[4]
The real psychological analysis with which the movement began has,
therefore, been somewhat pushed aside for a while, and the officers of
those institutes declare frankly that they want to return to the
mental problem only after professional psychologists have sufficiently
worked out the specific methods for its mastery. Most counselors seem
to feel instinctively that the core of the whole matter lies in the
psychological examination, but they all agree that for this they must
wait until the psychological laboratories can furnish them with really
reliable means and schemes. Certainly it is very important, for
instance, that boys with weak lungs be kept away from such industrial
vocations as have been shown by the statistics to be dangerous for the
lungs, or that the onrush to vocations be stopped where the statistics
allow it to be foreseen that there will soon be an oversupply of
workers. But, after all, it remains much more decisive for the welfare
of the community, and for the future life happiness of those who leave
the school, that every one turn to those forms of work to which his
psychological traits are adjusted, or at least that he be kept away
from those in which his mental qualities and dispositions would make a
truly successful advance improbable.
The problem accordingly has been handed over from the vocational
counselors to the experimental psychologists, and it is certainly in
the spirit of the modern tendency toward applied psychology that the
psychological laboratories undertake the investigation and withdraw it
from the dilettantic discussion of amateur psychologists or the mere
impressionism of the school-teachers.
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