ABSTRACT
The first edition of Studies of childhood was published in 1895 and widely reviewed, amongst other places in the Athenaeum, Daily Chronicle, Mind, the Monist and the Speaker. Stanley Hall, the other major pioneer of the developmental psychology textbook, also subscribed to the recapitulation theory and adopted Haeckel’s ‘biogenetic law’, erroneously believing that children love to swing in trees because of a common ancestry with monkeys, and that the minds of children and ‘savages’ are comparably primitive. As mentioned above, attention had also been drawn to the problems of child development from an altogether different angle—the prevailing social conditions. The last quarter of the 19th century was a period of ferment in education in Britain. Finally, for Sully one of the main purposes of psychological investigations was to produce results that could be applied to education, whereas Münsterberg doubted the practical applicability of results from laboratory experiments to the classroom.
