Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/91

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in imaginative tales, applaud mock-heroic deeds, and appreciate beautiful objects and right action? If the child lacks normal development and has not the apperceiving mind for the various departments of knowledge, create new centres of apperception and interest, cultivate the neglected and stunted powers. The various distinct aspects of the objective world suggest the selection of studies; the nature of the mind suggests the manner in which the elements of knowledge are to be organized. The parts of a subject must be distinctly known before they are correlated; subjects must be distinctly known before they are viewed in a system of philosophy. Knowledge is not organized by artificial associations, but by observing the well-known laws of classification and reasoning. Moreover, all laws of thought demand that a subject be developed in a definite and continuous way, and that side illustration be employed only for the purpose of clearness. In practice the method of concentration can but violate this principle.

We may ask whether apperception, correlation, coördination, and concentration are anything but a recognition of the laws of association. The laws of association in memory are nothing but the law of acquisition of knowledge, as all good psychology points out. These laws include relations of time, place, likeness, analogy, difference, and cause. Add to these laws logical sequence in the development of a subject, and you have all the principles of the methods named. Have these investigations an important value? Yes. They explain and emphasize pedagogical truths that have been neglected. Having performed their mission and having added to the progress of educational theory, they will give way