"Our usual pedagogy," said Claparede, "oppresses children with a mass of information which can never help them to direct their conduct; we make them listen when they have no desire to hear; speak, write, narrate, compose and discourse when they have nothing to say; we make them observe when they have no curiosity, reason when they have no desire to discover anything. We incite them to efforts which are supposed to be voluntary without the preliminary acquiescence of their _ego_ in the task imposed, that inner consensus which alone gives moral value to submission to duty." The children thus reduced to slavery use their eyes to read, their hands to write, their ears to hear what the teacher says. Their bodies, indeed, are stationary; but their minds are unable to dwell upon anything. They must be continually exerting themselves to run after the mind of the teacher, who, in his turn, is urged on by a program drawn up at random, and which is certainly regardless of childish tendencies. The mind has to pass from thing to thing. Images fugitive and uncertain as dreams appear from time to time before the eyes of the child. The teacher draws a triangle on the blackboard and then erases it; it was a momentary vision represented as an abstraction; those children have never held a concrete triangle in their hands; they have to remember, by an effort, a contour around which abstract geometrical calculations will presently gather thickly; such a figure will never achieve anything within them; it will not be _felt_, combined with others, it will never be an inspiration. It is the same with everything else. The object would seem to be fatigue for its own sake, that fatigue which has engrossed almost the sum of effort of experimental psychology. In this environment, where free exercise is prohibited, as also the choice of work, and meditation, where every sentiment is oppressed, and from which every external stimulus which might enrich the intelligence with spontaneous acquisitions is eliminated, an attempt is made to excite the imagination by giving "compositions" to be written. This means that the child has to _produce_ without having the necessary material; to give, without possessing; achieve internal activities which he is prevented from developing. And _production_ is to come from the _exercise of production_; "constant practise in composition" is to develop the imagination; from the sterility of the void the most complex products of the intelligence are to be evolved!