84 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
In primary memory the children may be tested in their power to repeat 
figures or nonsense syllables. The latter may be so used as to show 
whether visual, auditory, or motor images predominate. Some of Galton’s 
Juestions on the image-making power may be asked the children. The 
entire set should be given to the normal class. Taking as a text their 
curiously unlike answers to the same questions, the teacher may well point 
out the great differences in mental life and the folly of supposing that there 
's any one method of imparting knowledge. The students should collect 
aumber forms and instances of colored hearing. In memory, many of 
Ebbinghaus’s experiments may be adapted to work with the children. Ag 
70 creative imagination, we are again dependent on observation, as we are 
also in the important field of childish reasoning. 
Such a course as I have indicated will take up all the time now allotted 
so psychology, but to drop it at this point is to leave all at loose ends, and 
0 fail of a good part of the benefit which we ought to derive from it. We 
should have, in the last year, a higher course. I fancy it would be better 
vo make it an elective, in which we take a systematic review of the field, 
discussing topics which could not earlier have been seen in their true bear- 
ings. If the apparatus is to be had, let the quantitative enter into experi- 
mental work. In many places students are sent out, in their last year, to 
practice in the city schools, and thus have a larger field for observation. 
Will the results from such a course pay for the expenditure of time ? 
{ believe that they will. Successful testing and experimenting with chil- 
dren is not easy. The training which the young workers thus get in 
patience, sympathy, and insight into childish ways is most valuable. 
Teachers thus trained cannot sink into drudges, nor the work become a 
treadmill round ; for, as Dr. Hall says, ¢“ Though the ground to be gone 
over each year may remain substantially the same, the children’s minds 
will be seen to be never alike.” In their schools, such teachers will be care- 
ful gatherers of facts, and thus, each contributing her mite, will help on 
the day when through the new psvchology there will be a Science of 
fducation. 
DISCUSSION. 
PROFESSOR BARNES: Three people whom I know, who are carrying on the work that 
Miss Williams has described in normal schools, say no matter whether we get any scien- 
siific results.or not the work will pay, because of the interest it will arouse in the students 
and the scientific spirit it will cultivate in them. 1 would like to ask Miss Williams if 
she thinks it desirable in our normal schools to have masses of data gathered and experi- 
ments made and work carried on, provided we are not able to elaborate and work it up 
into some form of definite expression. 
Miss WiLL1aMs : I believe we ought to have the students think that something will 
come of it. I have tried to do so, and I would tell them that 1 mean to do something 
with the result. When I first began taking observations I found that the thing which 
.nterested the pupils more than anything else was to tell them that I wished them to be