Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and experiences the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill.  Associate the new with the old in some natural and telling way, so that the interest, being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the entire system of objects of thought.

This is the abstract statement; and, abstractly, nothing can be easier to understand.  It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty lies; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.  One teacher’s mind will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson and the circumstances of the children’s other experience.  Anecdotes and reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest will shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a lively and entertaining way.  Another teacher has no such inventive fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy thing.  This is the psychological meaning of the Herbartian principle of ‘preparation’ for each lesson, and of correlating the new with the old.  It is the psychological meaning of that whole method of concentration in studies of which you have been recently hearing so much.  When the geography and English and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references to one another, you get an interesting set of processes all along the line.

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If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk.  That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole.  Fortunately, almost any kind of a connection is sufficient to carry the interest along.  What a help is our Philippine war at present in teaching geography!  But before the war you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and where they supposed the pepper came from.  Or ask them if glass is a stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are formed and glass manufactured.  External links will serve as well as those that are deeper and more logical.  But interest, once shed upon a subject, is liable to remain always with that subject.  Our acquisitions become in a measure portions of our personal self; and little by little, as cross-associations multiply and habits of familiarity and practice grow, the entire system of our objects of thought consolidates, most of it becoming interesting for some purposes and in some degree.