made to the sight and to the touch, and models or pictures of everything that has to be learned should be given to the pupil.
To Comenius’ eternal credit be it that he was the first to realise that the object-lesson was the only way in which any impression could be made on the half-developed thinking powers of the child, that he practically anticipated Pestalozzi, and paved the way for Froebel. Unfortunately he stops here. Up to the highest classes of the Pansophic school, the pictures on the wall and the models in front of the pupils are the prime aids to the teacher in his task of instilling knowledge. Visualisation in all things is the watchword of the Comenian method.
Now while it is evident that this factor is of great value at every stage of education, it is also evident that, at a certain stage, it becomes of secondary importance. By means of pictures, models, and what-not, a boy’s progress in acquiring the nomenclature of, let us say a language, may be immensely facilitated; but, when he reaches a certain point, when he is beginning to grapple with syntax, with analysis, with the various modal forms, or, in algebra, when he is attacking the mysteries of quadratic equations, a completely new element is introduced. Visualisation and object-lessons barely touch the fringe of the teacher’s difficulties. Between the ages of twelve and sixteen, when the boy is learning, not to see, but to think, not to exercise his sense of touch, but to draw conclusions, the schoolmaster, even at the present day, receives but slight assistance from systems of psychology, systems which, until recently, have consisted of little more than a somewhat arbitrary analysis and classification of states of consciousness. It can therefore scarcely be called weakness, on the part of Comenius, if he failed to solve the problem that still waits to be attacked, in the laboratory, by the special application to psychology of physiological methods, and, in the class-room, by the patient observation of teachers who are anxious to educate rather than to instruct.
It was his lack of a firm psychological basis and his
