ations exclusively.

And what about the liberty of the child, we shall be asked?

Well, we admit that every lesson infringes the liberty of the child,
and for this reason we allow it to last only for a few seconds: just
the time to pronounce the two words: hot, cold; but this is effected
under the influence of the preparation, which by first isolating the
sense makes, as it were, a darkness in the consciousness, and then
projects only two images into it. As if from the screen before a magic
lantern, the child receives his psychical acquisitions, or rather they
are like seeds falling on a fertile soil; and it is in the subsequent
free choice, and the repetition of the exercise, as in the subsequent
activity, spontaneous, associative, and reproductive, that the child
will be left "free." He receives, rather than a lesson, a determinate
impression of contact with the external world; it is the clear,
scientific, pre-determined character of this contact which
distinguishes it from the mass of indeterminate contacts which the
child is continually receiving from his surroundings. The multiplicity
of such indeterminate contacts will create chaos within the mind of
the child; pre-determined contacts will, on the other hand, initiate
order therein, because with the help of the technique of isolation,
they will begin to make him distinguish one thing from another.

The technique of our lessons is governed by experimental psychology.
And this trend, without doubt, is in contrast to that of the past,
which was governed by speculative psychology, on which the whole of
the educational methods commonly in use in schools has hitherto been
based.

It was Herbart who used the philosophical psychology of his day as a
guiding principle to reduce pedagogic rules to a system. From his
individual experience he believed he could deduce a universal method
of developing the mind, and be made this the psychological basis of
methods of teaching. The German pedagogist, whose methods are now,
thanks to Credaro, formerly Professor of Pedagogy at the University of
Rome, and afterward Minister of Education, adopted for elementary
education throughout Italy, gave a unique type of lesson on the four
well-known periods (the formal steps): clarity, association, system,
method. These may be explained approximately as follows: presentation
of an object and its analytical examination (clarity); judgment and
comparison with other surrounding objects or with