{"agent_id":"sully","agent_name":"James Sully","slug":"child-study","label":"Child study: is the systematic observation of children a proper method and the key to mind and education?","topic":"Child study","question":"Is the systematic observation of children a proper method and the key to mind and education?","position":"If we would understand the mind, we should watch it in the making, and it is making itself before our eyes in every nursery. The child is not a small adult but a mind in growth, and its perceptions, its first words, its drawings, its play, its dawning moral sense, and not least its charming errors, are the living record of how intelligence is built. I have gathered such observations — my own, and those of watchful parents and teachers — and studied them with sympathy and care, for the method proper to this subject is patient observation of the child as it is, not the imposition upon it of the adult's categories. This study is at once a science and a practical art: it lays bare the natural order of mental growth, and it teaches the educator to follow that order rather than to force the young mind against its grain. To observe children lovingly and exactly is to read the first chapters of the history of every human mind, and to learn how that mind may best be nourished.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"If we would understand the mind, we should watch it in the making, and it is making itself before our eyes in every nursery.","n":[]},{"t":"The child is not a small adult but a mind in growth, and its perceptions, its first words, its drawings, its play, its dawning moral sense, and not least its charming errors, are the living record of how intelligence is built.","n":[]}],[{"t":"I have gathered such observations — my own, and those of watchful parents and teachers — and studied them with sympathy and care, for the method proper to this subject is patient observation of the child as it is, not the imposition upon it of the adult's categories.","n":[]},{"t":"This study is at once a science and a practical art: it lays bare the natural order of mental growth, and it teaches the educator to follow that order rather than to force the young mind against its grain.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"To observe children lovingly and exactly is to read the first chapters of the history of every human mind, and to learn how that mind may best be nourished.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"Studies of Childhood (1895); Children's Ways (1898); The Teacher's Handbook of Psychology (1886). Reception: the founding of British child study; the supersession in rigor by the developmental psychology of Binet, Hall, Baldwin, and Piaget; the modern observational and naturalistic methods in developmental psychology; the critique of anecdotal parental-record methods.","works":["Studies of Childhood (1895)","Children's Ways (1898)","The Teacher's Handbook of Psychology (1886)"],"reception":"the founding of British child study; the supersession in rigor by the developmental psychology of Binet, Hall, Baldwin, and Piaget; the modern observational and naturalistic methods in developmental psychology; the critique of anecdotal parental-record methods.","status":"Sully was a principal founder of British child study, and the treatment of childhood as a distinct subject for systematic observation helped establish developmental psychology as a field. His method — sympathetic observation drawing on parental and teacher records — was pioneering but was superseded in rigor by the experimental and test-based developmental psychology of Binet, and by the more systematic stage-theoretic work of Hall, Baldwin, and above all Piaget. The anecdotal parental-record method drew the criticism that it lacks controls and generalizability. Yet naturalistic and observational methods remain central to developmental psychology, and Sully's humane insistence that the child be studied as it is, and that its errors and play are data, anticipates lasting commitments of the field.","era":"1842-1923","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Studies of Childhood","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Yet our case is not so hopeless that we need defer inquiry into the child's mind until human science has fathomed all the mysteries of the brain. We can know many things of this mind, and these of great impor- tance, even now. The naturalist discusses the actions 14 STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD.","label":"Studies of Childhood"},{"n":2,"work":"Studies of Childhood","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Conversely one may feel pretty sure that a woman who retains a vivid memory of her childish ideas and feelings will be drawn to the companion-!6 STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. ship of children.","label":"Studies of Childhood"},{"n":3,"work":"Studies of Childhood","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"W. Brown, Teacher of Psychology in State Normal School,Worcester, Mass., with introduc- tion by E.H.Russell, Principal: reprinted from the Pedagogical Semin- ary). Many of the quaint sayings noted down lose much of their psychological point from our complete ignorance of the child's home- experience, companionships, school and training. INTRODUCTION.","label":"Studies of Childhood"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"associationism","label":"Associationism: is the mind built up from elementary sensations by the laws of association?"},{"slug":"the-psychology-of-illusion","label":"The psychology of illusion: is error continuous with normal cognition and revealing of it?"},{"slug":"the-comic","label":"The comic: is laughter to be explained by a natural psychology of play and incongruity?"},{"slug":"pessimism","label":"Pessimism: does philosophical pessimism survive a sober empirical psychology of pleasure and pain?"}]}