ry time we send a child out
of the home to the school, we subject him to experiment of the most
serious and alarming kind. He goes into the hands of a teacher who is
often not only not wise unto the child's salvation, but who is,
perchance, a machine for administering a single experiment to an
infinite variety of children. It is perfectly certain that a great
many of our children are irretrievably damaged or hindered in their
mental and moral development in the school; but we can not be at all
sure that they would fare any better if they were taught at home! The
children are experimented with so much and so unwisely, in any case,
that possibly a little intentional experiment, guided by real insight
and psychological information, would do them good.

_Methods of experimenting with Children._--In endeavouring to bring
such questions as the degree of memory, recognition, association,
etc., present in an infant, to a practical test, considerable
embarrassment has always been experienced in understanding the child's
vocal and other responses. Of course, the only way a child's mind can
be studied is through its expressions, facial, lingual, vocal,
muscular; and the first question--i.e., What did the infant do? must
be followed by a second--i.e., What did his doing that mean? The
second question is, as I have said, the harder question, and the one
which requires more knowledge and insight. It is evident, on the
surface, that the further away we get in the child's life from simple
inherited or reflex responses, the more complicated do the processes
become, and the greater becomes the difficulty of analyzing them, and
arriving at a true picture of the real mental condition which lies
back of them.

To illustrate this confusion, I may cite one of the few problems which
psychologists have attempted to solve by experiments on children: the
determination of the order of rise of the child's perceptions of the
different colours. The first series of experiments consisted in
showing the child various colours and requiring him to name them, the
results being expressed in percentages of correct answers to the whole
number. Now this experiment involves no less than four different
questions, and the results give absolutely no clew to their
separation. It involves:

1. The child's distinguishing different colours displayed
simultaneously before it, together with the complete development of
the eyes for colour sensation. 2. The child's ab