The directress of the "Children's House" must have a clear idea of the two factors which enter into her work--the guidance of the child, and the individual exercise.
Only after she has this concept clearly fixed in her mind, may she proceed to the application of a _method_ to _guide_ the spontaneous education of the child and to impart necessary notions to him.
In the opportune quality and in the manner of this intervention lies the _personal art_ of the _educator_.
For example, in the "Children's House" in the Prati di Castello, where the pupils belong to the middle-class, I found, a month after the opening of the school, a child of five years who already knew how to compose any word, as he knew the alphabet perfectly--he had learned it in two weeks. He knew how to write on the blackboard, and in the exercises in free design he showed himself not only to be an observer, but to have some intuitive idea of perspective, drawing a house and chair very cleverly. As for the exercises of the chromatic sense, he could mix together the eight gradations of the eight colours which we use, and from this mass of sixty-four tablets, each wound with silk of a different colour or shade, he could rapidly separate the eight groups. Having done this, he would proceed with ease to arrange each colour series in perfect gradation. In this game the child would almost cover one of the little tables with a carpet of finely-shaded colours. I made the experiment, taking him to the window and showing him in full daylight one of the coloured tablets, telling him to look at it well, so that he might be able to remember it. I then sent him to the table on which all the gradations were spread out, and asked him to find the tablet like the one at which he had looked. He committed only very slight errors, often choosing the exact shade but more often the one next it, rarely a tint two grades removed from the right one. This boy had then a power of discrimination and a colour memory which were almost prodigious. Like all the other children, he was exceedingly fond of the colour exercises. But when I asked the name of the white colour spool, he hesitated for a long time before replying uncertainly "white." Now a child of such intelligence should have been able, even without the special intervention of the teacher, to learn the name of each colour.