Experimental education / by Robert R. Rusk.

  • Robert Robertson Rusk
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Experimental education / by Robert R. Rusk. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/364 page 3
    imparted to the child should be exactly determined, Kant 1 also asserted that experimental schools must first be estab- lished before we can establish normal schools. The recent advance in Education has only been made possible by the progress of such other sciences as anthro- pology, psychology, etc., which have helped to provide Ex- perimental Education with its methods. The way for this advance has also been prepared by the results of the Child- Study movement, although these are in themselves inade- quate as a basis for the new method. Excellent studies of individual children have been made by Preyer, Perez, Darwin, Miss Shinn, and Dearborn, but these stop before school age —just when they would have been of most value to the educator. The other department of Child Study is mainly statistical, yet its results cannot always be regarded as scientific. In most Child-Study investigations the questions employed are ambiguous, owing to inadequate analysis, and the statistics are frequently vitiated by the factor of * selection,” the answers recorded being given mainly by those to whom the questions happen to appeal.2 It is sometimes assumed that these objections do not hold when the range of replies is very extensive; but to this Myers says, “I want to protest as strongly as I can against the notion that any useful purpose can be served, so far as psychology is concerned, by collecting masses of psychological data with the help of an army of untrained observers. I have heard it confidently asserted that the gross errors inevitably arising from inac- curacies and inconsistencies of procedure among different observers cancel one another in the long run of such vast numbers of measurements. Nothing, I think, can be more dangerous or false than this idea that the untrustworthi- ness of crude methods diminishes as the number of observers increases. It involves the assumption that in the long run errors occur to an equal extent in opposite directions—a most unlikely hypothesis.” 3 The vagueness of the Child-Study methods can be illus- * Kant on Education, trans. by Annette Churton, Pp. 21. * Cf. Thorndike, Educational Psychology, vol. i. pp. 28-37. 3 C. S. Myers, “‘ The Pitfalls of Mental Tests ’\—a paper communi- cated to the British Association at the Sheffield Meeting, IgIo.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3