CHILD PSYCHOLOGY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 98, 27 April 1937, Page 14

CHILD PSYCHOLOGY.

A LEADING EXPONENT.

TO VISIT NEW ZEALAND

Much interest has already "been aroused by the news that Mrs. Susan Isaacs, M.A., D.Sc, will be among those taking part in the new Educational Fellowship Conference to be held next July. Mrs. Isaacs is well known for her brilliant work in the field of child education and psychology. For years she has held an important position at the head of the Department of Child Development at the University of London Institute of Education and her work in this position has attracted the attention of child psychologists in all parts of the world.

Among the books Mrs. Isaacs has written on the .subject of child education the most important are "Intellectual Growth in Young Children" and "Social Development in Young Children." The records on which those two books are bused were collected by Mrs. Isaacs during her three years stuo:y 01 nursery schools.

i Throughout her writings Mrs. Isaacs insists that the children's own activity is the key to their full development. "Whether we are oliserving the great need of tlie children for active movement "as a condition of physical growth and of poise and of skill, the wave in which he is led out of the narrow circle of his own egoistic desires and naive assnnipi tions about the world, or the situations that provoke thought and reasoning, we are brought back at every point to the view that it is the child's doing, the child's active social experience and his own thinking and talking that are the chief means of his education. The part of his teachers is to call out the child's activity, and to meet it when it rises J spontaneously. The school can give children the means of solving problems in which they are actively concerned, but cannot fruitfully foist upon them problems that* do not arise from the development of their own living interests in the world.

I Mrs. Isaacs also emphasises the great value to a child of "a firm background of regular routine and quiet control." The order which he needs is not, however, only one of meals and rest time, ! comings and goings by the clock. "Even more deeply and urgently," Mrs. Isaacs • B ays, "he seeks a stable pattern in his relations with people. He can be secure and content only if there is a harmony of feeling amongst those who make up his world, towards him and towards other people. If the grown-ups are changeable towards him, loving him one moment, teasing the next, angry one day and indulgent anothjer, the" child feels bewildered and lost." I Of her other publications the best known are "The Nursery Years,"' a psychology of infancy written for parents, and "The Children We Teach," perhaps the best account to date of the mental life of children during the period from eeven to eleven years.