Meanwhile the pointing finger (particularly if it is kept almost imperceptibly moving beneath the word which is being looked at) will help to keep the eyes centralized and rapidly shifting over a small area of maximum clarity of vision. In his own way and for his own purposes, the child is eminently wise. When disease or mal-functioning has reduced us, so far as reading is concerned, to the child’s level, we should not be ashamed to avail ourselves of this instinctive wisdom.
CHAPTER XV, Myopia
All persons suffering from defective vision will derive benefit from practising the fundamental techniques of the art of seeing described in the preceding chapters. In the present chapter and that which follows I shall indicate ways in which certain of these fundamental techniques may be adapted to the needs of persons suffering specifically from short sight, long sight, astigmatism and squint, and shall also give an account of some new procedures, particularly effective in these various manifestations of disease, hereditary idiosyncrasy and, above all, mal-functioning.
Its Causes
Myopia is almost invariably an acquired condition, which makes its appearance during childhood. It has been attributed to the close work which school children are compelled to perform; and great efforts have been made in all civilized countries to reduce the amount of such work done within a given period, to enlarge the type of text-books and to improve lighting conditions in schools. The effects of these reforms have been entirely disappointing. Myopia is even commoner today than it was in the past.
This deplorable state of things seems to be due to three principal causes. First, the attempt to improve the environmental conditions prevailing in schools have failed, in certain respects, to go far enough. Second, in other respects, the reforms carried out have been misguided. And third, the reformers have almost completely neglected the psychological reasons for defective vision—a neglect which is particularly serious in the case of children.
It is in the direction of better lighting that the reformers have as yet not gone far enough. Dr. Luckiesh has demonstrated experimentally that visual tasks become easier, and that muscular nervous tension declines, as the intensity of illumination on a given task is increased from one to a hundred foot-candles. He made no experiments with higher intensities, but considers that there is every reason to suppose that muscular nervous tension (the index of strain and fatigue) would continue to fall off with a further increase of illumination to a thousand foot-candles.
Now, a child in a well-built, well-lit modern school may think himself extremely lucky if he gets as much as twenty foot-candles of illumination to work with. In many schools he will be given as little as ten or even five. There is reason to believe that many boys and girls might be saved from myopia if they were given sufficient light. In existing conditions, only children with the most perfect seeing habits can hope to get through their schooling without straining their organs of vision. But strain is the principal cause of mal-functioning and this, so far as many children are concerned, means myopia.
In their attempt to improve lighting, the reformers have not gone far enough. In their attempt to improve the typography of school books they have gone too far in a wrong direction. For the purposes of clear, unstrained seeing, the best print is not necessarily the largest. Large print, it is true, has a specious air of being very easy to read; but precisely because it seems so easy, it lures the eyes and mind into temptation. They try to see whole lines of this all too legible print with equal clarity at the same time. Central fixation is lost, the eyes and attention cease to shift, habits of staring are developed and, instead of being improved, vision is actually impaired. For good seeing, the best print is one that is not too large, but fairly heavy, so that there is plenty of strong contrast between the black letters and their background. When confronted by such print, the mind and its eyes are not tempted by any obvious excess of legibility to try to see too much too well.
Instead, the smaller type encourages them to read with central fixation and in a state of dynamic relaxation. Dr. Bates, indeed, made use of the smallest available print for re-educating defective vision. He would give his pupils not merely diamond type to read (the smallest that a printer can set up), but even those microscopic reductions of print which can only be made by the camera. This microscopic type cannot be read except when the eyes and mind are in a state of complete dynamic relaxation, and are doing their looking with perfect central fixation. With a good teacher to help him a person with even very serious defects of sight (I speak here from personal experience) can be got into the condition in which he can read words printed in microscopic type. And the result is not eye-strain or fatigue, but a marked temporary improvement of vision for other objects.
Working with microscopic type without a teacher is not too easy, and the unwary enthusiast may be tempted to set about it in the wrong way. Consequently I have not included any detailed description of this procedure. If I mention it here, it is merely to show that the correlation between large print and good seeing is not the obvious and self-evident thing, which the designers of school books have commonly imagined it to be.
By neglecting the psychological reasons why school children develop defects of vision the reformers have absolutely guaranteed at least a partial failure of their efforts. Even if the lighting of schools were improved out of all recognition, even if the best possible print were used in all the primers and text-books, large numbers of children would still undoubtedly develop myopia and other defects of vision. They would do so because they are often bored and sometimes frightened, because they dislike sitting cooped up for long hours, reading and listening to stuff which seems to them largely nonsensical, and compelled to perform tasks which they find not only difficult, but pointless.
Further, the spirit of competition and the dread of blame or ridicule foster, in many childish minds, a chronic anxiety, which adversely affects every part of the organism, not excluding the eyes and the mental functions associated with seeing. Nor is this all; the exigencies of schooling are such that children must constantly be given novel and unfamiliar things to look at. Every time a new mathematical formula is inscribed on the blackboard, every time the class is set the task of learning a new page of Latin grammar, or to study a new set of features on a map, every child concerned is being forced to pay close and concentrated attention to something completely unfamiliar—that is to say, something which it is peculiarly difficult to see, something which sets up a certain amount of strain in the eyes and minds even of those who have the best of seeing habits.
About seventy per cent of children are sufficiently stolid and well balanced to be able to go through school without visual mishap. The rest emerge from the educational ordeal with myopia or some other defect of vision.
Some of the psychological reasons for bad sight can probably never be eliminated from the school; for they seem to be inherent in the very process of herding children together and imposing upon them discipline and book learning. Others can be got rid of—but only by a rare combination of good will and intelligence. (For instance, until all teachers become angels and geniuses, how are you going to prevent a considerable number of children in every generation from being frightened and bored?)
There is, however, one field in which the reasons for bad seeing can be eliminated fairly certainly and without much difficulty: it is possible to mitigate the ocular and mental strain, caused by the constant recurrence of situations in which children are called upon to look at something unfamiliar. The extremely simple technique for achieving this end was devised by Dr. Bates, and for some years was used successfully in a number of schools in different parts of the United States.
Owing to changes in the administration of these schools and to pressure exerted by organized orthodoxy, the practices suggested by Dr. Bates were gradually abandoned. The fact is regrettable; for there is evidence that they actually did good in preserving the children’s vision, while the nature of the practices was such that it was absolutely impossible that they should ever do anyone any harm.
Dr. Bates’s technique for relieving the strain caused by constantly looking at unfamiliar objects was exceedingly simple. It consisted merely in hanging a Snellen chart in some conspicuous position in the school room, and instructing the children, as soon as the chart was thoroughly familiar, to look at it for a few moments whenever they had any difficulty in seeing the blackboard, or a map, or the pages, say, of a grammar or geometry book. Because the chart was an old friend, the children had no difficulty in seeing its graduated letters.
The act of reading gave them new faith in their own
