tain burden on you in
this way. By all means let child-study go on,--it is refreshing all our
sense of the child's life. There are teachers who take a spontaneous
delight in filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compiling
statistics, and computing the per cent. Child-study will certainly
enrich their lives. And, if its results, as treated statistically, would
seem on the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes and
observations of which it in part consist do certainly acquaint us more
intimately with our pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened to discern
in the child before us processes similar to those we have read of as
noted in the children,--processes of which we might otherwise have
remained inobservant. But, for Heaven's sake, let the rank and file of
teachers be passive readers if they so prefer, and feel free not to
contribute to the accumulation. Let not the prosecution of it be
preached as an imperative duty or imposed by regulation on those to whom
it proves an exterminating bore, or who in any way whatever miss in
themselves the appropriate vocation for it. I cannot too strongly agree
with my colleague, Professor Muensterberg, when he says that the
teacher's attitude toward the child, being concrete and ethical, is
positively opposed to the psychological observer's, which is abstract
and analytic. Although some of us may conjoin the attitudes
successfully, in most of us they must conflict.

The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad
conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a
psychologist. Our teachers are overworked already. Every one who adds a
jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their burden is a foe of
education. A bad conscience increases the weight of every other burden;
yet I know that child-study, and other pieces of psychology as well,
have been productive of bad conscience in many a really innocent
pedagogic breast. I should indeed be glad if this passing word from me
might tend to dispel such a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for
it is certainly one of those fruits of more or less systematic
mystification of which I have already complained. The best teacher may
be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best
contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more palpable than
this.

So much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of the
teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our a