The child's mind : its growth and training being a short study of some processes of learning and teaching / by W.E. Urwick.

  • Urwick, W. E. (William Eddowes)
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The child's mind : its growth and training being a short study of some processes of learning and teaching / by W.E. Urwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mind; he treats of sensation apart, of percepts apart, of emotions apart, and so forth. Such method, necessary if the purpose be a classification of mental phenomena, is of little or no value to a theory of education, for all these things are abstrac- tions, and education has not to deal with abstrac- tions, but with the living and active mind, in which cognition, feeling, and conation are inseparably blended. The psychologist, again, is concerned with in- quiry into questions of how we come to cast our experience into the forms of space and time ; the mere fact that we do so is sufficient for the teacher. The psychologist often attempts, on an analogy with chemistry, to arrive at a series of mental phenomena which he regards as irreducible elements, out of whose combination other mental products arise ; or, again, he may be chiefly concerned with investigating the physiological correlatives of mental phenomena, and neither of these lines of investiga- tion concern* the teacher. These are merely illus- trations of differences which are bound to exist when the point of view and purpose of the two are so different. The educator is, in the first place, concerned with the process of learning and the con- ditions best suited to it, and in the second with the meaning of the term ‘ character ’ and the best means of training it; and he is perfectly justified in treating psychological data from the point of view most suited to his purposes, and need not concern himself if this does not exactly correspond to the trend of