Psychology applied to education : a series of lectures on the theory & practice of education / by James Ward ; edited by G. Dawes Hicks.

  • Ward, James, 1843-1925.
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Psychology applied to education : a series of lectures on the theory & practice of education / by James Ward ; edited by G. Dawes Hicks. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    making possible regular advance. It is customary with architects in their specifications to direct that all the walls of a building shall be raised to the same height together: the builder may not carry up a side wall as high as the eaves and let the front wall remain built no higher than the plinth or, perhaps, without even the foundations cleared. It is unnatural when you have been working with your trowel as high as the chimney tops to descend once more to the ground; moreover, if you do, the new wall cannot now without great pains and trouble be bonded into the old, and even should this be accomplished after a fashion, the result will only be that either the new wall or the old will crack. The reason why so many have now to lament the one-sidedness of their intellectual interests is either that they were allowed or caused to advance when children in one direction, instead of advancing in all pari passu. With many parents and teachers in the present day, one-sidedness, instead of being discouraged, is deliberately fostered. Because the man who can do one thing well is the man the world wants and pays and honours, therefore they at once direct all the child’s energies into that channel in which he seems most likely to attain pre-eminence, just as gardeners do when they leave only the biggest pear on a tree, hoping with this one, when monstrous grown, to win a prize. Now, though this procedure secures certain obvious advantages to society, and so to the individual whose fitness for special func¬ tions makes him valuable, yet the disadvantages to him as a man, and not as a money-maker or a marvel, are even more obvious, and we may, therefore, be sure that the gain even to the world is not a real gain. But, again, one-sidedness in the child is often the consequence of one-sidedness in parents or teacher. This is strikingly illustrated in that interesting book to which I have already referred, Gabon’s English Men of Science. We cannot suppose that an innate taste for science is more general among Scotch children than English, but in Scotland the university programme and the general method of teaching are much more suited to men of a scientific bent of mind than those in England. Accordingly, Galton found the cases in which scientific tastes were traced to teachers to be ten times more numerous among his Scotch corre¬ spondents than among his English. If children are left to grow up without observing large classes of facts that are really under their eyes and without acquiring even the names of such as they notice for themselves, one-sidedness is as inevitable as blindness would be if their eyes were always bandaged.