Datastream
Datastream
Datastream
'
BY T.H. PEAR, M.A., B.Sc.
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.
Side by side with the prent's watchfdness and care goes the demand that
the child himself should make as much effort. acquire as much physical
dexterity as possible. Every %sin a child makes is noted, and the child
is inexorably held to his past record. There are no cases of children who
toddle a few steps, fall, bruise their noses, and refuse to take another step
for three months. The rigorous way of life demands that the children be
self-sufficient as early as pssible. Until a child has learned to handle
his own body, he is not safe in the house, in a canoe, or on the small islands.
His mother or aunt is a slave, unable to leave him for a minute, never free
of watching his wandering steps. So every new proficiency is encouraged
and insisted upon. Whole groups of busy men and women cluster about
the baby's first step, but there is no such delightful audience to bemoan his
first fall. He is set upon his feet gently but firmly and told to try again.
The only way in which he can keep the interest of his admiring audience is
to try again. So self-pity is stifled and another step is attempted.
.. . The test of this kind of training is in the results. The Manus children
are perfectly at home in the water. They neither fear it nor regard it as
presenting special difficultiesand clangen. The demands upon them have
made them keen-eyed, quick-witted and physically competent like their
parents. There is not a child of five who can't swim well. A Manus
child who couldn't swim would be as aberrant, as definitely subnormal as
an American child of five who couldn't walk.
In other aspects of adapting the children to the external world the same
technique is followed. Every gain, every ambitious attempt is applauded ;
too ambitious projects are simply ignored, but important ones are punished.
So a child who, after having learned to walk, slips and bumps his head, is
not gathered up in kind compassionate arms while mother kisses his tears
away, thus establishing a fatal connection between physical disaster and
extra cuddling. Instead the little stumbler is berated for his durnsiness,
and if he has been very stupid, slapped soundly into the bargain. Or if his
misstep has occurred in a canoe or on the verandah, the exasperated and
disgusted adult may simply dump him contemptuously into the water to
THE CONCEPT OF MENTAL MATURITY 413
meditate upon his ineptness. The next time the child slips, he will not
glance anxiously for an audience for his agony, as so many of our children do ;
he will nervously hope that no one has noticed his faux pas. This attitude,
severe and unsympathetic as i t appears on the surface, makes children
develop perfect motor co-ordination. The child with slighter original
proficiency cannot be distinguished among the fourteen-year-olds except
in special pursuits like spear-throwing, where a few will excel in skill. But
in the everyday activities of swimming, paddling, punting, climbing, there
is a general high level of excellence. And clumsiness, physical uncertainty
and lack of poise, is unknown among adults. The Manus are alive to
individual differences in skill or knowledge and quick to brand the stupid,
the slow learner, the man or woman with poor memory. But they have no
word for clumsiness. The child's lesser proficiency is simply described
46
as not understanding yet ". That he should not understand the art of
handling his body, his canoes well, very presently, is unthinkable.