The Educability of a Two Year Old

When Bob was twenty-two months old, I could not, by any of the usual methods, or even by any means which I could devise myself, find any evidence that his memory span was more than two. There were, in fact, times when it did not appear to be even quite two. Sometimes he would repeat two digits after me correctly, but he was as likely as not to get the order of the digits reversed. He could sometimes put one specific picture block on another at command, and I noticed a decided improvement in this as his amount of practice in the exercise increased. When he was twenty-two months and four days old he was given a book containing sixteen different animal pictures, six of which he recognized at sight, and ten whose names he had to learn. His interest in the book was so great that he carried it everywhere with him, and named over the animals whenever he could find somebody to help him. Twenty-four hours after he had first seen the book he could name every animal in it. While we have no data to show a constant correlation between the length of the memoiy span and the degree of retention, yet it seemed to me quite impossible for a child to memorize ten new