The Individual in the Making
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM.
A subjective view of child development with suggestions for parents and teachers. By E. A. Kirkpatrick, B.S., M.Ph. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911. Pp. ix + 339.
This book is a thick volume of eleven chapters, arranged, in three parts, with a bibliography and index added. The purpose of the book as stated in the preface is “to trace the development of a child’s mind as a whole through various stages instead of discussing separately the various instincts and other phases of cliild-life.” This purpose, as suggested in the sub-title, makes it a book primarily for teachers and secondarily for parents.
With this end in view the material of the book is divided into three sections. The first part deals with general principles of subjective development beginning with personality in Chapter I and developing the author’s doctrine of interest in Chapter II. The latter topic is presented from the combined viewpoints of a psychologist and a pedagogue. It leads up to a somewhat full discussion of the two schools of pedagogical thought,?the one which insists upon connecting all learning with a child’s instincts, and the other, which believes in teaching the child what will be most valuable for the adult. The author seeks to harmonize the two views. lie concludes that the instincts or natural interests are to be supplemented in education by artificial interests. The chief practical problem of the teacher is not to obtain results “by trying to mix work and play, but by making the play so interesting that it develops the work characteristic, and by making the work so effective that freedom and success result.” Having thus laid down the doctrine of interest in Part I, Professor Kirkpatrick proceeds in Part IT, Chapters III to IX inclusive, to enumerate and to describe the stages of development through which a child passes from birth to later adolescence. These periods he calls the pre-social, imitating and socializing, individualization, competitive socialization and regulation, or early adolescent and later adolescent periods. In this study the author presents nothing novel or final, acting as he states in the preface “as organizer and interpreter of the work of the many observers and experimenters cited in the references.” Though he presents the development of the child in this periodic form, the author is in no wise committed to the individual recapitulatory theory, but insists continually that the stages of development must be made up, not by looking backward through the social history of the race, but by studying the children themselves. In this, without doubt, he frees the child-worker from the burden of a more or less unsubstantiated theory and directs his interest where it belongs, namely, to the study of the child himself.
The last section of the book, Part III, Chapters X to XI, is devoted to the relation of developmental stages to education, and contains many specific schoolroom applications of the psychological material contained in Part II. This is done for each grade beginning with the primary, through the intermediate to college life and deals with such detailed educational processes as spelling, punctuation, penmanship, arithmetic, history, geography, manual construction, and the methods of developing study-habits in the higher collegiate branches.
The book as a whole is a most compact, well systematized and usable volume, the kind of a tool the grade teacher especially loves to handle. At the end of every chapter a series of suggestive and searching questions touching upon the matter treated compels the reader to examine what he has read, and at the end of the book is a fairly full bibliography divided into as many parts as there are chapters, with a suitable part devoted to each chapter The book can be heartily commended to teachers and parents, because it makes a contribution to the general tendency away from mechanical methods of teaching toward the study of the individual child. A. H.
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