Here again, in the field of pedagogy, the naturalistic method must lead us to the study of the separate subjects, to a description of them as individuals, and their classification on a basis of characteristics in common; and since the child must be studied not by himself alone, but also in relation to the factors of his origin and his individual evolution—since every one of us represents the effect of multifold causes—it follows that the etiological side of the pedagogical branch of modern anthropology, like all its other branches, necessarily invades the field of biology and at the same time of sociology.
Among the types which it will be of pedagogic interest to trace in school-children, we must undoubtedly find those that correspond to the childhood of those abnormal individuals already studied in Lombroso's Criminal Anthropology, and in De Giovanni's Clinical Morphology.
Nevertheless, it is a new study, because the characteristics of the child are not those of the adult reduced to a diminutive scale, but they constitute childhood characteristics. Man changes as he grows; the body itself not only undergoes an increase in volume, but a profound evolution in the harmony of its parts and the composition of its tissues; in the same way, the psychic personality of the man does not grow, but evolves; like the predisposition to disease which varies at different ages in each individual considered pathologically. For all those anomalous types which to-day are included under the popular term of deficients, for the pathological weaklings who reveal symptoms of scrofula or rickets, there is no doubt that special schools and methods of education are essential. We teachers would like, through educative means, to counteract the ultimate consequences of degeneration and predisposition to disease: if criminal anthropology has been able to revolutionise the penalty in modern civilisation, it is our duty to undertake, in the school of the future, to revolutionise the individual. And by achieving this ideal, pedagogic anthropology will to a large extent have taken the place of criminal anthropology, just as schools for the abnormal and feeble, multiplied and perfected under the protection of an advanced civilisation, will in a large measure have replaced the prisons and the hospitals.
We owe to the intuitive genius of Giuseppe Sergi the conception of a form of pedagogic anthropology far more exact in its methods of investigation than anything which had hitherto been foreshadowed. This master takes the ground that a study of abnormal and weakly children is a task of absolutely secondary importance. What is imperative for us to know, he claims, is normal humanity, if we are to guide it intelligently toward that biological and moral perfection, on which the progress of humanity must depend. If general pedagogy is destined to be transformed under a naturalistic impulse, this will be effected only when anthropology turns its investigations to the normal human being.
Educators are still very far from having a real knowledge of that collective body of school-children, on whom a uniformity of method, of encouragement and punishment is blindly inflicted; if, instead of this, the child could be brought before the teacher's eyes as a living individuality, he would be forced to adopt very different standards of judgment, and would be shaken to the very depths of his conscience by the revelation of a responsibility hitherto unsuspected.
Let us take one or two examples; let us consider, among the pupils, one child who is very poor.
Studied by the anthropological method, he is revealed, in every personal physiological detail, as an inferior type. The child of poverty, as Niceforo has well shown, is an inferior in stature, in cranium, in weight, in muscular and intellectual strength; and the malformations, resulting from defects of growth, condemn him to an æsthetic inferiority; in other words, environment, mode of living, and nutrition may result in modifying even the relative beauty of the individual. The normal man may bear within him a germ of physical beauty inherited from parents who begot him normally, and yet this germ may not be able to develop, because impeded by environment. Accordingly, physical beauty constitutes in itself a class privilege. This child, weak in mind and in muscular force, when compared with the child of wealth, grown up in a favorable environment, shows less attractive manners, because he has been reared in an atmosphere of social inferiority, and in school is classed as a pariah. Less good looking and less refined, he fails to enlist the sympathy which the teacher so readily concedes to the courteous manners of more fortunate children; less intelligent himself, and unable to look for help from parents who, more than likely, are illiterate, he fails to obtain the encouragement of praise and high credit marks that are lavished upon stronger children, who have no need of being encouraged. Thus it happens that the down-trodden of society are also the down-trodden in the school. And we call this justice; and we say that demerit is punished and merit is rewarded; but in this way we make ourselves the sycophants of nature and of social error, and not the administrators of justice in education!
On the other hand, let us examine another child, living in an agreeable environment, in the higher social circles; he possesses all the physical attraction and grace that render childhood charming. He is intelligent, smiling, gentle-mannered; at the cost of small effort he gives his teacher ample satisfaction by his progress, and even if the teacher's method of instruction happens to be somewhat faulty, the child's family hasten privately to make up for the deficiency. This child is destined to reap a harvest of praise and rewards; the teacher, egotistically complacent over the abundant fruit gathered with so little effort, and the moral and æsthetic satisfaction derived from the fortunate pupil, gives him unmeasured affection and smooths his whole course through school. But if we study the rich, intelligent, prize-winning child carefully, we find that he, too, is not perfect in his anthropological development; he is too narrow-chested. This is the penalty of the rich and the studious; every privilege brings its own peril; every benefit contains a snare; every one of us to-day, without the light of science, runs the risk of diminishing our physiological equilibrium, by living in an environment that contains so many defects. The child of luxury, living continually indoors, diligently studying in his well-warmed home, under his mother's vigilant eye, is impeding the development of his own chest; and when he has completed his growth and his education, will find himself with insufficient lungs; his physical personality will have been permanently thrown out of equilibrium by a defective environment. This highly cultured man may some day find himself urged on to big endeavour; his intelligence will create vast ideals, but he will not have at his disposal the physical force that is so strictly associated with the power to draw from the surrounding air a sufficient quantity of oxygen by means of respiration. The spirit is ready, but the flesh is weary; and all his ambitious hopes may be shattered in the very flower of life by pulmonary tuberculosis, to which he has himself created an artificial predisposition.
It is our duty to understand the individual, in order to avoid these fatal errors; and to arise to higher standards of justice, founded upon the real exigencies of life—guided by that spirit of love which is essential to the teacher, in order to render him truly an educator of humanity.
Love is the essential spirit of fecundity whose one purpose is to beget life. And in the teacher, love of humanity must find expression through his work, because the very purpose of love is to create something. Accordingly, this spirit of fecundity ought to produce the teacher's mission, which to-day is the mission of reforming the school and accepting the proud duty of universal motherhood, destined to protect all mankind, the normal and abnormal alike. This is a reform, not only of the school, but of society as a whole, because through the redeeming and protective labours of pedagogy, the lowest human manifestations of degeneration and disease will disappear; and, more important still, it will make it henceforth impossible for normal human beings, conceived from germs that promise strength and beauty, little by little to lose that beauty and strength along the rough paths of life, through which no one has hitherto had the knowledge to guide them. "In the social life of to-day an urgent need has arisen," says our common master, Giuseppi Sergi, "a renovation of our methods of education and instruction; and whoever enrolls himself under this standard, is fighting for the regeneration of man."
Enrico Morselli and Scientific Philosophy.—Among the names of Italian scientists that must be called to mind, in discussing the modern developments of anthropology, a special lustre attaches to that of Enrico Morselli, who has earned the right to call himself the critic, or rather, the philosopher of anthropology. Notwithstanding that he has made his name famous in the vast field of psychiatry, this distinguished Genoese practitioner has found time to assimilate the most diverse branches of science and the most widely separated avenues of thought, qualifying himself as a critic, and systematising experimental science on the lines of scientific philosophy.
His great work, General Anthropology, is developed on synthetic lines, embracing in a single scientific system all the acquired knowledge of the past two centuries, and may rightfully be called the first treatise on philosophic anthropology. While the experimental sciences, by collecting and recording separate phenomena, were gradually preparing, throughout the nineteenth century, a great mass of analytical material, chosen blindly and without form, they apparently engendered a new trend of thought positively hostile to philosophy: the odium antiphilosophicum, as Morselli calls it. And conversely, the speculative positivism of Ardigo remained throughout its development a stranger to the immediate sources of experimental research, and adhered strictly to the field of pure philosophy. It remained for Morselli to perceive that the scientific material prepared by experimental science was in reality philosophical material, for which it was only necessary to prepare instruments and means in order to systematise it and lead it into the proper channels for the construction of a scientific philosophy.
Throughout the whole period of his intellectual activity, Morselli sought to unite experimental science and philosophy, by taking his content from the former and his form from the latter. To gather and catalogue bare facts could not be the scope of science; such labour could result only in sterilising the mind. "The human mind," says Morselli, "does not stop at the objective study of a phenomenon and its laws; it wants also to fathom their nature; the how does not content it, but it must also have the wherefore." It must mount from facts to synthesis, constantly achieving a new and fuller understanding. But what determines the content of philosophy is not speculative thought, but facts that have been collected objectively. Such is the view of Enrico Morselli, expressed in the introduction to his Review of Scientific Philosophy: "We think the moment has come for professional philosophers to allow themselves to be convinced that the progress of physical and biological sciences has profoundly changed the tendencies of philosophy; so that it is no longer an assemblage of speculative systems, but rather the synthesis of partial scientific doctrines, the expression of the highest general truths, derived solely and immediately from the study of facts. On the other hand, we hope also that in every student of the separate sciences, whether pure or applied, the intimate conviction will take root that no science which applies the method of observation and experiment to the particular class of phenomena which form its subject, can call itself fully developed so long as it is limited to the collection and classification of facts. Scientific dilettantism of this sort must end by sterilising the human mind, whose natural tendency is to advance from observed phenomena by successive stages to the investigation of their partial laws, and from these to the research of more and more general truths. But philosophy, thus understood, can never confine itself within the dogmatism of a system, but rather will leave the individual mind free to make constant new concessions, in the pursuit of the truth.
"The human mind is condemned to search forever, and perhaps never to find, the ultimate solution to the eternal problem which it offers to itself; accordingly, let it keep itself at liberty to accept to-day as probable, a solution which further researches or newly discovered facts will compel it to reject to-morrow in favor of another. We must admit that in philosophic concepts there is a constant evolution, or rather natural selection, thanks to which the strongest concepts, those best constituted, those that are fitted to make use of scientific discoveries with the broadest liberality, are predisposed to prove victorious or at least to hold their own for a long time in the struggle."[3]
It is this liberty that makes it possible for us to pursue experimental investigations, without fear that our brains may become sterile. And by liberty we mean the readiness to accept new concepts whenever experience proves to us that they are better and closer to the truth which we are seeking. Even though the absolute truth were never reached, the experimental method is the path most likely to lead us toward it step by step.
Accordingly, what we should demand of investigators is not a creed, a philosophic system, but "the objective method in their researches and in the sources of their inductions." For this is the way to train the workers and philosophers of experimental science.
And the same lines must serve us for building up a philosophy capable of shaping a regenerated method of pedagogy.
The Method
The determining factor in anthropology is the same that determines all experimental science: the method. A well-defined method in natural science applied to the study of living man offers us the scientific content, which we are in the course of seeking.
The content bursts upon us as a surprise, as the result of applying the method, by means of which we make advances in the investigation of truth.
Whenever a science prescribes for itself, not a content but a method of experimenting, it is for that reason called an experimental science.
It is not easy for those who come fresh from the pursuit of philosophic studies to adapt themselves to this order of ideas. The philosopher, the historian, the man of letters prepare themselves by assimilating the content of one particular branch of learning; and thereby they define the boundaries of their individual knowledge and close the circle of their individual thought, however vast that circle may be.
Indeed, the elaboration of human thought, the series of historic deeds, the accumulated mass of literature, may offer immense fields; but after the student has little by little assimilated them, he cannot do otherwise than contain them within him precisely as they are. Their extent is limited by the centuries that cover the history of civilised man, and it is invariable, since it exists as a work accomplished by man.
Experimental science is of an entirely different sort. We must look upon it as a means of investigation into the field of the infinite and the unknown. If we wish to compare it to some branch of learning that is universally familiar, we may say that an experimental science is similar to learning to read. When as children we learn to read, we may, to be sure, estimate the effort that it costs us to master a mechanical device; but such a mechanical device is a means, it is a magic key that will unlock the secrets of wisdom, multiply our power to share the thoughts of our contemporaries, and render us dexterous in despatching the practical affairs of life.
Thus considered, reading is a branch of learning that has no prescribed limits.
It is our duty to learn to read the truth, in the book of nature; I. by collecting separate facts, according to the objective method; II. by proceeding methodically from analysis to synthesis. The subject of our research is the individual human being.
1. The Objective Collecting of Single Facts.—In the gathering of data, our science makes use of two means of investigation, as we have already seen: observation or anthroposcopy; and measurement or anthropometry. In order to take measurements, we must know the special anthropometric instruments and how to use them; and in making observations, we must treat ourselves as instruments, that is, we must divest ourselves of our own personality, of every preconception, in order to become capable of recording the real facts objectively. For since our purpose is to gather our facts from nature and await her revelations, if we allowed ourselves to have scientific preconceptions, we might distort the truth. Here is the point which distinguishes experimental science from a speculative science; in the former, we must banish thought, in the latter we must build by means of thought. Accordingly at the moment when we are collecting our data, we must possess no other capacity than that of knowing how to collect them with extreme exactness and objectivity.
Accordingly we need a method and a mental preparation, that is, a training which will accustom us to divest ourselves of our own personalities, in order to become simple instruments of investigation. For instance, if it were a question of measuring the heads of illiterate children and of other children of the same age, who are attending school, in order to learn whether the heads of educated children show greater development, we need not only to know how to use the millimetric scale and the cranial calipers which are the instruments adapted to this purpose; we need not only to know the anatomical points at which the instruments must be applied in the manner established by the accepted method; but we need in addition to be unaware, while taking the measurements, whether the child before us at a given moment is educated or illiterate because the preconception might work upon us by suggestion and thus alter the result. Or again, to take what in a certain sense is an opposite case, and nevertheless analogous, we may undertake a research into some absolutely unknown question, as for instance, what are the psychic characteristics of children whose development has kept fairly close to the normal average, and of those whose anthropological measurements diverge notably from the average: in such a case we ought to measure all the children, make the required psychological tests separately, and then compare the results of the two investigations.
A woman student in my course, last year, undertook precisely this sort of investigation, namely, to find out what was the standing in school of children who represent the normal average anthropological type, that is to say, those whose physical development had been all that was to be desired: and she found that normal children are vivacious (happy), very intelligent, but negligent; and consequently their number never includes the heads of the classes, the winners of prizes.
In addition to gathering anthropological data, which requires a special technique of research, we need to know how to proceed to interpret them.
We are no longer at the outset of our observations. No sooner was the method established, than there were a multitude of students in all parts of the world capable of objective research, that is to say, of anthropological investigations. The sum total of all these researches forms a scientific patrimony, which needs to be known to us, in order that our own conclusions may serve to complete those of other investigators, who have preceded us, and thus form a contribution to science.
In other words, there have already been certain principles established and certain laws discovered, on an experimental basis; and all this forms a true and fitting content of our science. It will serve to guide us in our researches, and to furnish us with a standard of comparison for our own conclusions. Thus, for example, when we have measured the stature of a boy of ten, we have undoubtedly gathered an individual anthropological fact; but in order to interpret it, we must know what is the average stature of boys of ten; and the average will be found established by previous investigators, who have obtained it from actuality, by applying the well-known method of measuring the stature, to a great number of individuals of a specified race, sex, and age, and by obtaining an average on the basis of such research.
Accordingly, we ought to profit from the researches of others, whenever they have been received, as noteworthy, into the literature of science. Nevertheless, the patrimony which science places at our disposition must never be considered as anything more than a guide, an expression of universal collaboration, in accordance with a uniform method. We must never jurare in verba magistri, never accept any master as infallible: we are always at liberty to repeat any research already made, in order to verify it; and this form of investigation is part of the established method of experimental science. One fundamental principle must be clearly understood; that we can never become anthropologists merely by reading all the existing literature of anthropology, including the voluminous works on kindred studies and the innumerable periodicals; we shall become anthropologists only at the moment when, having mastered the method, we become investigators of living human individuals.
We must, in short, be producers, or nothing at all; assimilation is useless. For example, let us suppose that a certain teacher has studied anthropology in books: if, after that, he is incapable of making practical observations upon his own pupils, to what end does his theoretical knowledge serve him? It is evident that theoretic study can have no other purpose than to guide us in the interpretation of data gathered directly from nature.
Our only book should be the living individual; all the rest taken together form only the necessary means for reading it.
2. The Passage from Analysis to Synthesis.—Assuming that we have learned how to gather anthropological data with a rigorously exact technique, and that we possess a theoretic knowledge and tables of comparative data: all this together does not suffice to qualify us as interpreters of nature. The marvellous reading of this amazing book demands on our part still other forms of preparation. In gathering the separate data, it may be said that we have learned how to spell, but not yet how to read and interpret the sense. The reading must be accomplished with broad, sweeping glances, and must enable us to penetrate in thought into the very synthesis of life. And it is the simple truth that life manifests itself through the living individual, and in no other way. But through these means it reveals certain general properties, certain laws that will guide us in grouping the living individuals according to their common properties; it is necessary to know them, in order to interpret individual differences dependent upon race, age, and sex, and upon variations due to the effort of adaptation to environment, or to pathological or degenerative causes. That is to say, certain general principles exist, which serve to make us interpreters of the meaning, when we read in the book of life.
This is the loftiest part of our work, carrying us above and beyond the individual, and bringing us in contact with the very fountain-heads of life, almost as though it were granted us to materialise the unknowable. In this way we may rise from the arid and fatiguing gathering of analytical data, toward conceptions of noble grandeur, toward a positive philosophy of life; and unveil certain secrets of existence, that will teach us the moral norms of life.
Because, unquestionably, we are immoral, when we disobey the laws of life; for the triumphant rule of life throughout the universe is what constitutes our conception of beauty and goodness and truth—in short, of divinity.
The technical method of proceeding toward synthesis, we may find well defined in biology: the data gathered by measurement can be grouped according to the statistical method, be represented graphically and calculated by the application of mathematics to biology: to-day, indeed, biometry and biostatistics tend to assume so vast a development as to give promise of forming independent sciences.
The method in biology, considered as a whole, may be compared to the microscope and telescope, which are instruments, and yet enable us to rise above and beyond our own natural powers and come into contact with the two extremes of infinity; the infinitely little and the infinitely large.
Objections and Defences.—One of the objections made to pedagogical anthropology is that it has not yet a completely defined content, on which to base an organic system of instruction and reliable general rules.
It is the method alone that enables us to be eloquent in defence of pedagogic anthropology, against such an accusation. For the accusation itself is the embodiment of a conception of a method differing widely from our own: it is the accusation made by speculative science, which, resting on the basis of a content, refuses to acknowledge a science that is still lacking and incomplete in its content, because it is unable to conceive that a science may be essentially summed up in its method, which makes it a means of revelation.
How could we conceive of the content of pedagogic anthropology otherwise than as something to be derived by the experimental method from the observation of school-children? And where could we conceive of a possible laboratory for such a science, if not in the school itself? The content will be determined little by little, by the application of the anthropological study to school-children in the school, and never in any other manner.
Now, if it were necessary to await the completion of a content before proceeding to any practical application, where could we hope to get this content from—especially since we look for no help either from speculative philosophy or divine revelation?
When a method is applied to any positive science, it results in giving that science a new direction, that is to say, a new avenue of progress: And it is precisely in the course of advance along that avenue that the content of the science is formed: but if we never made the advance, the science would never take its start. Thus, for example, when the microscope revealed to medicine the existence of micro-organisms, and bacteriology arose as the positive study of epidemiology, it altered the whole procedure in the cure and prophylaxis of infective maladies. Prior to this epoch people believed that an epidemic was a scourge sent by divine wrath upon sinners; or else they imagined it was a miasma transported by the wind, which groves and eucalyptus trees might check; or they pictured the ground ejecting miasmatic poisons through its pores:—and humanity sought in vain to protect itself with bare-foot processions and religious ceremonies, attended by jostling throngs and cruel flagellation; or else they betook themselves to the shade of eucalyptus trees, in the midst of malarial lowlands. Entire cities were destroyed by pestilence, and malarial districts remained uncultured deserts, because entire populations, in the brave effort to perform their work, were destroyed by successive impoverishment of the blood.
It is bacteriology that has put to flight this darkness of ignorance that was the herald of death, and has created the modern conditions of environment, which, by a multitude of means, defend the individual and the nation from infective diseases; so that to-day civilised society may be said to be advancing toward a triumph over death.
But the microbes have not all of them been discovered; bacteriology and general pathology are still very far from having completed their content. If we had been obliged to wait for such completion, we should still be living quite literally in the midst of mediæval epidemics; or, to state the case better, where in the world would the science of medicine ever have attained its new content? For it has been building it up, little by little, by directing medicine upon a new path. It was the introduction of this new method of investigating the patient and his environment that experimentally reaped the fruit of new etiological discoveries, and new means of defence: the microscope became perfected because it came into universal use in practice; bacterial cultures owe their perfectionment to the fact that they became the common means of investigation for the purpose of diagnosis; just as tests in clinical chemistry have become perfected through practical use. Without which, who would ever have perfected the microscope, or the science of bacteriology? In a word, whence are we to get the content of any positive science, if not from practical application?
A direction and an applied method represent a triumph of progress; and in progress, a content cannot have defined limits. We do not know its goal; we know only that at the moment when it finds its goal, it will cease to be progress.
It is many years since medicine abandoned the speculative course, and we see it to-day hourly enriching itself with new truths; its triumphal march is never checked, and it moves onward toward the invasion of future centuries. In the wake of its progress, that frightful phenomenon which we call mortality tends to fall steadily to a lower level; giving rise to the hope that through future progress it will cease to be the mysterious, menacing fate, ever watchful and ready to sever the invisible threads of human life. These threads are to-day revealing themselves as the resistant fibres of a fabric; because, humanity by engaging collectively in the audacious search after truth, and by thus protecting the interests of each individual through the common interests, has succeeded in offering a powerful resistance to the mysterious sheers.
Accordingly, we may say that the substitution to-day of an anthropological development of pedagogy, in the place of a purely philosophical and speculative trend, does not offer it merely an additional content, an auxiliary to all the other forms of teaching on which it now comfortably reposes; but it opens up new avenues, fruitful in truth and in life; and as it advances along these avenues, regenerated from its very foundations upward, it may be that pedagogy is destined to solve the great problem of human redemption.
The Method to be Followed in These Lectures
Lastly, just one more word regarding the didactic method that I intend to follow, in delivering this course of lectures. From the purpose already stated, it follows that this Course in Anthropology must be eminently practical. Of the three weekly lectures, only one will be theoretical; that is to say, only one in which I shall expound the content of our science; a second lecture will treat of the technique of the method; that is to say, I shall devote it to describing the practical way of gathering anthropological data, and how we must study them and re-group them in order to extract their laws; and finally, the third lecture will be practical and clinical; I shall devote it to the collection of anthropological data from human subjects, and little by little I shall try to work toward the individual study of pupils, until we reach the compilation of biographic charts. At the lectures of the third type, we shall have present subjects who will be, for the most part, normal, but some of them will be abnormal, and all will be drawn from the elementary schools of Rome.
Finally, in further illustration of our course, we shall make excursions, visiting certain schools that offer some particular interest from our scientific point of view; to the end that we may supply what is lacking and what is needed to complete a University Course in Scientific Pedagogy, namely a "Pedagogical Clinic," where pupils of the widest variety of types might be educated, and where it might be possible to lay practical foundations of a far-reaching reform in our schools.
Accordingly, I shall repeat myself three times, in these lectures; first, by setting forth the scientific content, secondly, by expounding the methods of investigation, and thirdly, by applying in practice what I have already taught in theory. The didactic method of repeating the same instruction under different forms, is also a feature of scientific pedagogy, because it represents the method by which positive science must be taught and acquired; and furthermore, it is the method that deserves to be applied wherever instruction of any sort is to be given.
Hitherto, we have not learned how to study; we know only, or at least the majority of us do, how to absorb the contents of books. The only true student is the scientist, who knows how to advance slowly; we educators on the contrary plunge in a dizzy, headlong rush, through all acquirable knowledge. To study is to look steadily, to stand still, to assimilate and to wait. We should study for the sake of creating, since the whole object of taking is to be able to give again; but in this giving and taking we ought not to be mere instruments, like high-pressure suction pumps; in work of this sort we ought to be creators, and when we give back, to add that part which has been born and developed within us from what we acquired. It is wise to give our acquired knowledge time not only to be assimilated but also to develop freely in that fertile psychic ground that constitutes our innermost personality. In other words: assimilate by every possible means, and then wait.
In order to start from a point of established knowledge, let us consider what is meant by meditation: to meditate means to isolate one's thoughts within the limits of some definite subject, and wait to see what that subject of its own accord may reveal to us, in the course of assimilation. The Jesuits succeeded in winning souls merely by encouraging the people to meditate; meditation opened up an unsuspected inner world, which fascinated the type of person accustomed to flit lightly in thought across a multitude of diverse matters; and under the spell of such fascination, their consciences could attribute to nothing less than some occult power, what was really the application of a great pedagogic principle.
There is a great difference between reading and meditating: we may read a voluminous novel in a single night; we may meditate upon a verse of Scripture for an entire hour. Anyone who reads a novel in a night undoubtedly squanders his physical powers, like a wind that passes over arid ground; but one who meditates assimilates in a special manner that surprises the meditator himself, because he feels something unforeseen coming to life within him, just as though a seed had been planted in fertile soil and, while remaining motionless, had begun to germinate. Accordingly, the act of holding acquired knowledge within ourselves for a period of time results in self-development; superficial learning, on the contrary, means the exhaustion of our personal resources. We become steadily more exhausted and more inefficient, through too much study; and instead, we ought to become all the time more flourishing and more robust, if we studied in the proper way: and this is because we squander our psychic powers, instead of acquiring new energy. The consequence of this mistaken method is that we rapidly forget all that we have learned. Everything is acquired at the cost of effort; what we need is to labor patiently, in order to acquire in the real sense. To-day it is the fashion to study in order to enter upon that particular business or profession that is destined to be our life's work; what we ought to do instead, is to devote our energies to the conquest of thought and the elevation of the spirit.
The didactic method that I am trying to illustrate is not a new one; it dates back to the first precursors of scientific pedagogy. Half a century ago, a marvellous work on pedagogy, based on similar principles, was issued from the press; it was the method elaborated by Séguin, based on thirty years of practical experience in the education of idiotic children. Such a system cannot be foreign to the interests of schools intended for average, normal children, because it is not a specialised method, like that for deaf-mutes or for the blind. Being designed for the mentally deficient, this method applies to any class of undeveloped beings who are striving to grow bigger; we may even apply it to ourselves, and thereby increase our own mental stature. In short, pedagogically considered, it is a rational method.
Perhaps it is already familiar to a good many of you; but an example or two will serve to illustrate it. Let us suppose that we have to impart a lesson in history to a deficient pupil: first of all, a picture is shown him, representing an historic fact; then the same fact will be shown him in as many different ways as possible—through the cinematograph, for example. Finally it will be acted on the stage; and in this case, it is the children themselves who prepare the setting and endeavor, to the best of their ability, to impersonate the historic figures. Now, it is precisely at the moment when they are reproducing the scene that these children feel it, and it is only then that they learn. But this is not peculiar to deficient children: the same path is the common path for all; it is necessary for all of us to assimilate mentally and to feel, before we can say: I have learned. If there is a latent tendency in the mind of a normal child to love historic happenings, then he will love them, and thus reveal to his teacher one of his intimate and secret tendencies; in other words, we shall have developed a taste, of which the hidden germs already existed. Perhaps it was in some such way that Sabatier succeeded in realising the environment and the life of St. Francis of Assisi.
Let us suppose, again, that we have to teach a child what is meant, in geography, by a mountain, a lake, or an island. According to Séguin's method, we should take the child out into the garden, and make him construct a miniature mountain with earth, a lake with water, etc., than make him trace their geographical outline with chalk, then make him paint them in oils or water-colours, so that in the end he will have, as the result of his handiwork, a little monument, so to speak, of the acquired lesson. It is only after a child has worked that he begins to learn and to be interested. Does not everyone know that, as between the one who receives, and the one who confers a favor, it is the latter who cares the more, because he has done something? The next step is to take the pupil to the top of some hill, so that he may see with his own eyes the things that we have taught him in the garden and through the medium of work; and in the silent contemplation of nature, it may happen that a normal child will hear the call of her mysterious voice, and reveal a dormant tendency to become some day, perhaps, a geographer, or an explorer, like the Duke of the Abruzzi; or perhaps he will feel that lure of nature which, some day or other, when he reaches maturity, will lead him to investigate the secrets of the earth and of meteorological phenomena, even to the point of such heroic sacrifice as was exemplified by Professor Matteucci, during the eruption of Vesuvius.
Repeating the same things over and over, keeping the mind fixed upon the selfsame lesson, teaching how to reproduce objects by the work of the hands, bringing the pupil into direct contact with the object that he is desired to study, such is the true way to enable him to learn. The man who has been educated according to this method has not fruitlessly expended his energy in fatiguing study; he has preserved his forces unimpaired; indeed, if anything, they are all the sounder and more flourishing. By such a system of education, we launch upon the world a sturdy generation, imbued with that living energy, that constitutes the one and only mainspring that really makes the world move.
Accordingly this is the method that we shall follow: studying, repeating, working experimentally: the subject of our study is humanity; our purpose is to become teachers. Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.
The Limits of Pedagogical Anthropology
In concluding this preamble, it may be well to define the form of study and the purposes of pedagogical anthropology; in order to distinguish it clearly from general anthropology and from the allied branches of applied anthropology (criminal and medical anthropology).
Pedagogical anthropology, like all the other branches of anthropology, studies man from the naturalistic point of view; but, unlike general anthropology, it does not concern itself with the philosophic problems related to it, such, for instance, as the origin of man, the theories of monism or polygenism, of emigration, and classification according to race; problems which, as everyone knows, are difficult of solution, and which constitute the pivot on which biological anthropology revolves. Thus, for example, bacteriology has its origin in biology, in so far as it has certain orders of living organisms for the subject of its research; but it well nigh ignores the problems of biological philosophy associated with them, such as the origin of living matter and of the primitive cell; the fixity or variability of monocellular species; the possibility of life in the isolated nucleus (the microbe), or in the isolated protoplasm (the monera), but it devotes itself to the direct study of microscopic organisms, both in themselves alone and in their influence upon their environment; in short, bacteriology has for its purpose the acquirement of that practical knowledge necessary for a successful campaign against the causes of infective maladies, and for rendering infected districts sanitary. In much the same way, pedagogical anthropology, considered as a form of study, departs from general anthropology. It studies man from two different points of view: his development (ontogenesis), and his variations.
Since many causes concur in producing variations in the individual during his development (social causes, pathological causes, etc.), we have to take into consideration, and frequently invoke the aid of subsidiary sciences (sociology, pathology, hygiene). Variations constitute the most important subject of inquiry in pedagogic anthropology, just as fixed characteristics constitute the essential matter of research in general anthropology: because the latter endeavours, by the help of fixed characteristics, to trace back to the origin of species, while the former tries, through the help of variable characteristics, to discover a way for the future perfectionment of the human species and the individual: indeed, this is precisely what constitutes the practical purpose of its application to pedagogy.
In comparison with criminal and medical anthropology, pedagogic anthropology differs substantially in its declared intentions. These other two kindred branches endeavour to diagnose the personality of the individual; we must admit that both psychiatry and general medical practice profit by the application of anthropology to the extent of securing greater accuracy in diagnosis and prognosis; but whenever the study of a patient's personality sheds light upon decisions of this sort, it generally follows that the personality is fixed and unalterable. For instance, when, in medical practice an individual constitution is shown to be fatally predisposed to certain definite diseases, that is precisely one of the cases where medical treatment is most impotent; and the same may be said when, in the practice of criminal law we find a defendant whose personality is profoundly degenerate. It follows that the application of these new anthropological methods is substantially diagnostic; furthermore, they are limited to special classes of human beings, to those who are physiologically the most impoverished, such as criminals and the diseased. Pedagogic anthropology, on the contrary, embraces all humanity; but it pays special attention to that part of it which is psychologically superior: the normal human being. Its purpose is none the less diagnostic; but it regards diagnosis as constituting a means, and not merely indicating an end; because the end projected by pedagogic anthropology is a far-reaching and rational system of hygiene.
More than that, the proposed system is the one true one, a hygiene that pays more attention to the man himself than to his environment; striving to perfect him in his physiological functions, or to correct any tendency to abnormal and pathological deviations.
It follows that, in pedagogic anthropology, the direction taken by the naturalistic study of man is predominantly physiological.
In the same manner as the other two kindred branches of anthropology, this branch which has joined forces with pedagogy has severed connection with the original parent stock of general anthropology, and abandoned its dogmatisms and to a large extent its phraseology.
Criminal anthropology, for example, shows great daring and scant accuracy in its affirmations and its researches; and to a large extent it has acquired a nomenclature of its own; and medical anthropology lays down laws that general anthropology never took into consideration, and neglects to bestow particular attention upon the head, which formed the object of fundamental research in general anthropology.
In the same way, pedagogic anthropology has had to emancipate itself from the general science from which it has sprung, in order to proceed unhampered along the practical line of research, which consists essentially in a study of the pupil and the compilation of biographic charts, from which a fund of material will result, destined to enrich the scientific content of this branch of learning.
But since the study of the pupil must not be morphological alone, but psychological as well, it is necessary for anthropology to invoke the aid of experimental psychology, in order to achieve its purpose. Now it is essential to psychology, no less than to pedagogic anthropology, to study the reactions of the physiological and psychical personality of the child in the environment which we call school. Consequently it is reserved for the teacher to make a large contribution to these two parallel sciences, which are coming to assume the highest social importance.
It follows further that pedagogic anthropology differs from the other two allied branches in its practical applications; the progress of criminal and medical anthropology requires, as a matter of fact, only the labors of medical specialists; in the case of pedagogic anthropology there is equally a need of medical specialists, to whom the diagnosis and the treatment of abnormal pupils must be entrusted, as well as the hygiene of their development; but in addition to these, the teachers also are summoned to a vast task of observation, which, by its continuity, will supplement and complete the periodic observations of the physician.
Furthermore, the teacher will acquire under the guidance of anthropology certain practical rules in the art of educating the child; and it is this especially that makes the anthropological and psychological training of the modern teacher so necessary.
The school constitutes an immense field for research; it is a "pedagogical clinic," which, in view of its importance, can be compared to no other gathering of subjects for study. Thanks to the system of compulsory education, it gathers to itself every living human being of both sexes and of every social caste, normal and abnormal; and it retains them there, throughout a most important period of their growth. This is the field, therefore, in which the culture of the human race can really and practically be undertaken; and the joint labour of physician and teacher will sow the seed of a future human hygiene, adapted to achieve perfection in man, both as a species and as a social unit.