Errors in school : their causes and treatment / by John Adams.

  • Adams, John, 1857-1934.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Errors in school : their causes and treatment / by John Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    can get at the inner meaning of the error, and from that learn something for their future guidance. The plain error with no intrinsic interest forms the foundation of the professional teacher’s daily work, just as the ordinary undignified diseases make up the bed-rock of the general practitioner’s daily round. As the doctor must study rather carefully the whole working of the human body in order to be able to treat these inconspicuous and humble ailments, so must the teacher get at the laws of ordinary mental process in order to be able to deal with errors that may be said to be, in a sense, the result of mental disease, functional or organic. This talk of doctors and disease naturally suggests a mode of dividing up our subject so as to present it in a fairly systematic way, without, however, allowing ourselves to make the scheme rigid. There must be a reasonable give and take, or our treatment becomes pedantic. Before the doctor can begin to deal with diseases, he must learn what they are. He has first to find out how’ the normal healthy body works, and then to detect any variation for the worse. The body can go wrong in a distressingly large number of ways. Many of these get names, and we have a list of diseases. Physiology is the study of the healthy working of the body, and pathology the study of the various ways in which the body misbehaves itself, goes wrong, or, as ordinarily expressed, becomes diseased. For the doctor’s physiology the teacher substitutes the study of psychology, but for pathology there is not yet a separate study in the teacher’s curriculum. It is true that defective