The teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is fortunate.  Almost all children collect something.  A tactful teacher may get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a neat and orderly collection of notes; in starting, when they are mature enough, a card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map which they may make.  Neatness, order, and method are thus instinctively gained, along with the other benefits which the possession of the collection entails.  Even such a noisome thing as a collection of postage stamps may be used by the teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographical and historical information which she desires to impart.  Sloyd successfully avails itself of this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of wooden implements fit for his own private use at home.  Collecting is, of course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody ever became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector when a boy.

Constructiveness is another great instinctive tendency with which the schoolroom has to contract an alliance.  Up to the eighth or ninth year of childhood one may say that the child does hardly anything else than handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing, setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart; for, from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are two names for the same manual activity.  Both signify the production of change, and the working of effects, in outward things.  The result of all this is that intimate familiarity with the physical environment, that acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is really the foundation of human consciousness.  To the very last, in most of us, the conceptions of objects and their properties are limited to the notion of what we can do with them.  A ‘stick’ means something we can lean upon or strike with; ‘fire,’ something to cook, or warm ourselves, or burn things up withal; ‘string,’ something with which to tie things together.  For most people these objects have no other meaning.  In geometry, the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by going through certain processes of construction, revolving a parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc.  The more different kinds of things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives.  An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them.  But the wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction and to object-teaching.  I need not recapitulate here what I said awhile back about the superiority of the objective and experimental methods.  They occupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the spontaneous interests of his age.  They absorb him, and leave impressions durable and profound.  Compared with the youth taught by these methods, one brought up exclusively by books carries through life a certain remoteness from reality:  he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels that he stands so; and often suffers a kind of melancholy from which he might have been rescued by a more real education.