Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/549

Rh by leading from simple experiences to those that are more complex. But the great beauty of such teaching is that the child itself feels an interest in its work. It is learning as a pleasure and not as a drudgery.

People in general know what is meant by a natural or rational method of doing a certain task or carrying on to completion a given work. It is astonishing that the very opposite of a natural system should have prevailed so long in the important matter of the education of children throughout the schools of all countries. There have not been wanting some who, at different periods, have called attention to the wrong methods in vogue; but until recent years no very decided advance has been made. Too much importance can not be attached to the fact that in all well-regulated schools such subjects as botany, chemistry, and zoölogy should be taught by means of the objects under study. How much more natural it is to take a rose flower and carefully explain all its parts by pulling it to pieces than to attempt to give a class of young children a knowledge of the same flower by talking about it, without the object being in the hands of the teacher and class! By means of the objects the analogies and differences between the root, stem, and branch, or between the leaf, flower, and seed, can be shown and demonstrated to the class. Lessons conducted properly in this manner become a delight to children, and they come to regard their teacher as a true friend.

Let us examine how we come by a general idea, concept, or notion. Here we must call in the aid of language in naming abstractions. Under this there are ideas of complex character that exist in the mind without the need of language. Still more fundamental than these are simple conceptions carried to the perceptive centers by the ingoing nerve currents. Take the example of an ordinary cube. The child looks at it, and there is a visual impression formed of its color, of the length of each side, of the area of a surface, of the combination of the surfaces so as to give rise to the idea of solidity. The simple ideas are combined into the more complex idea—the visual one of a cube. But by the aid of touch other qualities can be ascertained. The hardness, weight, sharpness of edges and angles, smoothness or roughness of surfaces, form the tactual idea of a cube. But the visual and tactual ideas are still further combined into a general idea or concept to which the name cube is given. In this general idea or concept other qualities may enter, as, for example, the taste of the cube, if it is a sapient object. When the word cube is spoken, it recalls some, or all, of these qualities, according to the knowledge and observation of the person to whom the word is addressed. In the case of a child, the word cube may convey no definite recollection of the object mentioned. The child may not