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SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



room by teachers themselves. When by their own researches teachers 

 have demonstrated that their art is, in fact, a science, then, and not 

 till 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 educa- 

 tionisli should see to it that his science also becomes recognised, no 

 longer as a general topic upon which any cultured layman may dog- 

 matise, but as a technical branch of science, in which the educationist 

 alone, in virtue of his special knowledge, his special training, his special 

 experience, is the acknowledged expert. 



Educational science has hitherto followed two main lines of investiga- 

 tion: first, the evaluation and improvement of teachers' methods; 

 secondly, the diagnosis and treatment of children's individual capacities. 



I. The Psychology of the Individual Child. 



It is upon the latter problem, or group of problems, that experi- 

 mental work has in the past been chiefly directed, and in the imme- 

 diate future is likely to be concentrated with the most fruitful results. 

 The recent advances 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 individual 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. 



(1) The form.er method is in education the older. At one time, 

 in the hands of Stanley Hall and his followers — the pioneers of the 

 Child-Study movement — ^observation yielded fruitful results. And it 

 is perhaps to be regretted that of late simple observation and descrip- 

 tion have been neglected for the more ambitious method of experi- 

 mental tests. There is much that a vigilant teacher can do without 

 using any special apparatus and without conducting any special ex- 

 pex'iment. Conscientious records of the behaviour and responses of 

 individual children, accurately described without any admixture of in- 

 ference or hypothesis, would lay broad foundations upon which subse- 

 quent investigators could build. The study of children's temperament 

 and character, for example — factors which liave not yet been accorded 

 their due weight in education — must for the present proceed upon 

 these simpler lines. 



(2) Witli experimental tests the progress made during the last 

 decade has been enormous. The intelligence scale devised by Binet for 

 the diagnosis of mental deficiency, the mental tests employed by the 

 Ameiican army, the vocational tests now coming into use for the selec- 

 tion 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 



