CHAPTER III. 

 THE STUDY OF INDIVIDUALS VERSUS THAT OF TYPES. 



One of the most important reasons for the remarkable hold 

 which the stories of history and biography take upon the minds 

 of children, and of older students, too, is the fact that they contain 

 a dramatic element which fires the imagination. The characters 

 portrayed in history are in action ; they are doing something which 

 always involves their relations to others, and the part they play is 

 easily recognized as being essential in the general movement. The 

 events themselves become the embodiment of action. One thing 

 follows another in an order that stirs the emotions, appeals to the 

 reason, and irresistibly fastens the entire attention. The treat- 

 ment also of the subject-matter has been essentially different. In 

 the teaching of history, there is a careful arrangement of details in a 

 proper perspective. The great actors stand well in the foreground 

 as chief centers of interest. The influence of a people, often cover- 

 ing the entire life of a nation, is summed up as a single event in the 

 great historic succession. 



The plan followed by most teachers of nature-study has been 

 the reverse. Believing it to be largely an affair of the senses, the 

 pupil at the outset is completely immersed in details so numerous 

 and minute that it is beyond the power of his reason and imagina- 

 tion to reduce them to order. It is as though the teacher of history 

 should begin the study of a great military campaign by a critical 

 study of all the different kinds of buttons on the uniforms of the 

 soldiers. The imagination is a fact and a factor in human educa- 

 tion which must be taken into account, regardless of the kind of 

 subject-matter presented. If the presentation for any reason fails 

 to reach and rouse the imagination, no educative result can come 

 from it, though the appeal may have been made to every sense in 

 the body. Many teachers, realizing the lack of this element in 

 nature-study, have sought to supply it by treating all individuals 

 under the guise of human beings. There is nothing in nature, from 

 a raindrop to an oyster, that has not been personified in the hope 

 that this personal relationship to the pupils may be brought out a 



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