The child who copies a flat copy does not perceive anything except some other person's reproduction of a scene or object; and even this he does not necessarily grasp as a whole, his business being to reproduce it with flawless accuracy, line by line.

Indeed, it may well happen that he does not even know what the picture or diagram before him is intended to represent.

Nor is he expressing anything, for he has not made his model in any sense or degree his own.

Thus, during the whole of a lesson in which the perceptive and expressive faculties are supposed to be receiving a special training, they are lying dormant and inert.
Each of them is, for the time being, as good as dead.

And each of them will assuredly die if this kind of teaching goes on for very long, die for lack of exercise, die wasted and atrophied by disuse.
The extent to which the copying of copies can injure a child's power of observation exceeds belief.