Native is slower than the European in all types of activity, and is satisfied with a considerably less degree of completeness and exactness.1 In school practice it points to less stringent requirements from Native pupils than from Europeans in both teaching and examination.

The fact that the Native child is from 30 to 100 per cent. slower than the European child in working arithmetical examples is very significant. The slowness of the South African Native has become proverbial, and in their political, social, and domestic dealings with the Natives the greatest mistakes made by the Europeans have been in neglecting to make allowance for the slowness of the Native people. We have seen how the early missionaries attempted to proceed too rapidly with their work among the Natives; and to this day one of the most difficult problems confronting the missionary is to prevent retrogression. Similar mistakes have been made, and are still being made, in educational work among the South African Natives. Until we realise that our educational programme must be based upon the peculiar characteristics of the people we are doomed to disappointment. The absurdity of imposing the same curriculum upon the children of both races is apparent. The curriculum for Native pupils must be different from that of the Europeans; and where the subjects are the same, considerably less in the way of achievement must be expected from the slower race.

A third fact of great significance is the greater variability of the Europeans in their arithmetical achievements. While the Natives vary more than the Whites in their ages, they are much more uniform in their achievements. This fact is of much importance for the probable future of the races, and points to the continued dominance of the European.2

Section 7.-Conclusions

Our investigation into the comparative achievements of European, Indian, and Native pupils leads to the following conclusions:

1 See Report of the Cape Select Committee on Native Education, 1908, section 1028.

2 See Thorndike, Educational Psychology, vol. iii., chaps. ix. and x., for a treatment of the significance of variability.

1. The Native pupils tested were from two to three years older than the Europeans of the same standards, and from three to five years older in physical maturity. No allowance has been made in curriculum, methods, or discipline for the physical, mental, and emotional differences between prepubescent and pubescent or post-pubescent children. This would probably account largely for the so-called arrested mental development of pubescent and post-pubescent Native pupils. The only remedy available at present, when Native pupils enter school at such different ages, is to encourage teachers to modify curriculum and methods to suit these pupils, and to advance them as rapidly as possible.

2. There is a considerable amount of overlapping in the several standards of European, Indian, and Native schools. Where it is not possible to regroup pupils in accordance with their standard of achievement in each subject, they should be allowed to devote their time to work in other subjects.

3. The formal teaching of handwriting is of little value in and after Standard IV. The high standard already achieved could be maintained by insistence on good writing in all subjects, and the time thus saved might be devoted to other subjects. This is of prime importance because of the short school life of Native pupils.

4. In arithmetic the Native pupils are very much slower, less accurate, and less variable than the Europeans. This fact has important bearing on the curriculum, which should be considerably simpler than that of the European pupils.

CHAPTER X

THE BASES OF RECONSTRUCTION

PART I. THE MENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE

NATIVE

DR JOHN ADAMS, in his brilliant and entertaining study of the psychology of Herbart,1 points out that when "the master teaches John Latin," it was formerly only considered necessary to know Latin, but that nowadays the master must know John. So with us. If we hope to build up a satisfactory system of Native education in South Africa we must first know the Native.

The importance of psychology in education is twofold. On the one hand, it is one of the basal subjects, and, along with biology, sociology, and philosophy, provides us with a mass of rationalised knowledge on which a system of education must be founded. On the other hand, it becomes a professional subject, and, by explaining how the mind develops and acts, shows the educator how to bring about those mental changes in knowledge and character which we call education.

The study of child psychology derived from observation of experiments with Caucasian children has given us sufficient reliable data regarding the mental processes and development of young children on which to base a system of education; but when we seek to make use of that data in preparing a system of education for the Bantu child, we are confronted with a serious difficulty. Is the psychology of the Bantu child the same as that of the Caucasian ?

1 Herbartian Psychology, chap. ii.

Section 1.-General Studies in Racial Psychology

2

The scientific study of racial psychology is still in its infancy. Generalisations from individual cases or from the observations of travellers are at least as old as Herodotus, but the first real attempts to apply objective and quantitative methods to the questions of race psychology were those of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits in 1891.1 The next important study was that conducted by Professor R. S. Woodworth at the St Louis Exposition in 1904. In both cases the qualities tested were motory and sensory processes, and some of the simpler and higher mental processes. The conclusions arrived at by the two studies are in general agreement. The widespread notion that uncivilised peoples are more acute in vision and hearing is not borne out by the results. Primitive people appear to be superior to Europeans in their sense of touch, but inferior in their sense of pain. The sense of smell is about the same in all races. In accuracy in tapping marked differences were noted, and in the "form-board" test (i.e. fitting differently shaped blocks into their proper grooves) the races experimented upon seemed to divide into two groups of widely different ability. The reader is referred to the reports themselves for details. All we can do here is to give the general conclusions that there is very little difference between races in sensory and motor processes and the simpler mental activities, but that there are apparently wide differences in general intelligence in the higher mental processes.

Section 2.-Studies of School Children of Different Races in the United States

While there is a pressing need for further experimentation along the lines of these studies, our present interest is to discover what mental differences (if any) exist between European and Native school children. The writer believes that the experiments reported below are the only ones which have been made on the Native children of South Africa, but 1 Reported in the Report of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition. * Reported in Science, February 1910, Racial Differences in Mental Traits."

"

three studies which have been made in the United States on the comparative intelligence of White and Negro children are interesting and suggestive.

In 1913 Dr Marion J. Mayo endeavoured to find out the differences in mental capacity between White and Negro pupils as far as this capacity is exercised in school work.1 His method was to compare the school marks of the 150 White and the same number of Coloured2 pupils in the high schools of the city of New York, where both sets of pupils attend the same schools, pursue the same branches of study, are measured by the same standards, and have received the same kind of previous school training. The results are summarised by Professor Thorndike as follows:-3

1. On the average Coloured pupils are seven months older than the Whites, only 36 per cent. of them being as young as the median White.

2. The Coloured pupils continue longer in the high school. 3. In achievement in the different studies they are somewhat, but not very much, inferior to the Whites. The general tendency is for only three-tenths of them to reach the median record for Whites.

4. The difference is greatest in the case of English, in which only 24 per cent. of the Coloured pupils reach or exceed the median for Whites.

5. The coloured pupils are perhaps a little less variable than the whites.

In 1913 Professor W. H. Pyle began a series of experimental studies on the mentality of the Negro. The investigations are not yet completed, but the results attained so far are interesting and suggestive.1

The tests were four tests of memory, two tests of quickness

1 "The Mental Capacity of the American Negro,” Columbia Contributions to Philosophy and Psychology, vol. xxii., No. 2.

2 "Coloured" includes both pure Negroes and Mulattoes. Dr Mayo was compelled, through difficulties of classification, to abandon his attempt to separate the Coloured pupils into sub-groups on the basis of the degree of race mixture.

3 Educational Psychology, vol. iii. p. 208.

4 An account of the results so far obtained are presented by Professor Pyle in the March 1915 number of School and Society, vol. i., No. 10.