Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/74

62 however, in passing, that the various exercises now laid down in courses of manual training will all have to be examined in the light of the scientific methods already employed in studying the older practices in education, to determine not only what value these exercises have, but also their sequence, and doubtless to cast aside considerable that is at present recommended. Thirty-five years ago object lessons were strongly advocated in this country. They brought new life and spirit into the schools, and became widely adopted. But to-day, without object teaching, all that was then gained by it is secured and much more by Nature study or science work, that which object teaching has led up to. And through a similar process of evolution many of the formal exercises of manual training are destined to disappear and to be correlated with other kinds of work, so that a broader purpose will be subserved through the use of the motor side.

The reader will recall the statements already made that attention is strongest when the motor side is employed, and that association and memory seem more closely related to this side. There is, however, another ingredient entering into all this which we have not yet mentioned. It is that with the proper expenditure of motor energy there arise interest and pleasure—an emotional condition which of itself materially strengthens memory and association.

When we call to mind that the child's mental world is largely an unrelated world, we find another reason for urging a larger recognition of this principle in our teaching. The child is in an unrelated world, because he is in the midst of innumerable objects, manifestations of complex and varied phenomena, the succession of events and their occurrences simultaneously. The stimuli which constantly stream in produce very strong sensations, and innumerable sense judgments are formed more or less unrelated. One of the most difficult tasks of the teacher is to lead the child to relate these judgments, to reject the unessential and unrelated, and to arrange the ideas growing out of those judgments in series; in other words, to introduce coherence and unity into the child's mental life. But this mental unity can not be considered apart from the matter of physical growth. The child's brain at birth weighs about one fourth of what it weighs at maturity, and the proportionate increase of other tissue in the body during the period of growth is considerably greater than the proportionate increase in brain weight. That which helps the child to gain nervous control will accordingly help greatly in bringing unity into his mental life, and no other means at the teacher's command will contribute so much toward what Prof. Baldwin has so happily styled nervous and mental unity, as a large employment of motor activity in schoolroom work.