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: CHAPTER III CAUTION IN CHILD-STUDY ' Who is able to speak worthily of the fulness of childhood ?' Goethe. It is only natural that child-study should have met with criticism. But the modern child-study movement has spread so rapidly; it has so obviously secured the support of men and women of experience, ability, and balanced judgment; its conclusions have been so accordant with reason and common sense; and the practical application of its teaching to the care and education of the young has been found so beneficial, that the keenest critic has quickly found himself constrained to roar ' as gently as a sucking dove.' Criticism has come mainly from two quarters from members of the public who think that the study of children is useless, if not actually harmful to the children studied; and from scientific people, who tell us that child- study can never be an exact science that its workers are, many of them, untrained in scientific methods, and that accordingly its observations are likely to be inaccurate and its conclusions unsound. As an example of the first class of criticism I may quote from Mrs. Richmond's little book, textit{The Mind of a Child: ' I have said that this science of child-study may be fascinating and interesting to ourselves, but that I cannot seein what way it can be useful to children. The only thing that matters to them is that we should assist them to grow from happy children into happy men and women. As the only happy men and women are those who are at work on the improvement of the world around them, so the only thing that matters to us in our contemplation of children is that we should teach them while they are young and plastic such habits as will most conduce to virtue.' The obvious answer to criticism of this sort is that child-study cann...