http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/203299164

The backward child : a study of the psychology and treatment of backwardness ; a practical manual for teachers and students

"Mental analysis looks to a future when teachers will so understand every child's mental structure that his whole education will be directed to the fortifying of his weak points and the development of his tendencies. The present analysis is applied to backward children because they are one of the most insistent of present school questions. It is an effort to persuade teachers and parents, in spite of a hide-bound educational system, to study the children that interest them as individuals, and to recognise their faculties and tendencies as intelligently as they do their habits and manners. I first noticed the existence of a practically untouched field by observing the gap between the psychologists and neurologists, on the one hand, who are intent on the mental side upon classifying, and on the other hand the teachers who are eager for expert knowledge but unable to use its results. Accordingly an experimental clinic was conducted for two years in New York City, in which children were tested and then trained in the particular deficiency which that examination had revealed. The material offered in this book is based upon the verifications of that clinic. I have been unable, among the mass of writing upon psychological and pedagogical subjects, to find any work which analyses mental operations into their component parts and builds a scheme of training upon that diagnosis. It is with full consciousness, therefore, both of the scope and the novelty of my subject, that I present it"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

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