Education should guide and perfect the development of the three periods, the two peripheral and the central; or, better still, since the process fundamentally reduces itself to the nerve centres, education should give to psychosensory exercises the same importance which it gives to psychomotor exercises.
Otherwise, we _isolate_ man from his _environment_. Indeed, when with _intellectual culture_ we believe ourselves to have completed education, we have but made thinkers, whose tendency will be to live without the world. We have not made practical men. If, on the other hand, wishing through education to prepare for practical life; we limit ourselves to exercising the psychomotor phase, we lose sight of the chief end of education, which is to put man in direct communication with the external world.
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.
"... 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_."
It is here, that the factor of individual limitation and differing degrees of perception are most keenly felt in the teacher. In other words, in the quality of this intervention lies the art which makes up the individuality of the teacher.