Quoted by Meredith Bak, 'Democracy and discipline: Object lessons and the stereoscope in American education, 1870-1920', Early Popular Visual Culture 10 (2) (2012), pp. 147-167.
Description:
'The growing institutionalization of experimental psychology in the 1880s and 1890s fostered the notion that the child's malleable mind might be trained with precision. Experts believed that particular traits might be instilled upon young minds with almost surgical specificity. Early American psychologist E.W. Scripture, who studied under Wilhelm Wundt, suggested that scientists - and, by extension, educators - could cultivate or eliminate particular personality traits and habits 'just as a trainer shows thr athlete how best to apply his powers and the surgeon cuts out a hindering tumor.' (149)