mportance of giving the
child an opportunity to exercise his senses in discovering the
properties of the objects constituting his environment. The introduction
of the kindergarten, objective methods of teaching, nature study, school
gardening, and constructive occupations have done much, however, to
remedy this defect. One of the chief claims in favour of the so-called
Montessori Method is that it provides especially for an education of the
senses. In doing this, however, it makes use of arbitrarily prepared
materials instead of the ordinary objects constituting the child's
natural environment. The one advantage in this is that it enables the
teacher to grade the stimulations and thus exercise the child in making
series of discriminations, for instance, a series of colours, sounds,
weights, sizes, etc. Notwithstanding this advantage, however, it seems
more pedagogical that the child should receive this needful exercise of
the senses by being brought into contact with the actual objects
constituting his environment, as is done in nature study, constructive
exercises, art, etc.

=Dangers of Neglecting the Senses.=--The former neglect of an adequate
exercise of the senses during the early education of the child was
evidently unpedagogical for various reasons. As already noted, other
forms of acquiring knowledge, such as constructive imagination,
induction, and deduction, must rest primarily upon the acquisitions of
sense perception. Moreover, it is during the early years of life that
the plasticity and retentive power of the nervous system will enable the
various sense impressions to be recorded for the future use of the mind.
Further, the senses themselves during these early years show what may be
termed a hunger for contact with the world of concrete objects, and a
corresponding distaste for more abstract types of experience.

=Learning Through all the Senses.=--In recognizing that the process of
sense perception constitutes a learning process, or is one of the modes
by which man enters into new experience, the teacher should further
understand that the same object may be interpreted through different
senses. For example, when a child studies a new bird, he may note its
form and colour through the eye, he may recognize the feeling and the
outline through muscular and touch sensations, he may discover its song
through the ear, and may give muscular expression to its form in
painting or modelling. In the same way, in lear