this school and labored among its children. They all
know and love her, and her memory will not die among them.

The great peculiarity of this school has now been adapted in the other
Industrial Schools, under the name of the "Object System of Teaching"--a
method which has proved so singularly successful with the children of
the poor, that I shall describe it somewhat at length.

THE OBJECT SYSTEM.

"I began with children," says Pestalozzi, "as nature does with savages,
first bringing an image before their eyes, and then seeking a word to
express the perception to which it gives rise." This statement of the
great reformer of education expresses the essential principle of the
Object System. The child's mind grasps first things rather than names;
it deals with objects before words; it takes a thing as a whole rather
than in parts. Its perceptive and observing faculties are those first
awakened, and should be the first used in education; reflection,
analysis, and comparison must come afterward. The vice of the former
systems of education has been, that words have so much taken in the
child's intellect the place of things, and its knowledge has become so
often a mere routine, or a mechanical memorizing of names. The scholar
was not taught to look beneath words, and to learn the precise thing
which the word symbolized. He was trained to repeat like a machine. He
did not observe closely, he had not been educated to apply his own
faculties, and therefore he could not think afterward. The old system
reversed the natural order. It began with what is the ripest fruit of
the mature intellect-definitions, or the learning of rules and
statements of principles, and went on later to observing facts and
applying principles. It analyzed in the beginning, and only later in the
course regarded things each as a whole.

The consequence was, that children were months and years in taking the
first steps in education--such as learning to read--because they had
begun wrong. They had no accurate habits of observation, and, as a
natural result, soon fell into loose habits of thinking. What they knew
they knew vaguely. When their acquirements were tested they were found
valueless. The simplest principles of mathematics were almost unknown to
them, because they had learned the science by rote, and had never
exercised their minds on it. They could apply none of them. Algebra,
instead of being an implement, was of no more