rials
with which the mind works, but they are elaborated out of the raw
products furnished by the senses and other forms of intuition. As
cloth is manufactured out of the raw cotton and wool produced on the
farm or in southern fields, so concepts are a manufactured article,
into whose texture materials previously gathered enter. Concepts do
not grow up directly from the soil of the mind any more than ready-made
clothing grows on bushes or on the backs of the wearers. Concepts must
be made out of stuff that is already in the mind, as woolen blankets
are spun and woven out of fleeces. Our present contention is that the
mind shall be filled up with the best quality of raw stuff, otherwise
there will be defect and deficiency in its later products. The stuff
out of which concepts are built is drawn from the varied experiences of
life. On account of this intimate relation between the realities of
life and school studies they cannot be separated. Every branch,
especially in elementary studies, must be treated concretely and be
built up out of sense materials. Every study has its concrete side,
its illustrative materials, its colors of individual things taken from
life. Every study has likewise its more general scientific truths and
classifications. The prime mistake in nearly all teaching and in the
text-book method is in supposing that the great truths are accessible
in some other way than through the concrete materials that lie properly
at the entrance. The text-books are full of the abstractions and
general formulae of the sciences; but they can, in the very nature of
the case, deal only in a meager way with the individual objects and
facts upon which knowledge in different subjects is based. This
necessary defect in a text-book method must be made good by excursions,
by personal observation, by a constant reference of lessons to daily
experience outside of school, by more direct study of our surroundings,
by the teacher perfecting himself in this kind of knowledge and in its
skillful use.

There was a current belief at one time that object lessons should form
a _special study_ for a particular period of school life, namely, the
first years. It was thought that sufficient sense-materials could be
collected in two or three years to supply the whole school curriculum.
But this thought is now abandoned. Children in the earlier grades may
properly spend more time in object study than in later grades, but
there is