Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/427

 NEW BOOKS. 41$ we have no philosophy of education, nor can philosophy and ethics be merely conversant with a progressive developrnentalism. There is, too, in Dr. Hall's work what might fitly be described as the psychology-ill bias in education. The primitive child mind is not to be exalted into> supremacy because we happen to be greatly interested in it. The teacher's absorption in this study is apt to nuikc him neglect the normative moral sciences, which are the guides for his aims if not, in all cases, for his methods. Psychology should show how, along the lines of least resistance, to substitute the new for the old, the mature for the undeveloped, and should not induce a sentimental satisfaction with what is crude and infantile. But, even if all this be admitted, there still remains a vast field for inquiry of a highly useful nature in the investigation, with age and environment fully allowed for, into the actual content of children's minds ; and one of the most valuable articles deals with the concepts which children possess on entering school. Even here, however, there is a pedagogical danger, for the ignorance which is so startlingly shown in such statistical returns is apt to throw undue emphasis on the mere collection of perceptive material rather than the thoughtful elaboration of it. A few summarised results are worth noting. Questioning children collectively we find produces results of little value. " The better off the parents, the stiller and less imitative the child." I commend this state- ment to the ultra-Froebellians, whose insistence on self-activity often degenerates into the notion that unrestrained physical movement is a requisite to the mental education of the young. Colour names are developed, it is said, in the order black, white, red, green, blue, yellow. This is not the order of colour-development in primitive peoples, as Dr. Rivers's researches have shown : nor is it the order of development of colour names in London school-infants, where blue precedes green, so- far as my own investigations indicate. " Boys seem more likely than girls to be ignorant of common things about them." Primary school teachers in Germany, we are told, spend much time in talking of objects and drawing them ; talking of objects there is much of, but I have seen no case in which drawing was used in connexion with object lessons, though it is sometimes done in Eng- land. To those who say nowadays that to learn the names of letters is unnecessary for introducing young children to the art of reading, I com- mend the following : "A child may be said to know almost nothing, at least for school purposes, if he has no generally recognised name " for objects. " Figures, or number signs, almost create arithmetic." This is in- teresting as a blow at the over-concretion which primary schools have recently suffered from. Coloured sounds are numerous among children, the author says, but tries to explain it by association or analogy. Probably, however, dis- sociation of an original unity perhaps confusion is a better word is more likely to explain the subsequent separation of sense data than is the union, at this stage, to be explained by the association of originally distinct sensations. The ideas of wrong in children are much more distinct than those of right is a summary on the section on Moral Ideas in the young. All these points are both valuable to the teacher and suggestive to the psychologist. In the " Story of a Sand-heap," the fifth article in the collection, we have what is described as a pedagogical idyll. A number of boys on successive holidays convert a sand-heap into a miniature village with fields, houses, horses, cows, poultry. Prominent