EDUCATIONAL HEREDITY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19057, 9 July 1924, Page 4

EDUCATIONAL HEREDITY

Sir Charles Crichton-Browne, in taking the chair at the educational congress on the Montessori method at the Imperial Exhibition at Wembley, announced that a new era seemed to be dawning, and pointed out that recent experiments had demonstrated that acquired characters might be transmitted and that the Montessori training of the senses might prove helpful to the children of the children on whom it was bestowed. Pavlov, he said, that great Russian physiologist, Who has braved the brutal Bolsheviks in their demands and fearlessly denounced their infamous system which is producing in every town of Russia hordes of vagrant, homeless, criminal and diseased children, has shown that by functional exercise certain changes may be stamped on the nervous system and become hereditary. Pavlov trained a group of white mice to run to their feeding place on the ringing of an electric bell, and found that three hundred lessons were required in the first instance to accustom th© 1 inice to run to the feeding spot when they heard the bell ring. But in mice bred from the mice thus trained a much higher aptitude was displayed, for only a hundred lessons were necessary to obtain the same result. The third generation required only thirty lessons and the fourth only ten. The last generation on which Pavlov has reported learned their lesson after only five repetitions, and he has hopes that the sixth generation, or one still later, will run to the feeding place on the first occasion of hearing the bell. Sir Charies Crichton-BroWne regards these experiments as being very significant and hopeful in relation to the influence of training, education, discipline in moulding and modifying the higher nerve centres. Very encouraging should they be to Dr. Montessori and her disciples, who may pursue their labours feeling that they are conferring benefits more far-reaching than they had hitherto believed, and are benefiting the race as well as the individual child. Discussing the Montessori system more generally, Sir James j Crichton-Browne remarked that Dr. Montessori in the Casa dei Bambini had exercised the same patience and .faith that England had done in her | dealings with her offspring beyond the I sea. The Montessori method emanated

from Rome and had spread round the world, and had doubtless become acclimatised in Canada, Australia, the Cape, New Zealand and India. Dr. Montessori, the founder of the method and the only woman who could as yet as an educational leader rank with Rousseau, Herbert Pestalozzi and Froebel, was animated by a tender and voluminous love of children and possessed that personal magnetism which is so potent a force in education.