November 4, 1909] 



NA TURE 



27 



means, not the aim. The psychologist regards the inner 

 life as the physicist regards the outer. He shows us how 

 the pupil's mind imitates; he cannot tell us what is 

 worthy of imitation. It is to ethics we must look to give 

 us our goal before we apply to psychology for the means 

 to reach it. 



Again, the psychologist is seeking the relation of cause 

 and effect, and for that he must analyse personality. The 

 child's mind is to him a combination of elements, as the 

 physical thing is a combination of atoms; and so psycho- 

 logical truth differs from the truth of life. The child, for 

 the educator, is a unity to be understood, not a bundle 

 of conditions to be described. The teacher must beware 

 of any tendency to inhibit those emotional responses of 

 personality to personality. Tact and sympathy and love 

 and interest are the things which matter in educating the 

 young. 



Yet, if its dangers are well understood, the knowledge 

 of experimental psychology ought to be at the disposal 

 of the teacher just as experimental physics ought to be 

 familiar to the engineer. Psychology in the past has been 

 a strictly theoretical science, having little or no connection 

 with practical nee4s ; but in the last decade the connec- 

 tions have been made ; the practical problems have been 

 studied in the laboratory in the light of psychological facts. 

 There is a body of psychology applied to education which 

 the teacher can use with safety. 



Of this applied psychology Prof. Miinsterberg gave 

 several interesting examples drawn from his own labora- 

 tory practice. He told us how, by experimenting with 

 nonsense material, the effect upon remembering of repeti- 

 tion, of a lengthened time interval between hearing and 

 recollecting, of reading as against writing and saying, had 

 all been studied. He showed that the learning process is 

 not coterminous with the process of taking in, but that 

 a period of rest, in which the impressions settle, as it 

 were, and organise themselves with the previous content 

 of the mind, is requisite. He laid it down that piecemeal 

 learning is an illusion, and that, within certain ascertain- 

 able limits, the larger the group of impressions the better 

 they are remembered. Finally, he pointed out that it is 

 possible to relate individuals to certain definite types, as, 

 for instance, those whose memory is visual and those in 

 whom it is acoustical, and indicated the relevancy of the 

 facts, not only to the educational process, but also to the 

 selection of a calling for the child, since every calling 

 demands certain characteristic traits. 



Dr. J. W. Robertson, the second American vice-presi- 

 dent of the section, is the first principal of MacDonald 

 College, which has been established at St. Anne de 

 Bellevue, a few miles from Montreal, at the west end 

 of Orleans Island, through the generosity of Sir William 

 MacDonald. The college buildings alone cost nearly half 

 a million dollars, and, standing as they do immediately 

 north and south of the two great trunk lines of Canada, 

 which at this point run side by side, cannot fail to attract 

 the attention of every traveller to the western prairies. 

 They are, indeed, a worthy monument of their founder 

 and of the genius of the man who inspired him to build 

 this great house of education. 



Dr. Robertson addressed the section on the history and 

 aims of the college. He described the college as an effort 

 for the betterment of rural life in Canada. We are face 

 to face here, he said in effect, with problems which are 

 peculiar to ourselves — problems due to our youth, to our 

 vast stretch of territory, to the great potential value of 

 our resources, to the broad stream of foreign blood which 

 is pouring into our citizenship. Wealth may come, is 

 coming with great rapidity, but real progress and stability 

 in national life keep side by side with progress in intelli- 

 gent labour, and that depends upon education. 



MacDonald College has grown out of a desire to help 

 the rural population to build up the country and to make 

 the most of it and of themselves. The rural school must 

 be adjusted to the needs of the people ; it must have a 

 bearing on the life interests, the occupations, and the 

 opportunities of the locality. From the course of study 

 in many rural schools to-day you would not suppose that 

 the fathers had any concern with the soil, with crops or 

 animals. .At MacDonald College we instruct and train for 

 the three fundamental mothering occupations which nurture 

 KG. 2088, VOL. 82] 



the race, first, farming, whereby man becomes a partner 

 with the Almighty, and through cooperation with nature 

 obtains food and shelter and clothing ; secondly, home- 

 making ; thirdly, the teaching of the children. The train- 

 ing of leaders for these three fields of endeavour is being 

 carried on in close correlation. Until recently, the teachers 

 and the agricultural students were segregated for train- 

 ing, and the courses of study of neither class contained 

 much which identified education with the activities of the 

 home. Now the home, the farm and the school are 

 finding common ground, to the great advantage of all 

 three. 



We are all part of nature ; our lives, the transient and 

 the eternal, are sustained by natural processes under 

 natural laws. The study of nature, then, must lie at the 

 root of all education. Nature-study, too, deals with the 

 facts and principles on which a systematic study of agri- 

 culture can be founded ; and next to nature-study comes 

 manual training, which is similarly a basis for technical 

 and industrial education. Every boy and girl should go 

 through a course of manual training. Think of its value 

 in the making of character. How many men there are 

 who need the stimulus of others' approval to keep them 

 in the right wav. Here is something which the boy can 

 assess for himself; he does not need the teacher's blue 

 pencil to tell him whether his woodwork is right or wrong. 

 He judges it for himself and judges himself—" that is not 

 so good as I can make it." See, too, how it teaches the 

 lesson of all lessons the most important, the lesson of 

 consequences—" the joint will not fit because I did that 

 wrong." 



If the people starve the schools and colleges, the schools 

 and colleges will retaliate by letting the people starve 

 mentally, then morally, and in a measure materially too. 

 " Once I saw a field of which the owner said, ' I let the 

 crop take care of itself, and in three years there were 

 only two small heads of wheat among the weeds.' For the 

 bare maintenance of human life there is need for practical 

 education." It is hopeless in a bald summary to attempt 

 to recapture the enthusiasm, the intimacy, and the in- 

 dividuality of Dr. Robertson's address. Those who heard 

 him will not soon forget the experience. 



A useful discussion upon moral education was opened 

 by Prof. L. P. Jacks. The demand for moral training 

 has been reinforced by the growth of the imperial idea, 

 which is awakening the national conscience and confront- 

 ing the individual citizen with enlarged responsibilities. 

 Morality cannot be made one among a number of set 

 subjects ; what is needed is the idea of an " end " under 

 which the purposes of life may be coordinated. Loyalty 

 to the State is such a principle. Neither can the virtues 

 be taught on a fixed pattern ; the attempt to do so leads 

 inevitably to reaction against the idea of morality. The 

 teacher must be content to put the truths of their environ- 

 ment before young minds in such a light that the facts 

 themselves, when so explained, become incentives to 

 morality. Mr. Hugh Richardson followed with a plea for 

 a scientific investigation of methods and results. ^ He 

 pointed out how extraordinarily little evidence there is as 

 to what results have been produced, still less is there 

 any evidence as to which processes have produced which 

 results. The speakers following agreed with Prof. Jacks 

 that direct moral training was of little worth. 



Prof. Munsterberg, however, thought that teachers should 

 keep the ethical " end " always before them. There are 

 tendencies in education to-day which are bringing weak- 

 ness of character in their train. It is not wholly good 

 that the methods of the kindergarten should be allowed to 

 creep up the primarv school and the elective systems of 

 the high school to descend to it. The problem of educa- 

 tion to-day is the cultivation of the power of voluntary 

 attention. The child is naturally attracted by what is 

 loud and bright and shining. If everything is made easy 

 and pleasant for him as a child, as a man he will always 

 remain in thraldom to the momentarily attractive ; he will 

 let things slide. The good life is neither easy nor 

 pleasant ; the things that matter are not loud and bright 

 and shining. 



A discussion which attracted much local interest was 

 initiated bv Dean Wesbrook, of Wisconsin, on university 

 education, 'in which Mr. W. A. Mclntyre, principal of the 



