature. If any real results are to be obtained, one must will to hear and see, and must take trouble to do so; one must then write down one’s observations as soon as possible. If, instead, one waits for an opportunity later on, errors inevitably creep in: a turn of speech is forgotten and replaced by an expression which the child never used, or one invents additions unintentionally and unconsciously. If one writes nothing at all, only a fraction of what is observed remains in the memory, and even that is untrustworthy.

For the purposes of literature, intended for the guidance of others, it is of course requisite that the observers should be trained, careful, and familiar both with general psychology and the special psychology of children. But teachers have here a rich field for valuable first-hand studies which might be of extraordinary importance for their daily work and which also might advance knowledge of the child’s development; and if a large number of observers were each to observe with the utmost accuracy the development of the children under their care, a large amount of material might be gradually collected from which the general laws of children’s development might be deduced.

In addition to the observation of the individual child’s development, it is also possible to investigate particular sides of development in a large number of children and to treat the information statistically. This mass-investigation, however, is of use chiefly in the case of bigger children, who have reached school age, or who go to school. For example, it has been so investigated what colours children know when they begin to go to school, to what extent they are acquainted with the crow, the swallow, the rose, the thistle, and so on. In the case of quite small children, on the other hand, the method is difficult to apply, because an individual investigator has no facilities for observing a large number. Knowledge of the first years’ development must therefore be acquired by thorough observations of comparatively few children.

A very important supplement to immediate observation is to be found, when opportunity presents itself, in experiment, which in recent years has acquired great importance for child psychology. But in order that the experiments may yield correct results, much psychological insight is necessary. Suppose, for example, we wish to ascertain what colours are known to a two-year-old child. One can procure a few pieces of coloured paper or wool-skeins and ask the child: What colour is this? and so forth. The child answers according to circumstances: Red, green, blue, and so on; and one notes how often the answer is right and how often wrong. Unfortunately, the trouble taken is in a measure wasted, because the experiment labours under a technical defect. One has experimented on more than one thing; and that is what one must not do. If the child answers wrongly, it is not certain that the error comes from the child not knowing green, that is, being unable to distinguish green from other colours. Another possible cause is that the child is not yet sure that this is the colour which is called green. If, on the other hand, one takes a large number of coloured pieces of paper, picks out a green, blue, or red piece, and then asks the child to pick another piece of the same colour as the piece held in the hand, one is experimenting in a less objectionable manner. The child can no longer make mistakes because it does not know the names of the colours. Mistakes can now most probably occur for no other reason than that the child cannot identify two pieces of paper having the same colour. But even with this technically correct procedure mistakes might yet be made. For example, this experiment might be prolonged till the child was tired, or it might be entered upon in spite of the child’s disinclination or lack of interest. The mistakes might then be due to fatigue and similar causes.

In the same way, all other experiments require in the person who conducts them an ability to disentangle the separate elements in what he undertakes, so that he is always investigating only one unknown thing at a time. In principle, experiment and casual observation are not distinct from each other. The difference lies solely in this, that the experimenter deliberately produces the situation and so arranges it that there is only one unknown element. Casual observation, on the other hand, presents itself spontaneously, and that which goes forward may be very complicated, full of unknowns.