The training of teachers in the United States of America
John Stuart Mill · en
i. To give instruction and training to those who are preparing to
be professors of pedagogy, superintendents, or teachers in higher
institutions.
ii. To make scientific contributions to education.
The work pursued is in six courses, with an additional seminary course.
These are:--
i. Present status and problems of higher education in America and
Europe.
ii. Outline of systematic psychology.
iii. Organization of schools in Europe. Typical schools and typical
foundations.
iv. School hygiene.
v. Educational reforms.
vi. Motor education of children, involving the study of writing and
drawing, manual training, play, and gymnastics.
The _Pedagogical Seminary_, an educational magazine edited by Dr.
Stanley Hall, the President of Clark University, exists chiefly for the
purpose of publishing results of work in this department. There is a
special pedagogical library for research, and a complete collection of
the current educational literature of America and Europe.
Among the other departments of psychology, there are many of great
interest to the student of higher pedagogy.
Some of these are:--
i. History of psychology.
ii. Experimental psychology.
iii. Anthropology (the investigation of myth, custom, belief).
iv. Ethics (the investigation of criminals, paupers, defective
classes).
v. Feeling (investigations of conditions of the agreeable and
disagreeable, abnormal states, the hypnotic, the insane).
vi. Neurology (researches on brain fatigue, etc.).
For investigation in these departments, there are four psychological
laboratories, a neurological laboratory, and an anthropological
laboratory. Opportunities are also given to students to observe
patients in State and city lunatic hospitals, and in institutions
for the defective and criminal classes. The departments of research,
most closely bearing upon the teacher’s work, are perhaps those of
experimental psychology and neurology. Investigations on muscle and
brain fatigue, the diurnal variations of mental vigour, the memory of
children, etc., bring results important to the teacher, and especially
so when carried out as at Clark University, by experts in scientific
experiment. The _American Journal of Psychology_, edited by Dr. Stanley
Hall, and published quarterly, contains the results of many of the
researches in the psychological laboratories of Clark University.