112. It follows at once that the first thing to be done, in a school where many children are to be taught together, is to make the children more alike in their knowledge. To this end the store of experiences which they bring with them must be worked over. But the homogeneity of pupils, desirable as it is, is not the sole aim. We must take care also that the whole of instruction acts upon the particular stock of ideas of each pupil taken individually. We must seek those points of contact and departure to which attention has repeatedly been called above, and hence cannot leave the pupil’s mass of ideas in its original crude state. Thoughtful teachers have long since testified to the necessity of this requirement, which mere scholars in their zeal for learning fail again and again to appreciate.
Niemeyer, in his widely read work, opens his treatment of the particular laws of instruction with a chapter entitled: “The First Steps in awakening Attention and Reflection through Instruction, or Exercises in Thinking.” These exercises are no other than the elementary processes of analytic instruction. He says: “When the age, the health, and the strength of children have made instruction proper seem expedient, the first lesson should be one of the kind described in the chapter heading. Such exercises might be profitably continued in some form or other until the ninth or tenth year, and probably even later. The fact that it is not easy to describe them in a word very likely explains why we fail to find them in most programmes of private and public schools. That at last some attention is being given even in the common schools to this matter is one of the venerable Canon Rochow’s imperishable services to education.”
Pestalozzi, in his book for mothers, strikes out in the same direction. It will not serve the purpose, to be sure, to confine oneself, as he does, to a single object; still, the kind of exercises is indicated very definitely by him; indeed, more definitely, in some ways, than by Niemeyer.
113. The notions of pupils about surrounding objects, that is, notions in which the strongest impressions predominate (111), must be made to approach uniformity first. This is accomplished by uniform reproduction.