NEW EDUCATION FELLOWSHIP

Southland Times, Issue 23199, 14 May 1937, Page 15

NEW EDUCATION FELLOWSHIP

Child Psychologist To Take Part MRS SUSAN ISAACS It is announced that Mrs Susan Isaacs, M.A., D.Sc., will be among those taking part in the New Education Fellowship Conference to be held next July. Mrs Isaacs, who holds the important position of head of the Department of Child Development at the University of London Institute of Education, is an outstanding authority on the psychology and education of infants and young children. Her brilliant work in this field has attracted the attention of child psychologists in all parts of the world. Mrs Isaacs has had many years’ experience in advising parents on the treatment of nervous and difficult children, in lecturing to parents and teachers and in psycho-analytic work with both children and adults. From 1924 to 1927 she conducted an experimental nursery school for young children at Cambridge. Dr Isaacs had been impressed by the eager interest of young children in everything that went on in the world about them and felt that this interest had been very much neglected in their education. For the most part the school had remained a closed-in place, a screen between the child and his living interests. Accordingly, she set herself to provide an environment which would give full scope to the child’s impulse to learn, and lead gradually to a scientific understanding of the world in which he lived. The idea was not a new one, but in Britain Mrs Isaacs was the first to put it into practice in a thorough way in the education of young children. During the three years in which she conducted this nursery school Mrs Isaacs kept very detailed records of the sayings and doings of the children, and these records form the basis of her two most important books: “Intellectual Growth in Young Children” (193 Q and “Social Development in Young Children” (1932), Of her other publications the best known are “The Nursery Years” (1929), 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 seven to 11 years. Throughout her writings Mrs Isaacs insists that the children’s own activity is the key to their full development. “Whether we are observing. the great need of thfe children for active movement as a condition of physical growfli and of poise and skill, the ways in which he is led out of the narrow circle of his own egoistic desires and naive assumptions about the world, or the situations which 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,” she states. “The part of his teachers is to call out the child’s activity, and to meet it when it arises spontaneously. The school can give children the means of solving problems in which they are actively concerned, but cannot fruitfully foist upon themproblems that do not arise from the development of their own living interests in the world.”

Mrs Isaacs also emphasizes the great value to the child of “a firm background of regular routine and quiet control. The order which he needs is, however, not only one of meals and rest times, coming and going by the clock. “Even more deeply and urgently,” Mrs Isaacs says, “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 each other. If the grown-ups are changeable towards him, loving one moment, teasing the next, angry one day and indulgent another, the child feels bewildered and lost.” In addition to her duties as head of the Department of Child Development at the University of London Institute of Education, Dr Isaacs serves on a number of other bodies. She is psychologist to the London Clinic- of Psycho-Analysis, a member of the editorial boards of The British Journal of Psychology, The British Journal of Medical Psychology, the British Journal of Educational Psychology, and Home and School, a member of the Child Guidance Council, the Inter-Clinic Committee, the editorial board of the Association of Maternity and Infant Welfare Centres and the general committee of the Nursery School Association. This list is an imposing one and should give some indication of the position which Mrs Isaacs occupies in the educational and psychological worlds, and the interest • which has been aroused by the announcement that she will be attending the New Education Fellowship Conference.