CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 86, 28 April 1937, Page 4

CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Mrs- Susan Isaacs for N.Z. BRILLIANT WORK Much interest has been aroused by the news that Mrs Susan Isaacs, M.A., D.Sc., will be among those taking part in the New Zealand Fellowship Conference to be held in New Zealand next July. Mrs Isaacs, who holds the impbrtant position of head of the Department of Child Development at the University of London Institute of Education is an outstanding authority on the education of young children. Her brilliant work in this field has attfacted the attention of ehild psyehologists in all parts oi the world. p Mrs Isaacs has had many years' experience in advising parents on the treatment of nervom and difficult children; and in psycho-analytic work with both children and adults. From 1924 to 1927 she conducted an experimental nursOry school for young children at Cambridge. Throughout her wiitings, Mrs Isaacs insists that the children 's own activity is the key to their full development. "Whetlier we are ohserving the great need of the children for active movctaent as a condition of physical growth attd 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, br the situations which provoke thought and reasoning, we are brought back at every point to the.view that it is the eliild's doing, the ehild 's active social experience, and his own thinking and talking, that are the chief means of his education," she says. "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 aetively concerned, but eannot fruitfully foist upon them problems that do not arise from the development of their own living interests in the world." Mrs Isaacs also emphasises the great value to the child of a firm baekground of regular routine and quiet control. "Even more deeply and nrgently," 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 among those who make np his world, loward him and toward each other."