-these are the rivals with which the teacher's powers of being
interesting have incessantly to cope. The child will always attend more
to what a teacher does than to what the same teacher says. During the
performance of experiments or while the teacher is drawing on the
blackboard, the children are tranquil and absorbed. I have seen a
roomful of college students suddenly become perfectly still, to look at
their professor of physics tie a piece of string around a stick which he
was going to use in an experiment, but immediately grow restless when he
began to explain the experiment. A lady told me that one day, during a
lesson, she was delighted at having captured so completely the attention
of one of her young charges. He did not remove his eyes from her face;
but he said to her after the lesson was over, "I looked at you all the
time, and your upper jaw did not move once!" That was the only fact that
he had taken in.

Living things, then, moving things, or things that savor of danger or of
blood, that have a dramatic quality,--these are the objects natively
interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost everything else;
and the teacher of young children, until more artificial interests have
grown up, will keep in touch with her pupils by constant appeal to such
matters as these. Instruction must be carried on objectively,
experimentally, anecdotally. The blackboard-drawing and story-telling
must constantly come in. But of course these methods cover only the
first steps, and carry one but a little way.

Can we now formulate any general principle by which the later and more
artificial interests connect themselves with these early ones that the
child brings with him to the school?

Fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law that relates the
acquired and the native interests with each other.

_Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through
becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
The two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting
portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not
interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real
and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing._ The odd
circumstance is that the borrowing does not impoverish the source, the
objects taken together being more interesting, perhaps, than the
originally interesting portion was by itself.

This is one of the most striking