The Point of Contact in Teaching Author:Patterson Du Bois Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE As a practical matter, the point of entry to any child's mind depends upon the individuality of his life; but in dealing with cl... more »asses we must make sacrifices of the individual for the many. Of course we lose in effectiveness by this, and, so far, the single pupil is the ideal class. But, on the contrary, the single pupil loses the advantage of the social relation. All class teaching is therefore a compromise process. We can appeal to childhood from the general plane or ordinary range of experiences most characteristic of childhood. Says H. Courthope Bowen, "What interests a child must be immediate and level to his thoughts. He cannot realize a far-off advantage ; or, at any rate, he cannot feel it for long. Young and old, we all experience delight in discovering, or in being helped to see, connections between isolated facts,—especially such as we have ourselves picked up." Manifestly the plane of experience, the germination of interest, the genesis of study, will be a simple, rather than a complex, concrete rather than abstract. As Lange says, " the numerous concrete, fresh, and strong ideas gained in earliest youth are the best helps to apperception for all subsequent learning." But these germinal ideas have no affiliation with the "regular sequences" of theology; they will not be found in the local, political, or religious issues, or the imagery of Ezekiel, Haggai, Zechariah, Nehemiah, Nahum, Micah, or Habakkuk, or the complex rituals and regulations of the Mosaic era. Supposing " the elders of the Jews" did build and prosper " through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo,"—what is that to a babe who has no conception of space, time, organized society, or even of our commonest adult conventionalities ? How nea...« less