732 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 
2. Nature Study in Secondary Schools. 
By Miss Lintan J. Cuarge, B.Sc. 
TUESDAY, AUGUST 31. 
The following Papers were read :— 
1. Education and Experimental Psychology. 
By Professor Huco MunstTuRBERG. 
There is a striking contrast between the attitude of the British and the 
American educators towards psychology. In England psychology is neglected 
in the schools ; in America its value is over-estimated. This neglect causes the 
means of education to remain old-fashioned and clumsy instead of profiting 
from the progress of science, just as if the farmers were to refuse the help of 
scientific chemistry. On the other hand, the danger of over-estimation is not 
less grave. The American educator, who wants to subordinate the whole 
education to scientific psychology, ignores the fundamental fact that a science 
can give us only the means, but never the aims. Not psychology, but ethics, 
must show us the goal before science can teach us how to reach it. The 
psychologist may show how the pupil’s mind imitates, but he can never 
decide what is worthy of imitation. In the same way the psychologist 
can easily find the ways to hold the attention of the child, but cannot 
decide which kind of attention is desirable. Anything which is loud and 
shining and entertaining may attract the attention, and yet inquiry into 
the true aims of education will convince us that it is ruinous to turn the 
attention to the interesting material instead of learning to attend to that 
which demands effort. 
Moreover, the psychological attitude demands an analysis of the 
personality; the child is looked on as a combination of mental elements, 
in the same way as the physicist looks on the physical thing as a combination 
of atoms. But that produces in the teacher a tendency to inhibit those 
emotional responses which refer to the pupil as a real unified personality. 
Yet tact and sympathy, and love and interest are still more important in 
the schoolroom than the scientific understanding of the child. 
But if these dangers are well understood, there cannot be any doubt 
that the knowledge of experimental psychology ought to be at the disposal 
of the teacher as much as experimental physics is at the disposal of the 
bridge-builder and engineer. This is the more true since in recent years 
the work of the psychologist has turned directly to the pedagogical 
problems. The author gave a déscription of experiments from his own 
psychological laboratory in Harvard University, all of which involved 
suggestions for new methods of instruction. They referred especially to the 
psychology of memory, attention, imagination, perception, and will, and 
to the psychology of reading, writing, and arithmetic. 
2. Discussion on Education as a Preparation for Agricultural Life in 
Canada, with special reference to Schoolboys from the Mother 
Country. Opened by the Rev. Dr. H. B. Gray. 
(i) Agricultural Courses in High Schools. By S. BE. Lane. 
The severest critics of our too bookish education are those connected 
with the agricultural interest. Many devices have been suggested with a 
view to giving an agricultural bias to our elementary education. An 
effort is now being made to give the teachers such an interest in 
agriculture as may influence their teaching in our rural schools. The 
