CHILD-STUDY
CHILD-STUD1*
appeared in the race. At first very imperfectly developed, they require education for their perfecting, but the satisfactory maturation of the child requires that each should be allowed to run its course, so that the properly developed child has run the gamut of ancestral interests. This idea may be said to represent fairly well the belief of the very influential group of child-psychologists who follow President G. Stanley Hall of Clark University. Both applications of the idea of recapitulation to education are liable to the criticism that, while they suggest what is interesting and can be taught to the child, they do not enable us to know what should not be taught. Many stages of culture need not be represented in the child's education. So, too, many instincts, as those of fighting, may need repression rather than development.
The method of careful scientific observation of the child recommended by Her-bart finds its earliest and best exponent in the German physician and psychologist* Preyer. In his book, The Soul of the Child, we find a most careful study of the development of the powers of sense, or the feelings of physical and mental control, of language and the logical processes and self-consciousness. Space does not permit the statement of detailed conclusions, but the most suggestive and interesting outcome of Preyer s investigation is the clearness with which he puts the fact that the child at birth and for many months thereafter is not only without self-consciousness, reason and will, but that even its sense-perceptions are vague, confused and un-differentiated. Feeling is at first the mere rude sense of discomfort or comfort. The eyes are uncoordinated, the gaze is not fixed, and objects are not clearly discerned, not to speak of distances and colors. The same general condition holds of hearing and touch and even taste and smell.
The clarifying discoveries of Pre}^er have stimulated much valuable research into the methods by which self-control, judgment and conscience are evolved from the primitive chaos and night of the infant's consciousness. The most important development in this field takes the form of a psychological reinterpretation of the old principle that learning should be by doing. As stated by the American psychologists, Professors Dewey and Angell, who merely represent here the point of view of the psychology of to-day, consciousness arises when the child is stimulated more or less uncomfortably by some object, say a rattle. It reacts in a variety of movements, partly reflex, partly random in character. Among these movements one is usually more satisfactory in its results than the rest. Assumie t to be that
of grasping the rattle. This comes in the course of time to be the one movement that follows from the given stimulus, and the other unsuccessful movements are gradually eliminated. While this process is going on, the mind is gradually growing familiar with the stimulating object and is distinguishing those characteristics by which it can be identified. Thus perception is developing. The child bee mes conscious of what the object is and what it means. It then is capable of acting toward this object with intelligent foresight into consequences, that is, it can will. In a similar way all the mental powers develop. We learn to perceive, to remember, to imagine and to reason because we react toward stimulating objects, and in order that we may react more successfully. Consciousness finds its stimulus in an unsatisfactory situation and its function in assisting to a satisfactory treatment of this. To get a pupil to learn, the teacher must get him to be discontented with his capacity to do. This will stir up a process of experimentation, in the course of which the powers of thought and feeling will expand.
The typical experimental activity through which a young child learns most has been recognized to be that of play. According to Professor Groos, play is simply the expression of the instincts of the child and so of its interests and capacities. This activity is accordingly justified in the place assigned to it in education by Froebel. It must, however, be led into work by methods that are indicated in the article on INTEREST. One important activity by which this transition between the imperfect, instinctive plays of the child and mature efficiency is effected is found in imitation. This process has been exhaustively treated by the American psychologist, Professor Baldwin, who finds in it the means by which the child is led to become conscious of himself and of others, and so to develop his social and ethical nature. In the endeavor to imitate the child becomes adjusted to society.
The great emphasis thrown by] child-psychologists upon the feebleness of intelligence and the imperfection of instincts in the infant naturally rouses our curiosity as to why the young of brutes should be so much more capable of helping themselves. Mr. Fiske, the American historian and philosopher, has found in the helplessness of infancy the secret of man's capacity to learn. A brute is fairly well-fixed in its mode of life by its instincts. It does well in commonplace situations, but in unusual emergencies it is helpless. Its life is, however, as a rule, simple and commonplace It does not need to do new things. Man, on the other hand, is in his complex life continually compelled to learn, to readjust himself. Hence he is born helpless, with imperfect instincts
