Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1910-02-03

lie. Ih1s is a great advantage in abstract thinking. 1t
3 however d ulStlnct nlndrance in appreciation of cul-
ture and art. II we wish to train our children to think
accurately and abstracty we must train them, as the
schools evidently are now training them. in the direc.
ton Of verbal imagery. If, however, we wish to de-
Velop artists, poets, men of letters, inventors and those
with technical skill in the various professions. we must
see to 1t that this concrete imagery is not lost; for If
this loss takes place it will mean tremendous waste and
disaster for many.
The experiments further showed that those children
who thought in visual terms were best able to mem
orize material with a visual content and that those who
thought In auditory or motor terms were best able to
learn material with an auditory or motor content. This,
of course, means as far as the application of results to
school work is concerned that the material which the
child learns must be in some way adapted to his idea
tional type, II the best results are to be accomplished.
This, perhaps, is not SO vital a fact with the average
child who has many ways, it may be, in which he can
imagine his experience, but there are always in every
schoolroom numbers of exceptional children who are
very slow to get on in certain fields and who, neverthe-
less are far from being mental detectives. To take a
concrete illustration, there are children who have great
difficulty in learning to read and yet who are often
bright in other school subjects. 1t is probable that such
children have not developed the type Of verbaIvisual
imagery. The printed word fails to carry its proper
significance. Such a child, obviously, must be treated
differently from the average individual. In the first
place, he may be helped in his reading by being in
structed to spell and pronounce words. The method
of showing him words and having him grasp them as
visual signs will be a hopeless method Of procedure in
his case. Further, the child may be aided by a sys-
tematic attempt to strengthen his verbal-visual imagery.
There Is ample evidence that children can be trained
in any type of imagery and it is the business of educa-
ton to see that those who are defective in an essential
type are trained to overcome this defect.
We cannot think for a moment Of demanding the
same sort of thing from the child whose eyesight is poor
that we demand from the child Of normal visual acuity.
1t is just as foolish to expect the child who is defective
in a certain ideational type to do the work of a normal
child as it is to expect the child who is defective in his
visual s~ensibility to a~ccomplish the same results under
the same conditions that the child Of normal s~ensibflity
accomplishes.
Another important problem which has been under
taken by the psychological laboratory at the university
is to discover the most advantageous conditions, besides
those relating to the ideational type, under which GER
tain kinds of school material may be memorized. At
the outset of such an investigation the psychologist is
confronted with the difficulty of selecting the sort of
material for memorizing which will be sufficiently uni
form to be tried on many children and on the same child
at various times. 1t is quite evident that IL we use the
ordinary materials Of the schoolroom, such as the child
has had In his reading, geography and history room,
that this material will not be of the uniformity desired.
1t was to avoid this difficulty that the psychologist, Eb-
~binghaus, nearly rs years ago, tried a memory expert
ment, In which he used for material nonsense syllables,
that is, certain wsyllables which could be pronounced and
which yet had no Significance; s~yllables, for example,
like nec-doz-hux. Here we have a relatively uniform
material that has, for the most part, little or no signih-
canoe.
Using this kind Of material, several thousand school
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