November 4, 1920] 



NATURE 



323 



Educational Science.* 

 Bv Sir Robert Blair, LL.D. 



' P HE value to education of science and the scientific ; 

 A method has hitherto been for the most part ! 

 indirect and incidental. It has consisted very largely 

 in deductions from another branch of study, namely, I 

 psychology, and has resulted for the most part from ; 

 the invasion into education of those who were not i 

 themselves educationists. A moment has now been 

 reached when education itself should be made the 

 subject of a distinct department of science, when 

 teachers themselves should become men of science. 



There is in this respect a close analogy between 

 educiition and medicine. Training the mind implies 

 a knowledge of the mind, just as healing the body 

 implies a knowledge of the body. Thus, logically, 

 education is based upon psychology, as medicine is 

 based on anatomy and physiology. .And there the 

 text-books of educational method are usually content 

 to leave it. But me<licine is much more than applied 

 physiology. It constitutes an independent system of 

 facts, gathered and analysed, not by physiologists in 

 the laboratory, but by physicians working in the hos- 

 pital or by the bedside. In the same way, then, 

 education as a science should be something more than 

 mere applied psychology. It must be built up not out 

 of the speculations of theorists, or from the deduc- 

 tions of psychologists, but by direct, definite, ad )wc 

 inquiries concentrated upon the problems of the class- 

 room by teachers themselves. When by their own 

 researches teachers have demonstrated that their art 

 is, in fact, a science, then, and not until then, will 

 the public allow them the moral, social, and economic 

 status which it already accords to other professions. 

 The engineer and the doctor are duly recognised as 

 scientific experts. The educationist .should see TO it 

 that his science also becomes recognised, no longer 

 as a general topic upon which any cultured laj?man 

 may dogmatise, but as a technical branch of science, 

 in which the educationist alone, in virtue of his special 

 knowledge, his special training, his special experi- 

 ence, is the acknowledged expert. 



Educational science has hitherto followed two main 

 lines of investigation : first, the evaluation and im- 

 provement of teachers' methods, and, secondly,^ the 

 diagnosis and treatment of children's individual 

 capacities. 



I. Thb Psychologv of the Individual Child. 



It is upon the latter problem, or group of problems, 

 that experimental work has in the past been chiefly 

 directed, and in the immediate future is likely to be 

 concentrated with the most fruitful results. The 

 recent .idvanoes in " individual psychology " — the 

 youngest branch of that infant science — have greatly 

 emphasised the need, and assisted the development, of 

 individual teaching. The keynote of successful 

 instruction is to adapt that instruction to the indi- 

 vidual child. But before instruction can be so adapted 

 the needs and the capacities of the individual child 

 must first be discovered. 



A. Diagnosis. 



Such discovery (as in all sciences) may proceed by 

 two methods : by observation and by experiment. 



(i) The former method is, in education, the older, 

 At one time, in the handi of Stanley Hall and his 

 followers — the pioneers of the child>study movement 

 —observation yielded fruitful resuhs. And it it 



* From iIm opsning Mldrnt of ih« Pr«<M*m of Sactlon I. (CHuoiioniil 

 ticKiv-*) rfrlirtrad at IIm Cudiff MMiiog •( itn B i H Iifc AMoctalim oa 



Auguvi 34. 



NO. 2662, VOL. 106] 



perhaps to be regretted that of late simple observa- 

 tion and description have been neglected for the more 

 ambitious method of experimental tests. There is 

 much that a vigilant teacher can do without using 

 any special apparatus and without conducting any 

 special experiment. Conscientious records of the 

 behaviour and responses of individual children, 

 accurately described without any admixture of infer- 

 ence or hypothesis, would lay broad foundations upon 

 which subsequent investigators could build. The study 

 of children's temperament and character, for example 

 — factors which have not yet been accorded their due 

 weight in education — must for the present proceed 

 upon these simpler lines. 



(2) With experimental tests the progress made 

 during the last decade has been enormous. The intel- 

 ligence scale devised by Binet for the diagnosis of 

 mental deficiency, the mental tests employed by the 

 -American .Army, the vocational tests now coming into 

 use for the selection of employees — these have done 

 much to familiarise, not school teachers and school 

 doctors only, but also the general public, with the 

 aims and possibilities of psychological measurement. 

 More recently an endeavour has been made to assess 

 directly the results of school instruction, and to record 

 in quantitative terms the course of progress from 

 year to year, by means of standardised tests for educa- 

 tional attainments. In this country research com- 

 mittees of the British .Association and of the Child- 

 Study Society have already commenced the stan- 

 dardisation of normal performances in such subjects 

 as reading and arithmetic. In America attempts have 

 been made to standardise even more elusive subjects, 

 such as drawing, handwork, English composition, and 

 the subjects of the curriculum of the secondary school. 



B. Treatment. 



This work of diagnosis has done much to foster 

 individual and differential teaching — the adaptation of 

 education to individual children, or at least to special 

 groups and types. It has not only assisted the machinery 

 of segregation — of selecting the mentally deficient child 

 at one end of the scale and the scholarship child at 

 the other — but it has also provided a method for 

 assessing the results of different teaching methods 

 as applied to these segregated groups. Progress has 

 been most pronounced in the case of the sub-normal. 

 The mentally defective arc now taught in special 

 schools, and receive an instruction of a specially 

 adapted type. Some advance has more recently been 

 made in differentiating the various grades and kinds 

 of so-called deficiency, and in discriminating between 

 the deficient and the merely backward and dull. With 

 regard to the morally defective and delinquent little 

 scientific work has been attempted in this country, 

 with the sole exception of the new experiment 

 initiated by the Birmingham justices. In the United 

 States some twenty centres or clinics have been estab- 

 lished for the psycliological examination of exceptional 

 children ; and in England school me<lical ofliix-rs and 

 others have urged the need for "intermediate " classes 

 or schools not only to accommodate backward and 

 borderline cases and cases of limited or special defect 

 (e.g. " number-defect " and so-called " word-blind- 

 ness "), but also to act as clearing-houses. 



In Germany and elsewhere special interest has 

 been aroused in super-normni children. The few in- 

 vestigations already mode show clejirly that additional 

 attention, expenditure, study, and provision will, yield 



