"The 'word method' begins at once with teaching the words in a manner similar to that by which children learn to distinguish one object from another, and learn the names. It proposes to teach words as the signs of things, acts, and qualities, etc. It does not propose to teach children the alphabet, but to leave them to learn this after they have become familiar with enough words to commence reading."
The Object System teaches geography very ingeniously. The pupil begins by getting into his mind the idea of a map. This is by no means so simple an idea as might be supposed, as witness the impossibility almost of making a savage understand it. The child is first told to point to the different points of the compass; then he marks them down on a blackboard; next he draws a plan of the room, and each scholar attempts to locate an object on the plan, and is corrected by the school, if wrong. Next comes a plan of the district or town; then a globe is shown, and the idea of position on the globe given, and of the outlines of different countries. Soon the pupil learns to draw maps on the board, and to place rivers, bays, lakes, and oceans. The book-questions now to be presented will not be on purely political geography or merely arbitrary lists of names. The child is taken on imaginary journeys up rivers, over mountains, by railroads, and must describe from the lesson he has learned the different productions, the animals, the character of the scenery, the vegetation, and the occupations of the people. Thus geography becomes a kind of natural science, deeply interesting to the pupil, and touching his imagination. Certain dry geographical names are forever after associated in his mind with certain animals and plants and a peculiar scenery.
Natural history is also taught in this system, but not by the usual dry method. The teacher brings in a potato, for instance, and carries the pupil along by questions through all its growth and development. Or she takes flowers, or leaves, or seeds, and stamps the most important phenomena about them on the scholar's mind by an objective lesson. Prints of animals are presented, and the teacher begins at the lowest orders, and rises up in regular gradation, questioning the children as to the uses and purposes of every feature and limb. They work out their own natural philosophy. They observe, and then reason; and what they learn is learned in philosophical order, and imprinted by their own efforts on their memories. It is astonishing how much, in these simple methods, may be learned in natural science by very young children; and what nutritive but simple food may be supplied to their minds for all future years.
From lessons in science thus given, the teacher rises easily to lessons of morality and religion. Nothing even in moral teaching impresses a child's mind like pictures, stories, or parables, or some form of "object-teaching." The modern charts and books are extremely ingenious in giving religious lessons through the senses.
The beginning of the higher mathematics may be taught children perfectly well under this method. Straight lines and angles are drawn, or constructed with little sticks, and named, and various figures thus formed. With blocks, the different geometrical figures are constructed and named—all being finished by the pupils themselves. On the blackboard certain lines are given, and with them "inventive drawing" goes on under the pupil's own suggestion.
Weights and measures are learned by practical illustrations with real objects, and are thus not easily forgotten.
Definition is very agreeably taught by the teacher's producing some object, say, an apple, and then making each scholar describe some quality of it, in taste, color, form, or material, and then write this word on the board. Very difficult adjectives, such as "opaque," or "pungent," or "translucent," or "aromatic," may thus be learned, besides all the simpler, and learned permanently.
The old bugbear to children, spelling, is by no means so terrible under these methods. The teacher writes two initial consonants, say, "th," and each scholar makes a new word with them, and it is written on the board; or a terminal consonant is given, or certain combinations of letters are written down—say, ough, in "though" and words of corresponding sound must be written underneath, or the different sounds of each vowel must be illustrated by the scholar, and the varying sounds of consonants, and so on endlessly—spelling becoming a perfect amusement, and, at the same time, training the pupil in many delicate shades of sound, and in analyzing and remembering words.
Grammar is conveyed, not by that farce in teaching, and that cross to all children, grammatical rules, which are, in fact, the expressions of the final fruit of knowledge, but the teacher writes incorrectly on the blackboard, both in spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and the children must correct this; thus learning from the senses and usage, instead of from abstract rules. Reading is given as nearly as possible in conversational tones, and the old loud, mechanical sing-song is forbidden.
The principle most insisted on in all this system is, that the child should teach himself as far as possible; that his faculties should do the work, and not the teacher's; and the dull and slow pupil is especially to be led on and encouraged. But, as might be supposed, the teacher's task, under the object method, is no sinecure. She can no longer slip along the groove of mechanical teaching. She must be wide-awake, inventive, constantly on the qui vive to stir up her pupils' minds. The droning over lessons, and letting children repeat, parrot-like, long lists of words, is not for her. She must be always seeking out some new thing and making her pupils observe and think for themselves. Her duty is a hard one. But this is the only true teaching; and we trust that no Primary School in New York will be without a well-trained "Object-teacher."