ll, a purpose that is apparent
and stimulating enough to produce willing practice. A child will do much
to be a good shopkeeper, a good tram conductor, a good banker; he will
always play the game for all it is worth.

CHAPTER XXIV

EXPERIENCES BY MEANS OF DOING

In the Nursery School activity is the chief characteristic: one of its
most usual forms is experimenting with tools and materials, such as
chalk, paints, scissors, paper, sand, clay and other things. The desire
to experiment, to change the material in some way, to gratify the
senses, especially the muscular one, may be stronger than the desire to
construct. The handwork play of the Nursery School is therefore chiefly
by means of imitation and experiment, and direct help is usually quite
unwelcome to the child under six. There is little more to be said in the
way of direction than, "Provide suitable material, give freedom, and
help, if the child wants it." But the case is rather different in the
transitional stage. As the race learnt to think by doing, so children
seem to approach thought in that way; they have a natural inclination to
do in the first case; they try, do wrongly, consider, examine, observe,
and do again: for example, a girl wants to make a doll's bonnet like the
baby's; she begins impulsively to cut out the stuff, finds it too small,
tries to visualise the right size, examines the real bonnet, and makes
another attempt. At some apparently odd moment she stumbles on a truth,
perhaps the relation of one form to another in the mazes of
bonnet-making; it is at these odd moments that we learn. Or a boy may be
painting a Christmas card, and in another odd moment he may _feel_
something of the beauty of colour, if, for example, he is copying
holly-berries. No purposeless looking at them would have stirred
appreciation. Whether the end is doing, or whether it is thinking, the
two are inextricably connected; in the earlier stages the way to know
and feel is very often by action, and here is the basis of the maxim
that handwork is a method.

This idea has often been only half digested, and consequently it has led
to a very trivial kind of application; a nature lesson of the "look and
say" description has been followed by a painting lesson; a geography
lesson, by the making of a model. If the method of learning by doing was
the accepted aim of the teacher then it was not carried out, for this is
learning and then doing, not learning for the purpo