Cited by Meredith Bak, 'Democracy and discipline: Object lessons and the stereoscope in American education, 1870-1920', Early Popular Visual Culture 10 (2) (2012), pp. 147-167.
Description:
'In the 1870s, Scottish educational theorist Alexander Bain attempted to clarify the imprecise term ['object lesson'] by specifyling three primary ways in which it was used. The first, Bain proposed, attempted to clarify the imprecise term by specifying three primary ways in which it was used. The first, Bain proposed, followed in the tradition of the Swiss educator Pestalozzi , who favoured bringing concrete examples of things into the classroom. Secondly, the object lesson for Bain was a kind of sensory training wheeeby children learned to refine their observational powers, classifying and discriminating between things they perceived. Third, the object lesson involved language acquisition and the association between written words and the things they described. By sensorily exeriencing an object - seeing it or touching it - children could come to recognize its written equivalent (Bain 1898, 132-135).' (156)