Two important questions are suggested by these facts. First, what kind
of impressions should we attempt to store in the memory during
childhood? Second, how may these impressions be made permanent?

To the first question, the child himself makes answer through what he
most easily retains and through his needs.

Since he is interested and curious in regard to things, since he spends
all his physical activity upon them, since he desires them and thinks
about them, we would expect that things, together with experiences and
ideas associated with them, would naturally fill his memory. Any
observer of childhood knows that this is true. The memory of a little
child is overwhelmingly for the concrete, the impressions through the
senses and from what he does being far more easily retained than ideas
alone. A child will recall the story of the Good Samaritan more readily
than the isolated verse, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." The
reward or punishment of an act makes a more lasting impression than the
dissertation upon it. Since the concrete must be the starting point of
thinking, it must come to his soul at some time, and, judged by every
condition, this is God's time for it.

The child's needs are also a guide in this matter. The soul is growing
in every direction, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually if
properly nurtured, and memory holds the constantly increasing food for
its growth. Is it to be treated as a stockroom, where packages
unavailable for the present are to be laid away until needed, or as a
store-house supplied with nourishing food for the present? If memory is
a stockroom, then it should be filled with definitions, statements,
terms, facts, anything which may be needed sometime. This can be done,
for the brain will retain the sound of the words, but meantime, what