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We hear the constant cry against the multiplicity of subjects that have found their way into our schools. The elementary program has been referred to as a kind of grand medley, a heterogeneous mixture, a kind of stew, a hodgepodge of many ingredients, and yet, here is not where the schools break down. Let us be careful. The problem before the schools is not that of eliminating certain subjects bodily, but that of fixing upon essentials in our enlarged courses. It is no longer a problem of enrichment, but now, one of arriving at fundamentals in the subjects taught.

I cannot help feeling that too many children are leaving our grade and high schools every year dazed and bewildered by a superficial treatment of elaborate courses. Teachers have absolutely no time to stop for the sake of mastery and thoroness. In geography children are rushed thru the primary and intermediate grades, twice around the continents, in abstract discussions of cause and effect, thru a tangle of so-called rational study, while they should be doing observational work in home geography and nature-study. I wonder if there is a tendency now, after all our enrichment, to crowd back upon childish minds pure mathematics, institutional history and scientific geography beyond the experience and comprehension of grade children. We seem to be so concerned about the reasoning powers of children. In a nervous, restless, determined way we have enlarged and enriched our courses and outlined them for the teachers even to confusion and bewilderment. It is weak argument for us to say that it is all done for discipline's sake, and at the same time, graduate our children with blind staggers, with no power of concentration and no degree of thoroness.

It is not only in the grades but in the high school. I am sure there are too many science courses between the lids of the books and not enough applied science. Too many laboratories instead of offering an interesting workshop for boys in elementary experimentation, acquainting them with natural phenomena, are given up to abstract discussions of the law of Avogadro, ionic equilibrium, solution, tension, and so on. A high-school girl has no buisness working in historic geology and running about nights making a pretense at astronomical observations before she has an every-day practical acquaintance with physical, industrial, and commercial geography. Our free elective systems must not lose sight of prerequisites. Things on earth and near home should come first. A certain amount of arithmetic should come before algebra, spelling before, or at least along with, dramas and elocution, a legible handwriting before design in color, typewriting before stenography, home geography before geology and astronomy, English grammar before Spanish and Greek, physiology and domestic science before zoology.

It has lately been charged by that staunch German Professor of Harvard, that superficiality and inaccuracy are the curse of our American schools; that our children do not acquire habits of strict mental discipline from the first; that intellectual disorderliness prevails; that our students reach much and absorb immense quantities but do not master anything completely; learning is loose, inefficient, and time-wasting.

I propose to defend the American schools; I believe the spirit that prompts the American teacher and permeates the American schools is the best in the world, but at the same time, I cannot escape the conviction that the German professor has put his finger on the weakest spot in our educational system.

And now what is the remedy? It is suggested by the subject in hand. It comes with the answer, shall we give greater emphasis to commercial and industrial geography? Shall we give greater emphasis to our enriched and enlarged courses? I have followed the genesis of geography as a science. I have indicated the scope, significance, and importance of this subject in elementary education. I have pointed out the pedagogical possibilities of our new geography, and the fact that it has already relieved our schools of a diluted mush of unpractical pedantry, and yet I cannot urge greater emphasis of this subject without some consideration for the child. The great problem now before the teacher who would give greater emphasis to commercial and industrial geography or to any other subject is a problem of selection, elimination, adaptation, and presentation.

The solution comes with a course of study so organized as to afford practical basic training to every child, a broad basis of general culture and efficiency for every boy, however humble the home and however circumscribed the course of his destiny. There are certain phases of all school subjects that are essentially fundamental. We must agree upon these. Here is our business-appreciation of things essential and adaptable before emphasis. It may mean, in arithmetic, the elimination of complex fractions, bank discount, partial payments, compound proportion, foreign exchange, mensuration of trapezoids, trapeziums, cones, spheres, and pyramids, until all children alike have learned. the multiplication table and have become accurate in fundamental operations. It may mean, in grammar, the abolition of guess-work in parsing and fine discriminations in sentence analysis until all grade children, even in the flat districts of our cities, are given a sure grounding in practical language-training. In writing, it may mean less wrangling over the uniform slant of letters, and more consideration for the development of an individual, intelligible hand on the part of each child. In drawing, it may mean nothing more than the cultivation of such an artistic sense as will help boys and girls to wash their hands, comb their hair, clean the nails, and put their desks in order. In music, it may mean merely the cultivation of the primary music sense and an appreciation of clean, wholesome sentiment in song.

In geography, it should mean a reaction against "sailor geography," against exclusive map-study and old-time drill on spots and lines, less attention to ten thousand and one insignificant brooks, ponds, hills, villages, and harbors in all parts of the world, a movement breaking away from grind on locations and isolated facts, a first step toward vitalizing method and humanizing subject-matter, putting our children in a position no longer to be staggered utterly by the great mass of facts connected with the distribution of plants, animals, and men, but to comprehend their attendance upon wide-reaching

principles. Then, we may give greater emphasis to commercial and industrial geography in the elementary school.

HISTORY IN THE LIFE OF THE CHILD

WALTER A. EDWARDS, PRESIDENT OF THROOP POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

The education of the schools has been defined as a preparation for life. And the definition appeals to one as both broad and noble. It seems to enlarge the school to the full scope of human experience, and to elevate it to the level of man's highest ideals. This conception is embalmed in the word commencement, meaning the day which marks the end of the preparation and the beginning of real life. But this is not the truest conception of education. School is not a preparation for life; school is life. It is no gymnasium where with artificial exercises we train and harden the muscles so that they may after a while be equal to some serious task awaiting us. School, like life, is real, it is earnest, and commencement is not its goal. If the future should happen to hold for a given child no more of life, if he should die before he grew to manhood, still a school of the right kind would be the best place for him during his childhood. The considerations which should govern in the school are not the far-off account of years, not an imaginary view of an unknown distant future, but the status and needs of the child here and now. Our study of the child's needs must be not superficial, but profound and comprehensive, and must take into account the fundamentals of character and life; but with this understood we shall do our duty if we ask ourselves not what sort of a man will this child make, but what sort of a child is he now.

Now these considerations profoundly modify our view of what the child should do in school. If they are sound—and I cannot doubt it—his school work should not consist of exercises and drills conceived of as fitting him for something different that he is to do later, but should have value and richness of content in itself. School should mean to the child what life means to us, with all its seriousness and comprehensiveness and solidity. His lessons should appeal to him as real and worth while. There should be a vital contact between them and his out-of-school interests. All that he does, whether in school or out, should be of a piece.

Now this does not mean that all school work should necessarily be what is foolishly called "practical" and concerned only with material things. He makes a sad mistake who imagines that a boy's mind is occupied wholly with the visible and the tangible. On the contrary, as the poet tells us,

A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

You can count just as confidently on the glorious fancies and generous ideals of your boy as on his fondness for candy or baseball. His daydreams are certainly not less real and precious to him than his dinner. And the point I am urging is that what we give him in school must tie up to something he has

here and now, whether daydreams or dinner, not to something he is likely to have when a man.

A fellow-teacher once complained to me of the unfair tests on which teachers are sometimes condemned. Other employees, she said, are expected to satisfy their employers, mature, presumably reasonable, beings. Teachers are condemned as failures if their pupils are dissatisfied-immature, heedless, flighty, incapable of forming an opinion worthy of respect. And yet there is an element of justice in this test, for the whole duty of the teacher is to meet the present needs of the pupil, and even a child must have some instinctive sense of failure or success in the satisfying of his own needs. And similarly a curriculum which does not meet the present needs of the child, which does not in some sense justify itself to him, is to be condemned.

Our point of view then in selecting and arranging studies for the curriculum and also in determining the methods to govern our teaching must be the child. We must take the child just where we find him. We must approach each subject from his point of view.

History in the life of the child-for this is my topic-is then the whole pedagogical problem. There must be no history in the school except that which can somehow be vitally connected with the child's life. Nay, this is true of us all. Says Hinsdale: "Life alone enables us to form the conception of history." And Newman in the Grammar of Assent dwells at length upon experience as the interpreter of history. He says:

I may indeed bring home to my mind so complex a fact as a historical character by composition out of my experiences about character generally-Tiberius, James I, Louis XI, or Napoleon; but who is able to infuse into me, or how shall I imbibe, a sense of the peculiarities of the style of Cicero or Vergil, if I have not read their writings? or how shall I gain a shadow of a perception of the wit or the grace ascribed to the conversation of the French salons, being myself an untraveled John Bull ?

Now the mature man has a long and varied experience and the abundant material garnered from that experience out of which to construct his view of history. But the child's experience is short and narrow and has been concerned with trifles. What practical acquaintance has the child with industrial and commercial conditions, national ideals and institutions, the operation of law on a large scale? And yet these meagre experiences of the child are the material with which we must work. Perhaps you think the history teacher is required to make bricks without straw if she must build up a true conception of history out of such childish ideas. All that I can say is that the teacher's path is indeed no royal road. She must work with the actual material she finds in the boy's mind, or not at all. Let me quote again from Newman:

The rustic in Vergil says:

"Urbem quam dicunt Romam, Meliboee, putavi,
Stultus ego, huic nostrae similem."

And so the child's idea of a king, as derived from his picture book, will be that of a fierce or stern or venerable man, seated above a flight of steps, with a crown on his head and a scepter in his hand. In these two instances indeed the experience does but mislead,

when applied to the unknown; but it often happens on the contrary that it is a serviceable help, especially when a man has large experiences and has learned to distinguish between them and apply them duly, as in the instance of the hero "who knew many cities of men and many minds.”

Now I take it that most of the history work in the grades below the high school, certainly below the eighth grade, must be confined practically to the acquisition of facts. Do not misunderstand me. By facts I do not mean dates and names alone, nor do I advocate that the time set apart for history should be devoted to committing to memory a chronological outline. I mean that not much can or should be attempted in the philosophy of history, in a careful analysis of causes. Nor should the teacher be overconcerned about her pupils acquiring the proper historical "method." She will have done enough if she teaches successfully—ah, yes, successfully-the facts assigned to that grade. For as has been intimated above, it is no easy task to teach historical facts.

I believe it is generally thought best to make the history of our own land the first and principal, if not the only, subject of historical study in the elementary school. Patriotically and practically this is perhaps best. But it is of doubtful soundness from the standpoint of pedagogical theory. For theoretically the child should first master the simpler phases of a subject and afterward the more complex. He should begin his history study with the comparatively simple, naïve civilizations of ancient times, when governments were singleminded in their interests and straight-forward in pursuing them, when the organization of society was simple and rigid and easily comprehended, when the motives governing action were the primitive ones we all instinctively understand, when the occupations of daily life were few and of well-recognized types. Instead of this the American child must wrestle with a governmental organization, perhaps the most complicated and elaborate on earth, except that of the German Empire and possibly Great Britain. He must try to understand a society whose elements are most diverse and in constant flux, and whose interests and ideals are multitudinous. He must study a civilization which is daily increasing in complexity, and an industrial system which seems to embrace every occupation possible to man, whose organization is so delicate and whose inter-ramifications so far reaching that the smallest disturbance may produce the most astounding changes. The motives which govern this modern society are not the naïve ones of primitive ages but are sophisticated, self-conscious, composite. We of this latter day

Look before and after

And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught.

The ancients in their simple joys and sorrows and labors were children compared to us and children find them easier to understand than modern peoples. This comparative unfitness of modern history for children's minds is partially obviated by selecting our material for the younger classes from the times of

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