Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of EducationOntario. Department of Education
Science
Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education
Ontario. Department of Education
Education; Educational psychology
=Dangers of Neglecting the Senses.=--The former neglect of an adequate
exercise of the senses during the early education of the child was
evidently unpedagogical for various reasons. As already noted, other
forms of acquiring knowledge, such as constructive imagination,
induction, and deduction, must rest primarily upon the acquisitions of
sense perception. Moreover, it is during the early years of life that
the plasticity and retentive power of the nervous system will enable the
various sense impressions to be recorded for the future use of the mind.
Further, the senses themselves during these early years show what may be
termed a hunger for contact with the world of concrete objects, and a
corresponding distaste for more abstract types of experience.
=Learning Through all the Senses.=--In recognizing that the process of
sense perception constitutes a learning process, or is one of the modes
by which man enters into new experience, the teacher should further
understand that the same object may be interpreted through different
senses. For example, when a child studies a new bird, he may note its
form and colour through the eye, he may recognize the feeling and the
outline through muscular and touch sensations, he may discover its song
through the ear, and may give muscular expression to its form in
painting or modelling. In the same way, in learning a figure or letter,
he may see its form through the eye, hear its sound through the ear,
make the sound and trace the form by calling various muscles into play,
and thus secure a number of muscular sensations relative to the figure
or letter. Since all these various experiences will be co-ordinated and
retained within the nervous system, the child will not only know the
object better, but will also be able to recall more easily any items of
knowledge concerning it, on account of the larger number of connections
established within the nervous system. One chief fact to be kept in mind
by the teacher, therefore, in using the method of sense perception, is
to have the pupil study the object through as many different senses as
possible, and especially through those senses in which his power of
discrimination and recall seems greatest.
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