632 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 
the universities and the scientific study of children. Then followed the period 
of reaction under Alexander III. The Ministry of Education reduced all its 
schools to a formal type. Individuality was repressed. The system was 
vigorously attacked, and finally it was officially admitted that reform was 
necessary. Active propaganda continues. It has taken many forms, with only 
one of which it is possible to deal here—experimental pedagogics. 
Contrary to Tolstoi and his claim for absolute freedom for the child, the 
psychological investigator thinks the child needs help in the process of learning 
to understand himself; and in order to render that help it is the teacher’s first 
duty to learn to understand the child as a phase in the process of the biological 
development of man. 
In 1901 the first laboratory of experimental psychology was opened in 
Russia at the Pedagogical Museum of the Military Schools. This has become 
the centre of scientific pedagogy in Russia. Out of this institution have developed 
the Pedagogical Academy (1907), and a Society of Experimental Pedagogics 
(1908), which conducts a four-year course of study, and carries on an experi- 
mental school. Professor Bechtereff founded in 1908 the Psycho-Neurological 
Institute in St. Petersburg, and Dr. Rossolimo founded the Institute of 
Children’s Psychology and Neurology in Moscow. Numerous congresses have 
been held, and 131 schools and societies have purchased a cabinet of simple 
psychological apparatus for experimental purposes. 
The chief problem under investigation during the last fifteen years has been 
concerned with the changes in the moral life of children as depending upon 
age, sex, and educational environment. Changes in memory and association 
have been carefully studied. The general results offer striking evidence in 
favour of co-education. The study of attention and liability to fatigue con- 
firmed this result. Suggestibility, the relation of amount of sleep to intensity of 
work and the like, have also been the subject of research. 
Further, the specific quality of fatigue induced by special kinds of work 
have been studied with a view to discovering the best possible balance in the 
sequence of short exercises. We have also been engaged upon the problem 
of individual memory types in relation to economy in methods of teaching, and 
the possibility of improving the naturally weaker sides of individual memory. 
The ‘ natural’ method of teaching foreign languages has been carefully investi- 
gated with a view to determining the respective place to be given (a) to the 
mother tongue and (6) to pictures in that work. 
Lastly, we have been engaged in comparing the teachers’ judgments of 
children as ‘ attentive,’ ‘interested,’ ‘ progressing,’ with their performances under 
stricter laboratory methods and conditions. 
The work of Dr. Rossolimo and Professor Lazoursky in characterology should 
also be mentioned. 
These researches have all taken their rise in the laboratory, passed thence 
to the school, and finally come back to the laboratory again. This triple 
process seems to us absolutely essential. 
(Professor ANprRson followed, thanking Professor NetscHaserr, on behalf 
of the University, for presenting the Department of Education with a complete 
set of his psychological apparatus devised especially for educational investigation.) 
3. School Training for Public Life. 
By the Rev. H. B. Gray, D.D. 
Educational methods and practice have been up to the last twenty-five years 
empirical in England. The science of pedagogy has only recently come on to the 
horizon and is still in its infancy. Traditional subjects have occupied the atten- 
tion of schoolmasters even on the highest rungs of the educational ladder, and 
have been accepted as the groundwork of educational faith, notwithstanding the 
conclusions of thinkers like Pestalozzi, Rousseau, and Froebel abroad. 
Education, which in Germany and the United States has long been welcomed 
as a great national asset, has in these islands been regarded as little less than a 
bore, The evolutionary theories of Darwin have, however, gradually penetrated the 
