“Far beyond the ken of the pedagogue”? Tracing the fight for scientific authority in nineteenth and twentieth century “child study”

Julia Gustavsson is a DPhil candidate in the Faculty of History at St Peter’s College, Oxford, supervised by Prof Christina de Bellaigue and Dr Alex Aylward. Her doctoral research focuses on the historical practices of research on children in the UK through exploring the so-called child study movement which originated in the late nineteenth century.

A child’s drawing of a dog, published in Mrs Sherbrooke Walker, ‘My Square Yard of Earth’, The Paidologist 1/3 (1899), p. 167

'My greetings to the Child-Study Society on its Golden Jubilee!', Philip Boswood Ballard (1865-1950) wrote to the Child-Study Society in 1946.[1] The 50-year anniversary of the society, originally instituted in 1894 as the British Child Study Association (BCSA), had been delayed two years because of the war. Having, thanks to a handful of dedicated individuals, been kept 'alive during the time when there was a danger of its becoming a war casualty', the society found itself struggling to remain relevant in post-war Britain.[2] The jubilee lecturer was asked to answer the question 'what is the Child-Study Society, and how will it function in a changed and changing world?'[3] Ballard, who was initially meant to give the lecture, but declined the offer out of old age and ill health, sought to remind the society of its past as his letter was read aloud to the society committee on 3 January 1946: 'The Child-Study Society has for half a century been in the forefront of all liberal and progressive movements of reform in the education of the young, and I sincerely hope that the future will bring to its beneficent work a still wider influence'.[4] The future did not. After the jubilee lecture, only two more committee meetings are recorded in the society minutes. Only a few new members were recruited before the Child-Study Society quietly ceased operations.

Had child study ever been as important as Ballard was making it out to be? And what was it? Child study, the study of 'the mental and physical conditions of childhood', first formalised in the UK with the establishment of the BCSA in 1894, largely consisted of observational studies of children, discussed in relation to the influential scientific and pedagogical theories of the time. The study of children, many thought, held the keys to mysteries of evolution, heredity, and how to educate the society of the future. In 1910, statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson (1857-1936) circulated a child study form amongst his extended circle of acquaintances in attempt 'to discover the extent to which nature and nurture respectively contribute to the character of the child'.[5] Fellow eugenicist Cyril Burt (1883-1971) saw in child study the perfect venue to launch expanded studies of IQ. By 1946, as the eventual title of the jubilee lecture 'Child Psychology in a Changing World' reveals, child study had been subsumed into the formal academic field of psychology. But while the discipline grew to involve professional scientists such as Pearson and Burt, the founders of child study in Britain were a very different group of people.

The BCSA was founded by three women teachers, Mary Louch (1854-1947), Mary Crees (1844-1936), and Margaret Clapperton (1857-1902), who had met while attending an Educational Conference held in conjunction with the 1893 Chicago Exhibitions (these 'World's Fairs' took place around the western world with some frequency in the latter half of the nineteenth century, aiming to show off feats of culture and engineering, leaving behind recognisable buildings such as Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower). Inspired by the conference, the British Child Study Association was formed and soon grew in numbers. By 1899, almost half the membership consisted of women, a majority of whom were or had been employed in the educational sector.[6] These are quite remarkable numbers considering the scientific professionalisation which had taken place over the course of the nineteenth century, shaping science into the turf of professional middle-class men.[7]

Teachers and parents published their own findings on children in the society magazine and spoke at child study meetings and conferences. The picture above, drawn by a child, is taken from one mother’s study of her own children and provides a typical example of the type of material parents and teachers might draw on in their research. The involvement of parents, teachers, and women in general, was contentious. My research suggests that there were sustained conflicts over the participation of women and teachers in the child study movement, with attempts to construct a scientific identity, which excluded women and the working class from participating, by scientists defending the turf of their profession.[8] Child study was not, one ‘specialist’ exclaimed in a speech to the BCSA members in 1902, ‘a domestic pastime’![9] Another explained to the society in 1899 (whose active membership that year was c. 85% employed or previously employed in the educational sector) that child study was ‘far beyond the ken of the pedagogue’.[10] Ballard later remembered how ‘Both doctor and psychologist said to the teacher: “Hands off.”’[11]

Largely undeterred, to start, the amateur scientists and teachers of the BCSA continued their work. One teacher, Thomas Tibbey (1870-1934), working in a council school (what would today be termed a state school) responded in 1902 to ask with whom these experts were supposed to talk if all the teachers and amateurs stopped engaging with child study. There was, he argued, a ‘latent false antithesis between amateur and professional’ in child study.[12] Here Tibbey was articulating something that is central to understanding the tensions in the child study movement. Many of the scientific amateurs were professional teachers, and thus arguably more used to working with children in a professional sense than many of the scientists claiming expertise. In 1900, Mary Muirhead (1862-1922, a former teacher) published an article which explicitly conflated child study with ‘Education as an experimental science’.[13] The following year, her husband, an academic, underlined the ‘assistance which teachers might render to psychology taking advantage of their opportunities for observation of children’.[14] Indeed, John Henry Muirhead (1855-1940) continued ‘each school should be a psychological observatory’.[15] By articulating the close ties between educational institutions and child study, these child study ‘amateurs’ were making the case for educational professional expertise to be recognised within scientific discussions of child development.

Tensions between professional scientists and professional practitioners, and the production of rivalling knowledge practices have been largely overlooked in the histories of education and the human sciences. Delving into these tensions is revealing of the deeply contentious nature of the authority to produce knowledge about children and education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the importance of schools and homes as sites of experimentation and observation, and the role of the teaching profession in unsettling emerging patterns of gender and class in scientific practice.