places; they will exert slight beneficial influence upon contemporary life if they continue to be institutions for the gaining of mere formulae and rules and definitions, though such work might have been of some value in an earlier day. The plan which is under way in the most progressive communities in this country to transform the school from a static or memorizing, into a dynamic, institution deserves the hearty support of every friend of the child and the nation.

Professor of Education,

The University of Wisconsin.

M. V. O'SHEA.

Social Psychology in the Normal School

WH

HEREVER the problems of society are regarded as dynamic, an understanding and a mastery of the process of communication are imperative. Psychology is the conscious statement of the conditions and processes of that human awareness which we consider to be the medium in which all phases of communication go on; as such, it must be the basic discipline of the social sciences, including education. It seeks to analyze and control the changing; and, necessarily, our conception of the nature of consciousness will determine the direction of social change. The school, as a specialized tool of communication, is always based upon a psychology—that is, a realization of the method by means of which growth takes place.

The normal school has always stood for the value of method, of communication. It, therefore, has definitely based its technique upon a psychology; and, since its students are directly concerned with the younger generation, the type of psychology taught within its walls is an important social influence. If it embraces an individualistic, intellectualistic view of human nature, such a view will be distributed and followed by practical consequences; if it recognizes the central place of social impulses and communal experience, its teaching will react upon political, economic, and ethical practice.

For the sake of brevity, the types of psychology, which have been and are taught in our normal schools, may broadly, if not quite accurately, be grouped thus:

1. The individualistic and non-evolutionary. All species of psychological doctrine emphasizing over-much the rationalistic, the emotional, the sensational, are included. The views of Locke, Froebel, Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Hegel, Herbart, to mention a few-are reactions, conceived under peculiar philosophical and historical influences, and largely overlook the place of instinct, as we now define it, of a

genuine evolution, and of the biological. Such views, preevolutionary and non-biological, have determined and still determine, in varying degree, school practice, in ways too familiar to mention.

2. The biological and experimental. During the last decade of the nineteenth century the experimental, biological, genetic treatment of psychology developed, with its attendant child-study movement. The establishment of experimental laboratories and separate departments of psychology by Hall, James, Ladd, and Baldwin introduced physiological and exact methods. The child was considered a part of the animal kingdom, his nervous system the precondition of his conscious processes, his instincts looked upon as determining his responses to environmental stimuli, and instruction as a process of adapting selected phases of objective experience to native tendencies.

The biological, experimental attitude has been taken into account in the recent text books and may fairly be said to have found a place in the teaching of psychology in the normal school. The books of such men as Thorndike, Judd, Royce, James, Angell, Kirkpatrick, and Miller represent this tendency, and no prospective teacher should be without the tool of regarding conscious processes as specialized evolutionary devices dependent upon physiological structure and racial necessities, and having, for their ultimate function, a progressive adaptation of the organism to a shifting envi

ronment.

The reform is salutary. It links psychology to the other natural sciences, gives racial perspective, counteracts the aloofness, mysticism, and romantic elements of the ancient rationalism; it is democratic, inasmuch as it asserts the essential likeness of all men in psychological structure and organic tendencies; unproved empirical assertions are put to experimental tests; children are observed, tabled, and set in a note book; and definite applications to such school problems as fatigue, sanitation, and relative value of studies are rendered possible.

3. The standpoint of social psychology.

*There is no intention of denying the present value of the contribution of the writers named.

All in all, the human brain is only one pre-condition of consciousness, as we know it, and the experimental laboratory is not the open sesame to educational salvation. It is a significant fact that while the backward sweep of animal evolution is now regarded as a unitary, organic process, the organic and social nature of mind, as it exists in its human form, is not fully realized, and the physiological and the experimental psychologists, in their zeal to correlate an individual mind with its body, simplify and distort too much the essentially communal and spontaneous nature of our consciousness. And the teaching of psychology in our normal schools, in so far as it over-emphasizes the neurone, is likely to make as big an abstraction from daily life, and to descend into as much dogmatism and false perspective as did the various species of the rationalistic and the sensationalistic psychology of former days. Psychology has not found itself until it puts its experimental, psychological conditions of consciousness into organic relation with the other essential condition-other selves, without the stimulus of whom our human type of consciousness is without meaning.

It is not enough to state the structure and function of our neural mechanism, and to recite the doctrine of the brotherhood of animal forms. It is necessary to balance the biological sequences by insisting upon those conditions and characteristics of our conscious experiences coming from the group in which the organizm is introduced and to trace the implications of the thesis of Mr. McDougall in his Social Psychology, that human consciousness is determined by social instincts, "whose study reveals sociality not as a result of interaction, but as a medium within which intelligence and human emotion must arise."* That is, our psychology lacks perspective if it does not recognize its physiological conditions on one side, and the specifically social nature of our impulses and instincts on the other.

Our consciousness is, from the first, a consciousness in which other selves and their attitudes are as immediately real as the consciousness of our own bodies and selves, and our impulses form the pre-supposition and condition of the appreciation of meaning or relationship. Our intelligence *Mead, Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 12, p. 401.

arises from the need of acting similarly-co-operatively—in relation to common problems, and from the presence of instincts responding to types of stimuli. On the basis of response, attitudes or meanings are developed the implicit concepts, which culminate in reasoning and language.

Implications of the social nature of consciousness and criticism of current theories of imitation are acutely stated in Professor Mead's article already cited and need not be reproduced here. It does seem pertinent, however, to insist that the rich, if unorganized, body of the literature of social psychology-Wundt, Tarde, Baldwin, Ross, Cooley, Royce, McDougall, Wallas, and others, may be sifted and rendered usable and interesting to students who deal with the social problems of education, and may be of equal value to that of neurology. The problems of fashion, the mob, public opinion, conventionality, advertising,-all illustrate phases of social consciousness which cannot be explained satisfactorily by the ordinary psychology, overtly or tacitly assuming more or less independent physiological or conscious units, and professing to develop a social consciousness by some form of mechanical interaction.

It is, of course, true that recent text books and studies in education have brought home the social nature of our experience. James has his chapter on the hierarchy of our selves, yet his bias is mainly physiological; Royce bases his psychology on the objective reference which our every thought makes to another thinker; Miss Calkins' psychology is a skillful blending of the physical and the social presuppositions of consciousness; Angell insists, in his concluding chapters, upon the social nature of volition and the self; Judd's admirable text book emphasizes the social nature of meaning, especially as embodied in language; and Baldwin has contributed his fine analysis of the dialectic of personal and social growth. Professor Dewey bases his educational theory upon the social nature of consciousness and the value of group occupations in the development of initiative and co-operation, and the recent works of O'Shea and Scott point out the implications of a functional and social psychology in the early group experiences of children, as wellas of adults. These are valuable contributions, however