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Psychology 277
deaf and dumb, and blind children. Other essential pedagogical applications of
differential psychology are those required for school guidance, and the r61e
of educational psychologists becomes even more important in the many systems
of school management which now provide for special classes or even for whole
courses of school guidance; in these, pupils and parents have some freedom of
choice, but in order to be satisfactory, this choice must naturally be based on a
thorough diagnosis and prognosis of each case - more thorough than the
teacher alone can usually make.
However, this is only one aspect of the applications of psychology to educa-
tion, and the most essential aspect, which is far less emphasized but will become
increasingly important in the future, concerns the adaptation of didactic methods
to the laws of the development of thought. Dewey, Claparbde and Decroly have
already strongly emphasized the importance of the interests and motivations
needed to make education active, and generally speaking, they have more or
less convinced us of the principle - although its applications are still rather
elementary - that the child acquires his essential knowledge only through
guided activities enabling him to rediscover or partly to reconstruct truths for
himself, instead of receiving them ready-made and pre-digested. As regards
the development and actual building up of thinking processes, however, modern
education still adheres to an empiricism and opportunism bearing a closer resem-
blance to seventeenth-century medicine than to that of our day, although scien-
tific psychopedagogics might already be recognized as a discipline and wil cer-
tainly mark future stages in the development of educational sciences and tech-
niques. There are some signs, however, that the idea is catching on.Institutes of
psychopedagogical research for the experimental study of the acquisition of
knowledge, the r61e of action in such acquisition, etc., have been established in
the USSR. Mathematicians nearly everywhere are trying to reorganize their
teaching in order to bring it into line with modern mathematics, and if it so
happens that this subject is taught by the old methods, certain countries are
making great efforts to reconcile the exigencies of this situation with those of
the psychology of development. In the United States, a number of physicists
have left their laboratories in order to devote some time to initiating pupils in
experimental methods; and several of these physicists make use of current
psychogenetic data (those of Geneva, for instance).
III. Another extensive field for the application of psychology is mental patholo-
gy, a medical discipline, but one in which psychology constantly intervenes,
either when psychiatrists turn themselves into psychologists, or when they call
for the collaboration of psychologists proper. Psychopathology is even of
such importance to psychology itself that the great authorities on psychopathol-
ogy, such as Freud and Janet, at the same time rank among the great psycholo-
gists. But it was difficult, in discussing the general trends of contemporary
psychology (sections 2 to g), to identify psychopathology with any particular
trend, or even to find an example (like those in section IO) of interdisciplinary
collaboration. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, disease may be
likened to an experiment made by nature, in which a certain factor is modified