begins to find pleasure in what he can accomplish. Eyes and hands and feet are used in play, no longer in mere aimless exercise, but for sake of some success of quickness or accuracy or strength. He wants to make things, to achieve something. Yet, be it remembered, he has not developed enough control to be able to hold very long to a tedious task, or to see through complications and conquer many difficulties in the pursuit of an end. You must give him simple, definite things to do, and not too hard.

(2) Play takes the form of games, at first with very simple rules, and then more complex.

(3) The child no longer plays alone, but with companions; and rivalry and competition begin. Their games provide contests of power or skill in which each strives to win.

(4) Imaginative play, with its little dramas of make-believe, reaches its culmination in the first half of this period. It continues until adolescence, though constantly decreasing in importance, to be replaced by games of the competitive sort. In this period it often takes the more definite form of acting out some story that has been heard or read-a form in which it may well be used educationally, not only in this, but in succeeding periods.

3. The child's senses are as eager as ever, and to them we must appeal in our teaching. But now he is better able both to use his senses, and to understand the messages they bring. His years of experience, few as they have been, enable him to comprehend much that he once could not. School life is widening his knowledge and perfecting his powers, and casts a new light upon everything that presents itself.

It has been well said that we are able to see as much in anything as we can put into it. It is not the mere seeing or hearing, but the meaning which sights and sounds convey, that is important. And their meaning depends upon what is within one-upon his point of view and his ability to understand.

We always interpret the new in terms of the old. We grasp the unknown only by relating it to the known; to name it even we must class it with some past experience. A little girl of three called to her mother in wonder to come and see how the flowers had melted in the heat of the sun. A bright boy of the same age called a ring-shaped ant-hill a doughnut, and put a young uncle to confusion by asking whether his budding mustache were an eyebrow. We have all heard many such sayings of children, and are often amused at their brightness and originality. They are but simple illustrations of one of the

most fundamental of all laws of the mind-that new ideas grow always out of the old, and that what we already know biases our interest in novel situations and our comprehension of their meaning.

The term apperception is applied to this process of getting meanings. It is the process of interpreting, comprehending, digesting and assimilating whatever presents itself to the mind. It is the source of many of the teacher's hardest problems. If we could just put our own ideas unchanged into a pupil's head, teaching would be a very simple thing. But that we cannot do. We can only present words and things, and the pupil must understand them in his own way and from them construct his own ideas. What meaning does he get? What ideas does he form ?-these are the vital questions in every day's work.

The law of apperception is that the meaning of each new experience is determined by the relations it bears to one's ideas, instincts and habits. In early childhood, we have seen, things are apperceived from the standpoint of use and action. The child's instincts in the main determine his attitudes toward what is presented to him, and hence its meaning. But as experience grows, and ideas and habits multiply, they come to serve more and more as the basis for his apperceptions.

To understand, therefore, what your pupil's experience has been, what ideas and habits he has acquired, and so, what point of view he will bring to your teaching, is your primary duty. He will interpret everything you say and do from the plane of his own experience. If you can talk with him upon that same plane, and express your ideas in terms that belong to it, you can be reasonably sure that he will get just the meaning you want him to get. If you cannot, he will get some meaning or other, but not what you intend.

It is especially difficult to share the point of view of children from six to eight, and to make sure that we understand their apperceptions. Younger children are more dominated by instinct, and so tend to look at things in the same general way. Older children are nearer to our own plane, and reading has thrown open to them the common heritage of the race. Middle childhood is a transition time-from home to school, from play to work, from instinct to will, from imagination to reason. Each child is working out his own ideas from the host of new experiences that are coming to him, and he is bound to get some that are strange enough from our standpoint.

We must be careful not to assume that the child knows things which he really does not. A number of investigations have revealed a some.

what surprising ignorance of common things among children who are entering school. At Boston, of two hundred children entering school in the fall of 1880, President Hall found that 60 per cent did not know a robin, and 91 per cent an elm tree; 54 per cent had never seen a sheep; 50 per cent did not know what butter is made of, and 20 per cent were ignorant that milk comes from cows ; 78 per cent did not know what dew is; 90 per cent could not locate their ribs, 81 per cent their lungs, 70 per cent their wrists, 65 per cent ankles, and 25 per cent elbows; 21 per cent did not know the difference between their right and left hands; 28 per cent did not know what a hill is, and 35 per cent had never been in the country. Speaking to the public school teacher, President Hall draws these conclusions among others: (1) "There is next to nothing of pedagogic value, the knowledge of which it is safe to assume at the outset of school life." (2) "Every teacher on starting with a new class or in a new locality, to make sure that his efforts along some lines are not utterly lost, should undertake to explore carefully, section by section, children's minds with all the tact and ingenuity he can command and acquire, to determine exactly what is already known." *

Such a detailed investigation of the pupil's ideas, of course, cannot be undertaken by the Sunday school teacher; yet the spirit of these two conclusions should possess us. And our task is really very much simpler in this regard than that of the teacher in the public schools, just because we can count on the ideas which the child gets from him. There is one very definite and practical way for you to get into touch with the child's apperceptions. Visit his grade in the public schools; find out what he is learning there; and bring your teaching into as close correlation with it as you can.

4. The imagination of middle childhood is no less active, but more coherent and better controlled than that of early childhood. We have just seen that imaginative play reaches its culmination in this period. The same is true of the appetite for stories.

(1) The child is as eager as ever for stories. They must have more of detail and of connected action than those which appealed to him when younger. They must be dramatic, with plenty of life and movement, yet with a unity and coherence that brings them nearer to the plane of reality.

"Here is opportunity to fill the mind with a stock of images that shall represent life in its truth. The stories should not be

*Hall: " Aspects of Child Life and Education," ch. i.

goody-goody, nor should they contain any effort to reveal spiritual ideas and motives that are beyond the child's spontaneous interest. What is needed is the truth of life embodied in simple, sensuous forms, especially forms of outward action."*

(2) The child now makes a distinction between fact and fancy. His imagination is becoming critical. All stories were alike to the credulity of early childhood. But now he is getting perspective. He recognizes a difference between stories that are "just stories" and those that are "really true" or "could happen." Some that he once implicitly believed are now called into question. He wants to know whether fairy tales are true, or whether Santa Claus is real.

5. The fact is that reason is awakening. The child is beginning to grasp the relations of things and to fit them together into a connected whole.

Only the tiny baby accepts the moments as they come, without question of whence or whither, how or why. As soon as the mind awakens, the little child seeks causes for the happenings that fill his days. He finds them, we have seen, in personal agencies. He interprets all nature after the pattern of himself, and peoples his world with fairies and elves.

Almost insensibly, however, he grows away from this conception. As day after day brings more experience, the regularity and continuity of natural events stand out ever more plainly. Time and again, the same two things are joined together. When the one happens, the other follows. He comes soon to look upon the one as the cause of the other-and then there is no more need of fairies or giants. He has come to see that things cause one another. Henceforth he seeks thing-causes.

The transition is not made all at once. It is pretty sure to center, however, in middle childhood. With the influx of new ideas at school and the freedom of a wider companionship, the child soon outgrows the myths of his earlier years and reaches out toward a more rational comprehension of the world about him. It is a time of eager mental activity and of endless questions. The child is putting his world together. It is a work of thought, not merely of the senses. He is learning the relations of things to one another, and is as eager as he had been to see and touch in the first place.

We are apt to make either of two mistakes in dealing with the child at this time. One is to demand too much of him, assuming a reason

*Coe: "Education in Religion and Morals," p. 232.

ing power which he has not yet attained. He reasons only in terms of sequence. He associates cause and effect, not because he sees the real ground of their relationship, but simply because they happen together in time and space. He cannot analyze such a relationship into its elements and discriminate the essential from the non-essential. He cannot reason abstractly, and is not at all certain to draw a logical conclusion from given premises. All this must wait until adolescence, for reason is the last to mature of the intellectual powers.

The other mistake is to fail to meet the demands which the child's reason makes upon us. The most important of these demands are (1) consistency; (2) openness and sincerity.

(1) Consistency is demanded because the child is forming his own ideas of right and wrong. He forms them in the same way that he does his ideas of physical things-by reasoning from the sequence of events. Actions are bad, to his mind, which are followed by disagreeable results; those are good which bring pleasure. Moral laws are to him simple statements of cause and effect. He judges actions solely by their consequences. It is plain what is required of us. We must be firm and consistent in our dealings with him. We must abide by the simple laws we wish him to learn. There must be no exceptions, justified by some higher bit of reasoning that he cannot comprehend. We must see to it that always bad results follow bad actions, and good goes with good. In short, we must confront him with a moral order as inflexible as is the physical order, that he may be able to formulate definite moral laws, and that obedience to law and respect for the right may grow naturally within him.

(2) Openness and sincerity are demanded in our answers to his questions. The mother who will not answer truthfully a child's doubt concerning Santa Claus, because "it is so nice for the little ones to believe in him," sells her boy's birthright for a paltry bit of play. He believes her until the truth is forced upon him by the ridicule of schoolmates. She has deceived him, and left him to find out elsewhere and to suffer in the finding. Yet he ought to have the right to come to mother before anyone else in the world, for the truth and with the truth. There is a barrier now; his confidence is shaken-and then she grieves in later years that he does not come to her with his problems!

The teacher is faithless to his trust who teaches a child to accept as literal truth any Bible story or figure that he does not himself accept in that way, because “children are not old enough to be bothered with such things." Some day the youth so taught will pass through