s different from girls in mental capability and
attitude?

HELPFUL REFERENCES

Those listed in Chapter VII.

CHAPTER X

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND TEACHING

OUTLINE--CHAPTER X

The causes of individual differences.--Norsworthy and Whitley on
the significance of parentage.--The teacher's obligation to know
parents.--The influence of sex.--Environment as a
factor.--Thorndike quoted.--B.H. Jacobsen on individual
differences.

So far we simply have made the point that individuals differ. We are
concerned in this chapter in knowing how these differences affect the
teaching process. Fully to appreciate their significance we must know
not only that they exist, and the degree of their variation, but also
the forces that produce them. On the side of heredity, race, family, and
sex, are the great modifying factors. Practically, of course, we are
concerned very little as Church teachers with problems of race. We are
all so nearly one in that regard that a discussion of racial differences
would contribute but little to the solution of our teaching problem.

The matter of family heritage is a problem of very much more immediate
concern. Someone has happily said: "Really to know a boy one must know
fully his father and his mother." "Yes," says a commentator, "and he
ought to know a deal about the grandfather and grandmother." The
significance of parentage is made to stand out with clearness in the
following paragraph from Norsworthy and Whitley, _The Psychology of
Childhood_:

"Just as good eyesight and longevity are family characteristics, so
also color blindness, left-handedness, some slight peculiarity of
structure such as an extra finger or toe, or the Hapsburg lip, sense
defects such as deafness or blindness, tendencies to certain
diseases, especially those of the nervous system,--all these run in
families. Certain mental traits likewise are obviously handed down
from parents to child, such as strong will, memory for faces, musical
imagination, abilities in mathematics or the languages, artistic
talent. In these ways and many others children resemble their
parents. The same general law holds of likes and dislikes, of
temperamental qualities such as quick temper, vivacity, lovableness,
moodiness. In all traits, characteristics, features, powers both
physical and mental and to some extent moral also, children's
original nature, their sto