G. Stanley Hall was one of the leading figures in the North American Child Study Movement. In this book, the questions of arts education and imagination are central to the child's education. Here we will focus on the dangers deposited in the child with an excessive imagination. 

In 1924, Sidney L. Pressey, professor of psychology at Ohio State University, developed what is considered by many to be the first teaching machine. In practice it was a box with typed questions, with 4 multiple choice numbered answers. The box allowed the "test" model that added the correct answers, or the "teach" model that did not allow to advance until the answer was correct.

The gardening metaphors, in terms of the education of the children’s nature were common since the eighteenth-century, but they started to be deepened in terms of their governing purposes. John Locke used gardening metaphors to speak of the undesirable behaviors which “one by one you may weed them out all and plant what habits you please” (Locke 1934, 38). And, Locke stressed, vices and faults that conducted to bad habits in children were due to the practice of educators. Affectation, for instance, was not an early fault of childhood or a product of an untaught nature.

The sensitivity of the body was related to the ways in which the senses became a field of study and government, particularly through the ways in which physiology and experimental psychology were trying to understand how the body reacted to certain stimuli. In the eighteenth-century, physiological conceptions of the human were under scientific wars. On the one side, man is seen as a machine, on the other side, man is seen as a sensitive being.

Throughout the nineteenth-century, in Europe and in the United States, object lessons invaded the classroom, very much influenced by Johann Pestalozzi pedagogies, being configured as one path to construct knowledge through sense-training, and giving rise to a whole materiality in education, which produced educational objects and toys as part of learning commodities. The objects, being images or material objects, as part of a sensorial education were assumed as having the power to teach children unfamiliar concepts (Carter 2010).