The Discovery Of The Child

H A P T E Si

CRITICAL CONSIDERATIONS ON SCIENCE
APPLIED TO THE SCHOOL1

I HAVE no intention of producing a treatise on Scientific Pedagogy;
these preliminary notes have the modest aim of making known
the rather interesting results of a teaching experience which would
seem to open up a way for the practical application of new
methods, capable of giving to teaching a wider application of
scientific experiments without depriving it of its natural bases
on theoritical principles. It is asserted in an exaggerated
manner, and has been talked of for many years, that pedagogy,,
as has already been done in medicine, should tend to forsake
the purely theoritical fields in order to set its bases on the
positive findings of experiments. The physiological or experi-
mental psychology which, from Weber and Fechner to Wundt
and Binet, has come to be organized into a new science, would
seem to be destined to furnish for it that substratum of pre-
paration which the old psychology furnished to philosophic
pedagogy. And morphological anthropology also, when ap-
plied to the physical study of the pupils, appears to furnish
another link with the new pedagogy. But the truth is that the

3 The reader must keep in mind that these notes form part of the text of
this book when it first appeared in 1909.