5o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF CHILD DEVELOPMEXT 



By JAMES BURT MIXER, Ph.D. 



ASSISTANT PEOFESSOK OP PSYCHOLOGY, THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA 



TTTE public recognition that questions of development are different 

 from questions of health has caused a constantly increasing 

 demand for another type of expert than the physician. "We may call 

 him an expert in child development. When a parent stops to consider 

 the matter he knows that neither the short boy nor the short-minded 

 boy is primarily a sick boy. Moreover, if a child is persistently poor 

 in mathematics, it is not because of ill health. Mathematics makes 

 him sick, but in a different sense. He may lack the native interest 

 necessary for a mental flight into the fourth dimension. "When a 

 mother discovers that her daughter can not play the piano, she does not 

 take her to a doctor. She recognizes that it is a question of the absence 

 of a capacity for music or of improper training. Which fault it is, she 

 often can not tell. 



The expert in judging development must understand, not only how 

 the child is influenced by disease, but also how it is influenced in other 

 and more fundamental ways by hereditary tendencies, environment and 

 education. The attempt to specifically prepare such experts began 

 some fifteen years ago with the establishment of the first psychological 

 clinic. This work has now been taken up by half a dozen of the lead- 

 ing universities. Graduates, trained by their ps3^chologists, are giving 

 special service of this character in connection with the public schools, 

 juvenile courts, bureaus for vocational guidance, special schools for 

 exceptional children, schools for feebleminded, correctional and penal 

 institutions. Besides improving the methods for diagnosing the indi- 

 vidual child, scientific study is now rapidl}' increasing the data for 

 deciding how large groups of children should be handled in school and 

 out. This study of groups has been called to general attention most 

 prominently by various investigations of laggards in the public schools. 

 The most extensive of these is an elaborate report by Professor George 

 D. Strayer, published by the U. S. Bureau of Education, which covers 

 hundreds of cities scattered throughout the country. To understand 

 what the scientific study of development stands for, it is necessary to 

 consider both the researches which are directed at the study of groups 

 of children and those which emphasize the prolonged study of par- 

 ticular children. 



