ng."

_Farmer and Stork._ "Try and help the stork out of the field."

_Miller, Son, and Donkey._ "They was all big fools and mean to
the donkey."

One does not require very profound psychological insight to see that a
person of this degree of comprehension is not promising material for
moral education. His weakness in the ability to generalize a moral
situation is not due to lack of instruction, but is inherent in the
nature of his mental processes, all of which have the infantile quality
of average 9- or 10-year intelligence. Well-instructed normal children
of 10 years ordinarily succeed no better. The ability to draw the
correct lesson from a social situation is little developed below the
mental level of 12 or 13 years.

The test is also valuable because it throws light on the subject's
ability to appreciate the finer shades of meaning. The mentally retarded
often show marked inferiority in this respect. They sense, perhaps, in a
general way the trend of the story, but they fail to comprehend much
that to us seems clearly expressed. They do not get what is left for the
reader to infer, because they are insensible to the thought fringes. It
is these which give meaning to the fable. The dull subject may be able
to image the objects and activities described, but taken in the rough
such imagery gets him nowhere.

Finally, the test is almost free from the danger of coaching. The
subject who has been given a number of fables along with twenty-five or
thirty other tests can as a rule give only hazy and inaccurate testimony
as to what he has been put through. Moreover, we have found that, even
if a subject has previously heard a fable, that fact does not materially
increase his chances of giving a correct interpretation. If the
situation depicted in the fable is beyond the subject's power of
comprehension even explicit instruction has little effect upon the
quality of the response.

Incidentally, this observation raises the question whether the use of
proverbs, mottoes, fables, poetry, etc., in the moral instruction of
children may not often be futile because the material is not fitted to
the child's power of comprehension. Much of the school's instruction in
history and literature has a moral purpose, but there is reason to
suspect that in this field schools often make precocious attempts in
"generalizing" exercises.

XII, 6. REPEATING FIVE DIGITS REVERSED

The series are 3-1-8-7-9; 6-9-4-8-2; 5-2-9-6