Wildflower

U. S. education attempts to cultivate children's minds and bodies, lets their emotions grow like weeds or wildflowers. The results of this neglect, think mental hygienists, appear in the appallingly high rates of U. S. divorce, crime and insanity, in a national jitteriness. Last week the American Council on Education published a report* proposing that the schools pay as much attention to children's emotions as to the three Rs.

The committee that produced the report spent four years exploring the relation of emotion to learning. It had a grant from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Its chairman is husky, placid Professor Daniel Alfred Prescott, 40, of Rutgers University. A onetime Harvard teacher, Dr. Prescott is widely respected by educators for his tremendous research in sociology and psychology, is also an indefatigable stamp collector.

Dr. Prescott and his colleagues found human emotions a largely unmapped wilderness, its few known contours indicating that feeling's springs feed learning's river. Thus, whether an individual learns anything depends a great deal on whether he has a motive for learning it. One significant test showed that people learn pleasant words most efficiently, unpleasant ones less easily and words about which they are indifferent least efficiently.

Chief concern of Dr. Prescott was what can be done about training the emotions so that children will become well-balanced adults instead of arrested adolescents. The emotional impulses and cravings with which a child is born -- love, fear, the need for affection and for the sense of belonging to a group -- are bedeviled by many witches. Besides the timeless family jealousies and bickerings that make a child feel insecure, the accelerating tempo of modern life, the danger and excitement that fill even the comic strips, the rootlessness of city dwellers and competition in all things make "anxiety . . . the most prominent mental characteristic" of western civilization. Dr. Prescott found that by & large even the schools create tensions in children, by regimentation, by making them read before they are ready to learn to read, by giving them too many doses of failure.

The committee reported that all signs indicate that people's emotions can be trained. The big problem is : in what direction? The committee could not tell what emotional maturity is. Emotional behavior that eliminates tensions in the individual may not please society. "Yet society is not consistent within itself. . . . Socially, it is regarded as a mark of maturity in the United States to hate communism, while in much of Russia the affectively mature hate capitalism." Emotionally mature behavior, concluded Dr. Prescott, must be a compromise between physiological, social and ethical demands.

The committee recommended that the schools provide much more art, music and other esthetic outlets, that they offer children a fair balance between failure and success. Greatest need, however, is unworried, better-balanced teachers, preferably married.

Famed Ralph Winfred Tyler, head of the department of education at University of Chicago, said of the report: "To my mind it is the most significant book in this field which has appeared in years." But to laymen and most of the nation's 1,000,000 teachers it might have been more significant had it been written in plain English instead of clinical jargon. Sample: "Music and rhythm, apparently are facilitating factors for several types of learning. Diserens found that music delays fatigue, speeds up voluntary activities, increases the extent of many muscular reflexes, reduces and changes suggestibility and alters the electrical conductivity of tissues." In other words (Playwright Noel Coward's) : "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is".

*EMOTION AND THE EDUCATIVE PROCESS--Daniel A. Prescott--American Council on Education, Washington D. C. ($1.50).

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