tion is the regulation of the
process by which the child acquires and organises those experiences
which shall give him this control. Nature herself indeed provides the
means for the attainment of this end, but education can do much to aid
in the attainment and to shorten the period of incomplete attainment. By
means of the assistance given, the control exercised and the direction
afforded, we enable the child to organise the lower centres of the
nervous system which have to do with the control of the larger bodily
movements, and thus establish organised systems of means for the
attainment of certain definite ends.

The second stage supervenes when the need is felt by the child for some
measure of control over his social environment. For the young child soon
realises that it is only in so far as he can exert some influence over
the persons intimately connected with his welfare that he can make his
wants known and find means for the satisfaction of his desires. Hence
arises the need for some method of communication with his fellows, and
from this springs the desire for some system of signs and for a language
to enable him to make his wants known. Chiefly by means of the educative
process of imitating the experiences of others, he gradually acquires a
language and finds himself at home in his social world.

During this period the centres called into activity, developed, and
organised are mainly those connected with the lip and speech centres,
and a certain stage of organisation having been attained, the
opportunity is now afforded for the fuller functional development of the
higher centres entrusted with the duty of receiving, discriminating, and
co-ordinating the data of the special organs of sense.

The period during which the child is gradually acquiring control over
his immediate physical and social environments may roughly be said to
extend to the end of his third year.

From that time onwards the worlds of nature and of society for their own
sake become objects of curiosity to the child. Every new object presents
him with a variety of fresh sensations. He feels, tastes, and bites
everything that comes within his reach, and so acquires a world of new
experiences. Hence for "the first six years of his life a child has
quite enough to do in learning its place in the universe and the nature
of its surroundings, and to compel it during any part of that period to
give its attention to mere words and symbols is to stint