The Science of Human Nature | Page 6

to live. The child in being educated learns what the
world is and how to act in it--how to act in all the various situations of
life.
The third question--concerning the nature of the child--cannot be so
briefly answered. In fact, it cannot be fully answered at the present time.
We must know what the child's original nature is. This means that we
must know the instincts and all the other inherited capacities and
tendencies. We must know the laws of building up habits and of
acquiring knowledge, the laws of retention and the laws of attention.
These problems constitute the subject matter of educational psychology,
and at present can be only partially solved. We have, however, a very
respectable body of knowledge in this field, though it is by no means
complete.
The answer to the fourth question is in part dependent upon the
progress in answering the third. Economical methods of training
children must be dependent upon the nature of children. But in actual
practice, we are trying to find out the best procedure of doing each
single thing in school work; we are trying to find out by
experimentation. The proper way to teach children to read, to spell, to
write, etc., must be determined in each case by independent
investigation, until our knowledge of the child becomes sufficient for
us to infer from general laws of procedure what the procedure in a
particular case should be. We venture to infer what ought to be done in
some cases, but generally we feel insecure till we have proved our
inference correct by trying out different methods and measuring the
results.
Education will not be fully scientific till we have definite knowledge to
guide us at every step. What should we teach? When should we teach it?
How should we teach it? How poorly we answer these questions at the

present time! How inefficient and uneconomical our schools, because
we cannot fully answer them! But they are answerable. We can answer
them in part now, and we know how to find out the answer in full. It is
just a matter of patient and extensive investigation. We must say, then,
that we have only the beginnings of a science of education. The
problems which a science of education must solve are almost wholly
psychological problems. They could not be solved till we had a science
of psychology. Experimental psychology is but a half-century old;
educational psychology, less than a quarter-century old. In the field of
education, the science of psychology may expect to make its most
important practical contribution. Let us, then, consider very briefly the
problems of educational psychology.
=Educational Psychology.= Educational psychology is that division of
psychology which undertakes to discover those aspects of human
nature most closely related to education. These are (1) the original
nature of the child--what it is and how it can be modified; (2) the
problem of acquiring and organizing experience--habit-formation,
memory, thinking, and the various factors related to these processes.
There are many subordinate problems, such as the problem of
individual differences and their bearing on the education of subnormal
and supernormal children. Educational psychology is not, then, merely
the application of psychology to education. It is a distinct science in
itself, and its aim is the solving of those educational problems which
for their solution depend upon a knowledge of the nature of the child.
=The Method of Psychology.= We have enumerated the various
problems of psychology, now how are they solved? The method of
psychology is the same as that of all other sciences; namely, the
method of observation and experiment. We learn human nature by
observing how human beings act in all the various circumstances of life.
We learn about the human mind by observing our own mind. We learn
that we see under certain objective conditions, hear under certain
objective conditions, taste, smell, feel cold and warm under certain
objective conditions. In the case of ourselves, we can know both our
actions and our mind. In the case of others, we can know only their
actions, and must infer their mental states from our own in similar

circumstances. With certain restrictions and precautions this inference
is legitimate.
We said the method of psychology is that of observation and
experiment. The experiment is observation still, but observation
subjected to exact methodical procedure. In a psychological experiment
we set out to provide the necessary conditions, eliminating some and
supplying others according to our object. The experiment has certain
advantages. It enables us to isolate the phenomena to be studied, it
enables us to vary the circumstances and conditions to suit our
purposes, it enables us to repeat the observation as often as we like, and
it enables us to measure exactly the factors of the phenomena studied.
=A Psychological Experiment.=