Since professional work almost always requires man to make use of his surroundings, the technical schools are not forced to return to the very beginnings of education, sense exercises, in order to supply the great and universal lack.
CHAPTER XV
Intellectual Education
"... To lead the child from the education of the senses to ideas."
Edward Séguin.
The sense exercises constitute a species of auto-education, which, if these exercises be many times repeated, leads to a perfecting of the child's psychosensory processes. The directress must intervene to lead the child from sensations to ideas—from the concrete to the abstract, and to the association of ideas. For this, she should use a method tending to isolate the inner attention of the child and to fix it upon the perceptions—as in the first lessons his objective attention was fixed, through isolation, upon single stimuli.
The teacher, in other words, when she gives a lesson must seek to limit the field of the child's consciousness to the object of the lesson, as, for example, during sense education she isolated the sense which she wished the child to exercise.
For this, knowledge of a special technique is necessary. The educator must, "to the greatest possible extent, limit his intervention; yet he must not allow the child to weary himself in an undue effort of auto-education."