Parents and their problems Author:Mary Harmon Weeks Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MIND OF THE CHILD FROM EIGHTEEN MONTHS TO THREE YEARS Our limited knowledge of the mind DUNSTAN BREWER Medical Inspector of Schools, West Riding Count... more »y Council HE study of the development of the human mind is the most complex and most interesting of all sciences. Psychology was studied in the most remote ages of which we have knowledge; all the races that have left us any written records leave traces of having tried to elucidate its problems. And from the dawn of history to the present day men have tried and are still trying, have failed and are still failing, to unravel the intricate processes of mind. The older scholars left us works which are gems of literature, marvels of reasoning, but they do not further the subject. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries appeared many learned works on the subject—works teeming with knowledge, with observation and with brilliance, but they leave us still completely in the dark as regards the human mind. It is not until we come to the middle of the nineteenth century, when psychology was first studied as a concrete science, that we get anything approaching what can be called a fact. During the last fifty years we have gathered together a small handful of facts regarding the mind, but few and incomplete as they are, their value is immense and is ever increasing. They are facts that should be known to everyone who has any dealings with children. To the educationalist, above all, the actual known facts about the mind, especially those concerning the development of the mind, should be of profound importance. Yet as a class educationalists have ignored the results of modern research; they study Aristotle, but are ignorant of Clouston and Ferrier; they study abstruse fancy, but they neglect to learn facts that are ...« less