CHAPTER VII
FAULTS, LIES, AND CRIMES
Classifications of children's faults—Peculiar children—Real faults as
distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease—Truancy, its nature and
effects—The genesis of crime—The lie, its classes and relations to imagination
—Predatory activities—Gangs—Causes of crime—The effects of stories of
crime—Temibility—Juvenile crime and its treatment.
Siegert[1] groups children of problematical nature into the following sixteen
classes: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers, scatter-brains, apathetic,
misanthropic, doubters and investigators, reverent, critical, executive, stupid and
clownish, naive, funny, anamnesic, disposed to learn, and blasé; patience,
foresight, and self-control, he thinks, are chiefly needed.
A unique and interesting study was undertaken by Közle[2] by collecting and
studying thirty German writers on pedagogical subjects since Pestalozzi, and
cataloguing all the words they use describing the faults of children. In all, this
gave 914 faults, far more in number than their virtues. These were classified as
native and of external origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, greed,
perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness, frivolity, distraction, precocity,
timidity, envy and malevolence, ingratitude, quarrelsomeness, cruelty,
superstition; and the latter fifteen were settled on as resultant groups, and the
authors who describe them best are quoted.
Bohannon[3] on the basis of questionnaire returns classified peculiar children as
heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly,
deformed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in sense, mind, and
speech, nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly,