mm ^atk 
 
 Hatt (^allege of AgrtcttUurc 
 
 At OIocwEll HninecBttH 
 3ti|aca, £?. f. 
 
LB IS/O.RsT"" ""'"'*"" '■'""'^ 
 The curriculum, 
 
 3 1924 013 384 106 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 33841 06 
 
THE CURRICULUM 
 
THE CURRICULUM 
 
 KENNETH RICHMOND 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THK PEKMANENT VALUES IN EDUCATION"; 
 
 "education tor liberty"; and — ^WITH J, D. BERESFORD — 
 
 "W. B. ford; a BIOGRAPHY." 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The aim of this book is to contribute a series of 
 brief suggestions towards the task of making our 
 school curricula simpler, more elastic, and more 
 united within themselves. They must be made 
 simpler, because their present array of " subjects " 
 tends to become a jumble in the mind of the learner. 
 They must be made more elastic, because our con- 
 ception of a liberal education is widening — as it 
 must continually widen if we remain a progressive 
 people — ^and we cannot help seeing that many new 
 " subjects " have to be brought in. And the curri- 
 culum of every school must be unified within itself, 
 because the blind multipUcation of " subjects " is 
 distraction. 
 
 The cult of " subjects " in education is really out 
 of date. There is only one subject — ^knowledge ; 
 and only one object — free and active development. 
 Wholeness is what we lack, and wholeness is synony- 
 mous with health. Educational wholeness can be 
 bought at its proper price, a readiness to melt down 
 our innumerable fragments of theory and method 
 and recast them in a single mould. Far be it from 
 me to dictate what the mould should be : I try only 
 to put into the common stock such suggestions as 
 arise from my limited thought and experience. 
 
VI 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 These suggestions I have divided into three parts, 
 corresponding to the three types of schooling to 
 which we are committed. I take the secondary 
 school curriculum first because it is (or can be) the 
 most comprehensive, and also the most definite. 
 The elementary school curriculum can be less 
 definitely outlined at present : we carlnot know, 
 yet, all that can be done with the extra years pro- 
 vided for in the new Education Act. The continua- 
 tion school curriculum must be still more fluid in 
 our minds, if it is not to be made a lifeless mecha- 
 nism ; and the suggestions that I put forward for 
 continuation courses must be regarded as " sugges- 
 tions " in the most liberal sense of the term. Their 
 only solidity derives from the previous secondary 
 and elementary models, which are, indeed, all that 
 we have to build by. 
 
 As regards my first and least nebulous model — the 
 sketch-design for a secondary curriculum — the rela- 
 tive values assigned to the different aspects of 
 knowledge are avowedly open to criticism. All pro- 
 gressive critics, I think, will allow that the import- 
 ance of education in the social, the civic, and even 
 the philosophical values has not been over-estimated, 
 and I can hope that my insistence upon the aesthetic 
 values may not meet with too Philistine a reception. 
 But the rational sceptic — the first person whom I 
 would enUst in the cause of solid reform — may ask 
 how all these values are to be developed .without 
 sacrifice of the existing curriculum-structure. It is 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 of no use, he may justly observe, to make a rubbish- 
 heap of the solid, if narrow, structure that we possess. 
 One cannot build securely upon a rubbish-heap. 
 
 I wiU take one instarice : it may seem that I 
 propose to make a rubbish-heap, in the following 
 studies, of our present method or lack of method in 
 language-teaching. I propose that a single morning 
 period shall be allotted, from the start, to the study 
 of language, and that this shall suffice, later on, for 
 the study of several languages — ^with some allowance 
 in the afternoon for further modern-language work. 
 It is difficult to believe that this one daily period, 
 with or without afternoon additions, can give suffi- 
 cient scope for the study of two, three, and perhaps 
 four languages, including the mother tongue. But 
 the critic must consider the effect, first, of having 
 studied the mother tongue thoroughly to begin with ; 
 second, of having approached each new language, 
 not as a terra incognita, but as an interesting variant 
 of language as he knows it ; and, third, of having 
 reahsed that language — ^human expression in words 
 — ^is a single subject. The pupil who has grasped 
 this principle, and has learned the main^ facts about 
 the structure of Enghsh, can learn the main facts 
 about the structure of another European language 
 very rapidly. Most of the time that is spent in 
 " learning the grammar " of this or that language 
 is time wasted. Grammar is the science of words : 
 one science, not half a dozen. The pupil who is 
 rightly grounded in the one science, through his 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 mother tongue, need not relearn it every time he 
 begins to study a fresh tongue. The original con- 
 fusion of tongues has been attributed to the building 
 of the Tower of Babel : I suspect that our present 
 educational confusion of tongues is our Nemesis for 
 having built a Tower of Pigeonholes in which to 
 teach. I am not proposing to fell the tower, but to 
 knock out the unnecessary partitions and to put in 
 several doors of communication. 
 
 In Professor John Adams's symposium, " The 
 New Teaching," we can see how strongly the ten- 
 dency is growing, in representative modem practice, 
 to simplify and to co-ordinate the materia of educa- 
 tion. The further practical need, as I see it, is of 
 an accepted system of principles for co-ordination, 
 towards which we may work in common. The 
 studies in this book are suggestions towards a system 
 of this nature. The individual principles that I put 
 forward are fairly widely accepted in theory ; what 
 we have to do now is so to combine them that they 
 can operate as a single system in practice. 
 
 The present attempt at systematisation repre- 
 sents, in considerable measure, the dissolving |ind 
 re-crystallising of principles that have been stated 
 from different points of view in my earlier books. 
 As the Bellman says in " The Hunting of the Snark," 
 " What I tell you three times is true ; " and what I 
 have to say on this fourth occasion wiU, I hope, be 
 regarded as truth that is approaching truism. But 
 it seemed worth while to recast the truisms of real 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IX 
 
 education in yet another mould, with a special eye 
 to our present and immediately prospective needs, 
 before I left the sphere of pedagogy for that of 
 educational and re-educational psychology. The 
 new psychology finds Uttle place, unless by implica- 
 tions which those who know will recognise, in the 
 following studies : before it induces an organic 
 revolution, as it will, in pedagogic theory and 
 practice, we have to make doubly sure of the 
 principles with which it can enter into natural 
 alliance. 
 
 My thanks are due to The Times for leave to 
 republish the three groups of studies, which originally 
 appeared in the Educational Supplement of that 
 paper. I owe my original impulse towards the 
 sketching of a structural model of the curriculum to 
 Mr. Cloudesley Brereton ; and it is a sad pleasure 
 to record my debt to the shrewd criticism and 
 generous encouragement of that gallant worker in 
 the cause of educational reform, the late Mr. Hardress 
 O'Grady. 
 
 K. R. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 PAGE 
 V 
 
 PART I.— THE SECONDARY COURSE 
 
 I. PRELIMINARY NOTES. 
 
 II. MAPPING OUT THE DAY 
 
 III. THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS 
 
 IV. THE HISTORICAL BASIS 
 V. THE UNITY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 VI. REAL MATHEMATICS . 
 
 VII. GEOGRAPHY 
 
 VIII. ARTISTIC WORK 
 
 IX. RELIGIOUS TEACHING 
 
 X. ROOTS AND BRANCHES 
 
 XI. THE TEACHER . 
 
 XII. THE LEARNER . 
 
 I 
 
 5 
 9 
 14 
 18 
 22 
 26 
 30 
 34 
 38 
 42 
 46 
 
 PART II.— THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 
 
 I. 
 
 ELEMENTS AND ENDS 
 
 
 
 • 50 
 
 II. 
 
 WORDS AND THINGS 
 
 
 
 • 54 
 
 III. 
 
 THE GRAMMAR OF REALITY 
 
 
 
 • 57 
 
 IV. 
 
 READING 
 
 
 
 61 
 
 V. 
 
 STORY AND HISTORY 
 
 
 
 65 
 
 VI. 
 
 EVERYDAY SCIENCE . 
 
 
 
 69 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE SCIENTIFIC END 
 
 
 
 73 
 
 VIII. 
 
 HANDIWORK . . . . 
 
 
 
 76 
 
xu 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 IX. 
 
 MAKING AND THINKING . . . . 80 
 
 X. 
 
 PHYSICAL EDUCATION . . . . -84 
 
 XI. 
 
 MAKING THINGS FIT 88 
 
 XII. 
 
 CONCLUSION 92 
 
 
 PART III.— CONTINUATION COURSES 
 
 I. 
 
 THE FIRST NEEDS . 
 
 . 96 
 
 11. 
 
 THE SCIENCE OF READING 
 
 
 . 100 
 
 III. 
 
 THE USE OF WORDS 
 
 
 . 104 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE WRITTEN WORD 
 
 
 . 108 
 
 V. 
 
 SCIENCE AND WORK 
 
 
 . 112 
 
 VI. 
 
 HISTORY .... 
 
 
 . 116 
 
 VII. 
 
 POLITICS . . . .■ 
 
 
 . 119 
 
 VIII. 
 
 EXACT METHOD 
 
 
 . 123 
 
 IX. 
 
 CRAFTSMANSHIP 
 
 
 • 127 
 
 X. 
 
 DRAWING 
 
 
 ■ 131 
 
 XI. 
 
 EXTRA SUBJECTS 
 
 
 • 135 
 
 XII. 
 
 CONCLUSION .... 
 
 
 • 139 
 
 INDEX 
 
 143 
 
PART I 
 
 THE 
 
 SECONDARY COURSE 
 
 I 
 
 There is something essentially tantalising about 
 the principles of education. To any one who studies 
 
 them closely, in the works of the masters, 
 Notes™''^'^ they furnish a fine body of doctrine, clear, 
 
 convincing, and inspiring. But with the 
 inspiration there often comes a sense of depression, 
 as we reahse the gulf between principle and practice. 
 For this reason many of us shrink from digging to 
 the roots of educational theory. Those who have 
 gone deeply into the fundamentals often emerge 
 with nothing but laments for the present or exhor- 
 tations, somewhat vague and general, for the future. 
 The chief difficulty is that the only means of reducing 
 principle to practice is practice itself ; and practical 
 reform has always to start from small beginnings, 
 and from different beginnings in every school. No 
 scheme that is at once practical and ideal can spring 
 immediately into complete being, because it cannot 
 be adopted wholesale without being adopted mecha- 
 nically, so that the self-creative value of school work 
 and hfe disappears. And this self-creative value is 
 
 C, B 
 
2 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 worth more than the most perfect mechanical 
 system. 
 
 If I am to attempt to work out a few of the 
 conclusions as to the structure of the curriculum 
 which seem to me to be forced upon us by the first 
 principles of education, it must be. with a firm pre- 
 liminary disclaimer of any intention to set up a 
 scheme for wholesale adoption. We can only bmld 
 a model, for purposes of criticism and comparison. 
 It will possess the advantage of having stood the 
 test of practice ; it is a working model ; but it had 
 to grow by degrees, as every attempt at a systematic 
 reform of method has to grow by degrees. Its use 
 for the reader must lie, not only in any sugges- 
 tions of constructive method that it may raise, 
 but also in the original adjustments that can be 
 thought out for the gradual apphcation of those 
 suggestions to the conditions and needs of any 
 particular school. A formulated scheme for the 
 curriculum must of necessity be adapted rather than 
 adopted. It wiU be weU to indicate briefly the main 
 principles upon which we shall build. 
 
 First, we shall aim at simplif37ing the classification 
 of subjects, on the principle that the fewer and 
 broader the subject-headings, the more nearly we 
 shall be able to approach the ideal of working the 
 minor subjects, too often kept in isolation from one 
 another, into a co-ordinated unity. We shall make 
 use of only five main headings : Religious Know- 
 ledge, connected with the secular work of the school 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 3 
 
 through the considerations of ethics and of social 
 service which will come to the front in that work ; 
 Language, studied both from the structural and the 
 literary point of view, different languages being 
 taught as special cases of a single main subject, and 
 the aim of developing a just and sensitive apprecia- 
 tion of the mother-tongue being kept always in 
 mind ; History, based primarily upon world history 
 and the opening up of a continuous vista through 
 time — the development, that is, of a true historical 
 sense ; Science, based upon investigation of the 
 processes of nature, introducing the sciences as and 
 when they become relevant to the gradually enlarg- 
 ing range of inquiry ; and finally. Artistic and 
 Manual Work, brought as closely as possible into 
 illustrative connection with the foregoing subject- 
 matter. This broad classification does not imply 
 that special times will not be given to the study of 
 French or Latin, or mathematics, or geography. 
 Pure mathematics, for instance, is a science, and 
 appUed mathematics is the servant' of the sciences — 
 including, we will add, economics and the science of 
 business, lest we be accused thus early of forgetting 
 the claims^ of the business world upon education. 
 Our grouping is designed to build up a consciousness 
 of the principal relations. Geography is partly his- 
 torical, partly scientific ; in making geography a 
 sub-heading we are not slighting the valuable labours 
 of modem enthusiasts for geography, nor shall we 
 be found tearing the subject asunder, to place half 
 
4 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 under each of two arbitrary main headings. The 
 integrity of every subject must be preserved, but 
 our object must also be to open up its natural 
 relations with every other subject. 
 
 This brings us to a second main principle, already 
 foreshadowed. No divisions of subject-matter, how- 
 ever broad and fundamental we can succeed in 
 making them, are watertight in fact ; and we cannot 
 make them watertight in the practice of teaching 
 without doing violence to reality. Science, history, 
 and language, broadly defined as the study of existing 
 relations, of the processes by which they have come 
 into being, and of our means of formulating and 
 fixing the ideas to which they give rise in us — or, 
 more simply, the study of how things work, how they 
 have come to work as they do, and how we speak 
 to one another about them — these are distinct, but 
 interpenetrating, regions of study. Science cuts its 
 cross-section through the lines of history at any 
 given point in time ; language has its history and 
 its science, as history and science have their lan- 
 guages. Our principle for the mastery of knowledge 
 must not be divide et impera. Our whole effort, on 
 the contrary, must be. to distinguish, but to unite. 
 It is not in itself an evil symptom of high civilisation 
 that specialisation should be the road to advance- 
 ment ; but we are much in need of specialists whose 
 distinctive ability rests upon a broad understanding 
 of the working of things in general, and of a public 
 for whom specialised knowledge joins on to, while 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 5 
 
 it transcends, the common stock of generalised know- 
 ledge. It is only by preserving the unity of know- 
 ledge that education can further the solidarity, while 
 it keeps in touch with the increasing ramifications, 
 of civiUsed evolution. 
 
 II 
 
 Two tendencies pull the time-table in opposite 
 directions. On the one hand, the spacing and 
 arrangement of subject-periods influence 
 the^Day^ *"** ^ school's outlook upon knowledge con- 
 siderably ; a time-table of which the 
 structure has been well thought out gives the idea 
 of knowledge as a proportioned edifice, and we want 
 to reahse this architectural value as fully as possible. 
 On the other hand, mechanical difficulties — chief 
 among them the annoying fact that no given teacher 
 can be in two places at the same time — tend to dis- 
 integrate the structure of the time-table until it is 
 a mere patchwork, with the subjects simply fitted 
 in where they can be fitted in, sequence and coherence 
 being left out of account. In putting forward a plea 
 and a suggestion for the structural time-table we 
 must not be thought to underrate the difficulties, 
 but only to put forward reasons why they ought to 
 be overcome. 
 
 In many time-tables the most that is done by way 
 of arrangement is to take care that subjects which 
 make the same type of demand for concentration 
 and mental effort shall not be taken in succession. 
 
6 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 Geography comes kfter algebra, handwork after 
 Latin grammar, and so on. This is laudable in itself, 
 but regarded as a sole principle it is apt to induce 
 one kind of mental fatigue while it avoids another. 
 The time-table becomes kaleidoscopic, and the chil- 
 dren weary of perpetual change, the perpetual effort 
 to switch their attention from one circuit of activity 
 into another. Neither is this switching to and fro 
 of the attention a good mental habit to form ; and 
 there is the further consideration that a teacher of 
 the more formal subjects is encouraged to do his 
 worst in the way of exacting continued concentration 
 instead of attempting the important task — ^important 
 for his pupils' understanding of the subject, as well 
 as for their mental health — of varying his mode of 
 approach so as to bring different faculties and 
 activities to bear upon different parts of the same 
 lesson. But the chief objection to the kaleidoscopic 
 time-table is that, by putting unrelated subjects 
 next door to one another, it induces a state either of 
 bewilderment or of apathy as to the essential con- 
 nection between one branch of knowledge and 
 another, and thwarts, instead of developing, the 
 child's natural desire to see how the branches grow 
 from common roots. We have to trace the articula- 
 tion of the tree of knowledge, not merely to hop from 
 twig to twig. 
 
 Contrasted with the modern tendency to a patch- 
 work arrangement, we h9.ve the traditional pubhc 
 school time table, a trifle gnarled, full of dead wood 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 7 
 
 that could be cut out with profit, but possessing 
 structure. The time-honoured division, " classics, 
 mathematics, EngUsh and French," has structure of 
 a kind, though it is an illogical and a faulty kind. A 
 boy can see his way about it, if it is only a formal 
 and unreal way that he sees. It will be seen that in 
 our present suggestion for an arrangement of the 
 time-table we shaU treat the public school structure 
 as a model, but as a model to be altered. 
 
 Following our main division of a school's intel- 
 lectual work into language, history, and science, we 
 shall give the morning to language and history, the 
 afternoon to science. Religious teaching will come 
 first, though not with a view to keeping it as remote 
 as possible from scientific teaching ; its first affinities 
 are with the study of language and of history, but 
 principles worked out in the science classes will 
 continually be brought forward for co-ordination 
 with the religious outlook. The study to which the 
 second period of the day will be allotted may be 
 denoted as grammar, if we may claim something of 
 its old dignity for the word. It should imply the 
 whole study of the science of language, as distinct 
 from the art of language. The treatment of different 
 languages under a single scheme must be discussed 
 in a later section. The next period we shaU devote to 
 mathematics as a connecting link between the logic 
 of words and the logic oi reality. We spoke of mathe- 
 matics, in the preceding section, as a science ; it 
 would be more correct, perhaps, to call it a language 
 
8 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 of science. The different branches of mathematics 
 will be taught in close co-ordination with one another, 
 and the material for problem work wiU be chiefly 
 drawn from data that are being worked out in other 
 lessons. After the mid-morning break, two succes- 
 sive periods will be-given to history and composition ; 
 history being well correlated with geography, and 
 including a study of the development of civics and 
 economics ; while the composition class is at times 
 dependent for subject-matter upon recent history 
 lessons (at such times the two periods can merge 
 into one), at other times upon facts and considera- 
 tions drawn from other studies. Further, as the 
 grammar period is concerned with the science of 
 language, so the composition period is concerned 
 with the art of language, and the development of 
 a natural, graceful, and appropriate style will be 
 a primary objective. 
 
 Our afternoon time-table will consist chiefly in 
 two long periods : One for natural science, including 
 geography (which can stand in a closer or a looser 
 relation to the specific sciences according to the 
 aspect in which it is being studied at any given time) ; 
 and one for a variety of arts and handicrafts. The 
 latter will include experimental and illustrative work 
 in connection with the science teaching, and at times 
 the greater part of an afternoon can be given to a 
 particular piece of practical investigation. On other 
 occasions the working out of scientific theory, 
 demanding more concentration and less time, can 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 9 
 
 precede any form of art work that needs an extended 
 period. There is still room for another short period, 
 which may well be given to conversational practice 
 in the modem language or languages studied, from 
 the grammatical and Hterary points of view, in the 
 morning period allotted to language. It may not be 
 obvious, to those who have been long accustomed to 
 thinking in terms of separate language-systems, or 
 of separate sciences, how a place can be found for 
 everything within the periods that we have sug- 
 gested ; we shall endeavour to make this clear in 
 subsequent sections. It is to be noted, however, 
 that much depends upon grounding, and upon 
 continuity of treatment — e.g., the elementary prin- 
 ciples of language-structure must be thoroughly 
 apprehended in the junior forms through the study 
 of English, and continually extended and consoli- 
 dated as other languages are introduced. A time- 
 table of this type can best be instituted, at first, in 
 the junior forms ; in middle and upper forms only 
 a gradual merging is practicable of subjects at present 
 held in artificial separation. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It is purely for convenience, not at all with the 
 
 idea of putting science in a predominant position, 
 
 that we ^proceed to speak first of the 
 
 Scientific scientific side of the curriculum. In a 
 
 ^^'^' time-table of the type that was described 
 
 in the last section, the first aim is that no subject 
 
10 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 should be predominant, but that all subjects, so far 
 as they have naturat relations with one another, 
 should be interdependent. Having instituted a 
 Round Table of subjects, we can start with any 
 subject without thereby giving it pride of place; 
 and science is a convenient' sector of our circle to 
 choose, because science lends itself most readily to 
 the exposition of the principle that we shall follow 
 throughout — the principle of regarding knowledge 
 as a unity, seen from a diversity of aspects. The 
 scientific aspect is, by nature, the aspect in which 
 we can most easily see things in relation to one 
 another. 
 
 Following our main guiding object, to simphfy by 
 unification, we find ourselves in search of simple, 
 unif5dng truths of science that will draw the detailed 
 work of the various sciences into a group of common 
 reahsations. Such a truth is the cycle of change 
 through which matter is elaborated for the uses of hf e ; 
 the work of plants in producing the food upon which 
 we and the animals depend ; the vital partnership, 
 as we may put it, between man and his crops ; the 
 continual process of disintegration and reintegration 
 which is the material basis of vitality. This interests 
 children, because it is a big idea, and a central idea ; 
 an idea through which science can begin to tell them 
 what they chiefly want to know, that the universe 
 makes sense. At the same time it is, to start with, 
 a simple idea ; it can be progressively realised from 
 junior school nature-study up to the study by senior 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE ii 
 
 forms of organic chemistry and economic geography 
 — to name two diverse sciences which thus are traced 
 to one of their common roots. Those who have only 
 taught the sciences in separation from one another 
 would hardly believe with what economy of time and 
 laboxir (especially labour in the drumming in of ill- 
 understood formidae) such a subject as organic 
 chemistry can be taught when its foundations have 
 been continuously prepared, and its relation well 
 estabhshed with the affairs of life in general. 
 
 Another main idea, related to the foregoing, is that 
 of hving forms passing through, rather than carrpng 
 with them, their investiture of matter ; like the 
 wave instanced by Tyndall, which remains the same 
 wave, though composed at no two given moments of 
 exactly the same particles of water. This idea, 
 simply worked out, does not prove in practice to be 
 too abstract for children — ^probably because it satis- 
 fies in part their pertinacious desire to know how 
 things work ; and it is of great use in correlating 
 their conceptions of hfe with their conceptions of 
 energy, and in helping them to avoid the Protean 
 error instanced in Mr. Chesterton's story of the small 
 boy, bothered by a gale, who said to his mother, 
 " Well, why don't you take away the trees, and then 
 it wouldn't wind ? " The distinction between vital 
 or energic cause and material effect needs to be 
 clearly and continuously established, not only in 
 the interests of science, but of history and geography, 
 for example, as well. It is one of the functions of 
 
12 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 science to make it quite clear, in every relation of 
 life, that the trees do not make the wind. 
 
 These are only instances of main Unes of thought 
 and comprehension that can be followed up ; others 
 will suggest themselves, and those ideas are best that 
 spring from the teacher's own reflections upon the 
 simple fundamentals of science. All that we would 
 urge is that scientific knowledge should be rooted in 
 main ideas of universal interest, and that these ideas 
 should start from the common ground on which all 
 children meet — the desire to find general explana- 
 tions for the particular things that they can see 
 happening around them. This involves the abandon- 
 ment of a kind of false simplification to which science 
 teaching is prone ; as, for example,\ when we begin 
 the study of chemistry from the " simple " fact that 
 zinc liberates hydrogen from sulphuric acid. To 
 begin with, this is not a simple fact, but a highly 
 complex electro-chemical phenomenon ; but there 
 is the further point that it starts in no relation with 
 the learner's experience. We have to lead him to 
 systematise that experience before there will be any 
 relevance in his systematising the laws of chemistry. 
 It is easier to teach inorganic chemistry out of a 
 text-book than to work out a progressive systemati- 
 sation, by simple steps, of science as it explains the 
 things that happen to us and around us ; but it is 
 not so interesting, and it is not education. 
 
 And there is the further and more important point 
 that a gradual, patient co-ordination, in a scientific 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 13 
 
 scheme, of the child's widening outlook upon realities 
 is the only way of bringing his scientific conscious- 
 ness into relation with his thoughts upon matters 
 other than scientific. His science, at any age, must 
 be a philosophy, however simple, if he is to connect 
 it with the philosophies of religion and art, of history 
 and language. The old term " natural philosophy " 
 defines pretty adequately what should be the scope 
 of school science. The danger of natural philosophy, 
 as distinct from the study of arbitrarily distinguished 
 " sciences," is diffuseness ; but at the SEime time we 
 reqtiire, if not diffuseness, at any rate diffusion, of 
 scientific concepts. The prophylactic against diffuse- 
 ness is the thinking out — the collective thinking out, 
 as far as may be, by teacher and class together — of 
 significant main ideas. The diffusion of these ideas 
 will depend upon the efforts made by the teacher of 
 science, in common with the teachers of other sub- 
 jects, to correlate the scientific work with the other 
 work of the school. Science and geography should, 
 if possible, be in the same hands, and be treated to 
 a great extent as the same subject — ^given that the' 
 teachers of science and of history confer very closely 
 for the establishment and maintenance of a common 
 view of historical geography. Science (including 
 geographical science) can supply many interesting 
 data for working out in the mathematical class ; it 
 is a common arrangement that the teacher of science 
 should also teach mathematics, but it is less usual 
 to find him teaching sciejace and mathematics to the 
 
14 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 same form and also leading that form to realise that 
 their mathematical formulae are part of the essential 
 language for the expression of their scientific ideas. 
 
 IV 
 
 There are three main interests in history : 
 biography, event, and structural sequence. The 
 
 last is the most abstract, and ultimately 
 Historical the greatest, interest, to which the other 
 
 two become subservient ; but it is an 
 interest that only grows by slow and patient degrees. 
 It remains undeveloped in so far as history is taught 
 without a consecutive and carefully graded scheme, 
 so that only an accumulating jumble of " periods " 
 is left in the learner's mind ; and it develops, at the 
 best, along cold and academic lines unless it is con- 
 nected, for the learner, with a widening range of 
 event and of the human realities. 
 
 The interest of event, and the human interest, 
 can be established very early in the historical stories . 
 told or read to children ; and it is at this stage that 
 the roots of historical apprehension (as distinct from 
 historical comprehension, which involves structural 
 sequence) should be encouraged to spread into every 
 region of childish thought. The subsequent breadth 
 of historical interest will depend very largely upon 
 this early work. The teacher of jimior history 
 should know, in some detail, what his children are 
 learning in their other work, and should seize every 
 opportunity of throwing picturesque historical side- 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 15 
 
 lights upon the development of different branches of 
 knowledge. This gives to their conception of history 
 an increasing richness of content, while at the same 
 time reinforcing the interest of their work in general. 
 
 There are two modes of transition from the stage 
 of historical stories to the beginning of structural 
 history : the study of single comparatively short 
 periods, and the elementary study of world history. 
 Too commonly, it is not so much a transition that is 
 made as a jump. " Periods " suddenly become, and, 
 remain, the sole order of the day, while world history 
 is practically disregarded ; and the formal study 
 of periods bears little relation to the previous story- 
 telling. It should, on the contrary, be a graded 
 extension and amplification of the story-teUing 
 phase, the stories becoming increasingly consecutive 
 and more and more closely linked up with one 
 another. But this alone does not develop an historical 
 sense. It leaves history too much like a jigsaw 
 ■puzzle of an infinite ntnnber of pieces. A key is 
 necessary : a mental chart, by the aid of which 
 character and event can be seen in their proper time- 
 perspective. It is the first, though not the only, 
 argument for the inclusion of world history in the 
 curriculum, that without world history there is no 
 real history. 
 
 By the time children are ready for the beginnings 
 of world history, the foundations should already be 
 laid by that part of the world's story which counts 
 as geography. To begin with, physical geography 
 
i6 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 prepares the world, as it were, for the reception of 
 its inhabitants ; we then proceed to study the action 
 and reaction between character, event, and environ- 
 ment, bringing the whole into structural sequence. 
 It will be obvious that careful collaboration between 
 the teachers of history and of geography is essential. 
 It is no less essential that the teachers of history and 
 of Scripture should confer together. The study of 
 the early civiUsations from two points of view — the 
 point of view of the world and the point of view of 
 the Hebrew religion — can be highly educative if the 
 two views are correlated, and highly confusing if 
 they are not. The same thing is true of Mediter- 
 ranean history and the New Testament ; and of the 
 two aspects according to which there is a history of 
 Europe and a history of Christendom. Equally the 
 history that is a study of human character in time 
 must take account of the development of social 
 science, and needs to be brought into relation with 
 scientific method ; history and science can combine 
 to build up a conception of social ethics. 
 
 We have not yet traced the practical relation 
 between the study of world history and the develop- 
 ment of historical story-telling into a study of his- 
 torical periods ; it may be as well, to begin with, 
 if we reassure the reader that the proper study of 
 world history need not engross all the available time. 
 It should be taught at first in very broad and simple 
 outline, and then returned to from time to time for 
 fuller and more mature treatment. Successive 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 17 
 
 impressions are more effectual than intensive study. 
 Reminders of historical stories that have previously 
 been told should continually be brought in, so that 
 the stories can now be placed in their proper time- 
 setting (a chronological record of the stories should, 
 of course, have been kept) ; and fresh stories should 
 be so chosen as to bring interest of character and 
 event into any sequence that seems in danger of 
 becoming merely diagrammatic. As teaching by 
 stories gradually merges into real period-study, and 
 the periods begin to a.cquire time-structure, it is 
 important to relate this to the wider structure that 
 is being estabhshed through the study of world 
 history — to see that it is realised how brief a story 
 is told by any set period of history in comparison 
 with the complete story that is gradually, and in 
 part, being unfolded. History can be, and but 
 seldom is, a magnificent training in sense of propor- 
 tion. For the sake of this training, if for nothing 
 else, it is well to keep the teaching of world history 
 and of period history going on at the same time, and 
 in careful relation with one another. The writer's 
 experience is that two history lessons in the week, 
 out of- six, give a sufficient comprehension of world 
 history. 
 
 Period history, meanwhile, has also to be kept 
 clear of the dangers of discontinuity and isolation 
 from other subjects. The prevalent teaching of 
 history might ahnost be said to consist of premature 
 specialisation in periods; and this necessarily 
 
i8 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 involves a lack of co-ordination with other interests. 
 The remedy is, first, as we have suggested, to extend 
 and ampUfy the method of history teaching by 
 story-telling— and to show that all the small stories 
 are parts of a big story ; and, second, to develop 
 the teaching of world history so that, in studying 
 history, children are studying one of the aspects of 
 everything. The most elementary effort to co- 
 ordinate period history with world history does 
 away with the grossest absurdity of all — the study 
 of periods for periods' sake, by which children learn 
 to see the story of the human race as nothing but a 
 confused patchwork, with the patches not even sewn 
 together. 
 
 V 
 
 Of all the reforms that should develop from the 
 principle of teaching the unity of knowledge, the 
 
 most obvious is that language should be 
 Unity of taught as a unity, based upon a group of 
 
 main principles common to the European 
 languages. The chief difficulty is that we have to 
 proceed, not from one system to another, but from 
 chaos to system. A transition is always easier to 
 bring about than an act of creation. We have to 
 create a system by which we shall be able to teach 
 language, not merely languages. Such a system 
 must be constructive ; it must possess continuity 
 in time and uniformity of method. These two 
 requirements present difficulties, of which the first 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 19 
 
 is by far the greater. A system that can carry a 
 subject along slowly and steadily, from term to term 
 and from year to year, must be the system not, of one 
 school, but of all schools between which interchange 
 of pupils is likely to take place ; or else newcomers 
 arriving in the middle of their school career will find 
 themselves at sea. We must be so far Utopian as 
 to suppose that our system has been adapted to the 
 needs of at least a majority of schools of the same 
 type. Given this, uniformity of method can be 
 secured by consultation. 
 
 The beginning can be made in the junior forms 
 with the first steps' in systematic treatment of 
 English. The structural study of the mother tongue, 
 not of Latin, is the natural beginning for the struc- 
 tural study of language. And we would suggest that, 
 at this first stage, the time given to a thorough 
 elementary grounding in English should not be less 
 than the time that will eventually be given to the 
 co-ordinated study of English and other languages. 
 AU through the study of different languages upon 
 different, unrelated systems, the learner is dogged 
 by elementary mistakes that are not only mistakes 
 in this or that language, but mistakes in the science 
 of language itself ; this whole category of mistakes 
 — and it is a very large category — ^melts away when 
 the early study of Enghsh has been systematically 
 planned and thoroughly carried out, if only the 
 elementary language-principles, thus ingrained in the 
 learner's mind, are not thrown away by the adoption 
 
 C 2 
 
20 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 of a fresh system and a new terminology for every 
 language that is subsequently learnt- With a com- 
 mon system and a common terminology for all 
 languages (except in so far as any language presents 
 new features that call for new names), the early 
 groundwork in English can make a child surefooted 
 in any language that he takes up later. The child 
 has, in the main, to learn nothing but new forms for 
 old realisations ; he can see his way clear to a 
 fascinating exploration of the new mode of speech. 
 
 The fascination of Latin, during the time before 
 a Latin text can be read with enjo5Tiient, is the 
 fascination of a language with a more definite 
 structure than that of English. All children take 
 pleasure in understanding how things work ; and 
 the mechanism of the Latin language doe^ in fact 
 enable them to understand all language better if — 
 an important if — the study of Latin is kept in close 
 relation with the continued study of English and of 
 French, points of difference, as well as of resemblance 
 or identity, being carefully brought out. Later on, 
 Greek presents a still more deUcate and detailed 
 mechanism, or a second modern language displays 
 new divergences from the common stock. We have 
 recommended, in the section on the school time- 
 table, the teaching of languages, in co-ordination 
 with one another, during a single, daily period of 
 the morning. Translation and retranslation (after 
 the manner of Ascham), and the drawing up of 
 grammatical diagrams comparing the usages of dif- 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 21 
 
 ferent tongues, should be carried out so as not only 
 to correlate other languages with English, but also 
 to bring them into relation with one another. The 
 practicability of this system, it will be clear, depends 
 upon its having been the work of time. It cannot 
 be imposed upon middle and senior forms all at once ; 
 but it can gradually evolve upwards through a 
 school, starting with the proper study of language, 
 by means of the mother tongue, in the junior forms. 
 This study, however, needs to be formulated upon 
 common principles and methods by intercommuni- 
 cation between the heads and staffs of many schools 
 before a sound beginning can be made. 
 
 Meanwhile, any single school can do something, 
 and a valuable something, towards teaching language 
 as a unity. Different terminologies, if they cannot 
 be merged into one until common action has been 
 taken, can be compared with one another ; teachers 
 of different languages can collaborate so as to work, 
 as far as possible, upon a common system and to 
 introduce cross-references to one another's work ; 
 and teachers of other subjects, realising that they, 
 too, are inevitably teachers of language at the same 
 time, and are either helping or hindering the language 
 teaching of the school as a whole, can also study and 
 discuss the treatment of EngUsh that is being carried 
 out. By carefully maintaining the standard of 
 language in their own classes and referring, for 
 method in expression, to the terms and rules that 
 are in use in the language classes, they will not b§ 
 
32 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 digressing from their proper business, but greatly 
 improving the clarity of their pupils' understanding. 
 Above all and at the root of all, the systematic study 
 of English can be ma,de a real-and a Uving thing by 
 teaching not merely the aridities of " grammar " 
 and " analysis," but the essential relation between 
 the form of language and the substance of thought. 
 Thought is — or should be — ^prior to speech ; and 
 language is never understood by those who learn to 
 regard it as a science in itself, instead of as the vehicle 
 and instrument of interesting ideas. 
 
 VI 
 
 Mathematics, like art, has to be taught to a 
 
 majority who need only to realise its significance ; 
 
 only a small minority will become mathe- 
 
 R63l 
 
 Mathe-. maticians, even as only a small minority 
 will become artists. For practical utility, 
 outside such professions as engineering, only the 
 most elementary knowledge is necessary, coupled 
 with practice in bringing intelligence and under- 
 standing to bear upon simple problems of quantity. 
 For mental development, counting in the value of 
 mathematics not only as a gymnastic, but as a 
 means of comprehending the very great and the 
 very small — the star and the electron — and of 
 grasping quantitative relations in general, much 
 more than this is needed. Mathematical teaching, 
 then, should be essentially non-vocational, though 
 not anti-vocational ; and this is the trend that 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 23 
 
 reform has taken in the last decade or two. But 
 reform is far from complete. Mathematics is still 
 taught, in great measure, so that only the budding 
 mathematical genius is really interested in it, and 
 a good half of the pupils never learn more than the 
 application of memorised processes which they do 
 not tmderstand. Both the interest and the under- 
 standing of every pupil ought to be secured ; and 
 both can be secured if mathematics is taught as a 
 means of expressijig realities, a means of formulat- 
 ing concepts that are real to the growing mind. 
 For the great majority pure mathematics can only 
 become real by the way of applied mathematics ; 
 and even for- the gifted minority it is better that 
 abstractions from the concrete should be made 
 in class than doled out, ready-made, by the teacher. 
 AU abstractions, indeed, have to be made, not 
 learned, if they are to grow and fructify in the 
 mind. 
 
 What, then, are we to teach as mathematics ? 
 First and foremost, the handling of such problems 
 of quantity and proportion as arise in science and 
 geography, and to a less extent in other studies — 
 and are usually either neglected or scamped when 
 they do arise. Here, once more, we meet the neces- 
 sity of collaboration between the teachers of different 
 subjects. Second, we can teach problem work in 
 connection with local interests and events, these, 
 again, coming into contact with historical develop- 
 ment on the one hand and with geographical know^ 
 
24 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 ledge on the other. The principal concern of the 
 • mathematical class is with the whole nexus of quan- 
 titative values that is forming in the mind of the 
 learner, and the scheme and sequence of mathe- 
 matical teaching should be so arranged as to bring 
 to a jfocus, at each stage, the quantitative interests 
 that are appropriate to that stage. From this there 
 follows a third requirement, which is also consonant 
 with our general principle of unification. The " sub- 
 ject " method is only of incidental value in Uve 
 mathematical teaching. From time to time an 
 important mathematical law can be abstracted — 
 and abstracted so as to be understood — ^from actual 
 examples that have been worked out ; these are the 
 times for a spell of intensive " subject " work, which 
 must on no account be neglected. But this is a very 
 _ different matter from treating arithmetic, algebra, 
 and geometry, and the other branches of mathe- 
 matical expression, as separate, often as mutually 
 isolated, " subjects." It is only being realised by 
 degrees that to do this is inevitably to become 
 involved in premature and ineffectual specialisation. 
 Perhaps the worst sin of all is to teach the handHng 
 of algebraical symbols without having taken any 
 effectual steps to teach their meaning. Algebra can 
 be studied much more quickly and intelligently when 
 symbols have first b^en used to express abstractions 
 from immediate reality, as in the simpler formulte 
 deduced from experimental mechanics. It is more 
 generally understood that geometry can best be 
 
\ 
 
 THE SECONDARY COURSE 25 
 
 grasped as a sequel to mensuration and graphic 
 arithmetic. ' 
 
 It is rule of thumb that has to be exorcised, and 
 is in fact being discredited by slow degrees. We may 
 be impatient with the slowness of the general advance, 
 but the teacher can hardly be blamed who clings to 
 rule of thumb until he can see his way to a rule of 
 reason. And the teaching of mathematics in logical 
 and intelligible sequence is not a problem for the 
 mathematical class alone ; it is one of the inter- 
 related problems of the curriculum as a whole. Until 
 structure, co-ordination, and rational sequence are 
 to be found in the general system of presenting reality 
 to the child's apprehension, we cannot expect the 
 mathematical teacher to base a coherent structure 
 upon the quantitative aspect of that reality. But 
 he can do much. to forward the general advance, or 
 at the least he can avoid putting the drag on by 
 decMning, for instance, to " teach science instead of 
 mathematics." The attitude implied in that phrase 
 is the attitude of one who has not realised that mathe- 
 matics is a language of science. More positively, the 
 teacher of mathematics can help the building up of 
 a S37nthetic curriculum by working for a transition 
 from rule of thumb to rule of reason. Even rule of 
 thumb can be considerably vitalised by the searching 
 out of illustrative problems that are real to the learner, 
 and it gradually ceases to be rule of thumb with the 
 extension of the teacher's practice and experience in 
 the choice and use of real subject-matter. 
 
26 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 The first practical step, for the teacher, is to 
 examine the general syllabus of work for the coming 
 term (if there is one) and prospect for material that 
 will lend itself to correlation with mathematics ; he 
 can then proceed to follow up, during the term, 
 every vein that he has discovered, collaborating as 
 much as possible with his colleagues. The first step 
 for the head of a school is to arrange, preferably in 
 consultation with the . staff, a syllabus in which 
 mathematics is viewed in its relation to other school 
 work. It is true that examinations, tending, as they 
 still do, to foUow a curve that ends, for the few, in 
 wranglership, make rule of thumb, for the many, 
 to a great extent inevitable ; but on this point there 
 are two things to be said. One is that time given to 
 applied mathematics is time saved in the understand- 
 ing of pure mathematics ; and the other is that the 
 more schools can work towards the mathematics of 
 reality, and away from the mathematics that is 
 neither pure nor applied, but merely a system of 
 puzzles and keys to puzzles, the speedier will be the 
 improvement that is already taking place in exami- 
 nation questions. 
 
 VII 
 
 In many respects the teacher of modern geography 
 has been awake to the possibilities of synthetic 
 
 method, while the teachers of other sub- 
 Geography, jects have been asleep ; and geography, 
 
 more than any other subject, has become 
 rooted in a wide variety of interests. But it is diffi- 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 27 
 
 cult to find time for the full geographical programme 
 because it involves, in effect, a demand that the 
 geographer shall cover a good deal of ground that 
 belongs by rights to science, mathematics, and his- 
 tory. It has been suggested, in previous sections, 
 how the pressure can be reheved : historical, mathe- 
 matical, and scientific training are the poorer for 
 their lack of correlation with geography, and the 
 result of correlation, to use a chemical phrase, is 
 not a mixture, but a compound, of interests. Geo- 
 graphical teaching needs to be decentrahsed, but not 
 partitioned. 
 
 Geography may be described as a study of the 
 physical environment of civihsation, both as that 
 environment is provided by Nature and as it has 
 been modified by man. It is obvious that no sharp 
 dividing line separates geography, on the one hand, 
 from the t57pe of science that is a development of 
 Nature study, and on the other hanji from history, 
 economics, and poHtics. Further, geography has its 
 mathematical side, ranging from the measuring and 
 plan-making of junior forms to a study of the prin- 
 cipal methods of surveying (an excellent introduction 
 to trigonometry) carried out by older pupils. It is 
 fairly easy to see where a convenient line may be 
 drawn between the work of the geography class and 
 the material that can profitably be handled by the 
 teacher of mathematics in collaboration with the 
 geography teacher. A similar collaboration with the 
 teachers of history — not forgetting Bible history — 
 
28 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 and of science can determine, with a little more 
 trouble, the degree of co-operation that each can 
 give to the geographer with advantage to his own 
 subject. Xhe kind of co-operation that can be 
 brought about will depend upon the existing pro- 
 gramme and methods of the particular school, but 
 a few suggestions may be put forw9,rd as examples. 
 We have mentioned the importance, in natural 
 science, of the interdependence of different forms of 
 life, putting down for early consideration in class 
 work, and experiment in the laboratory, the function 
 of plants as the only original producers of foodstuffs. 
 With this the related questions arise of plant associa- 
 tions — agriculture — soils and rocks — rainfall and 
 irrigation, natural and artificial. Here it is obvious 
 that scientist and geographer should work upon a 
 common plan. The geographical outlook adds 
 breadth to the scientific, while science gives insight 
 into the why and wherefore of geographical fact. 
 
 The economic side of history, again, cannot afford 
 to remain outside this partnership of geography and 
 science. One cannot understand a civilisation with- 
 out understanding its basis, of livelihood. The con- 
 nection between the characteristics of a people and 
 its environrnent and pursuits should be brought out ; 
 and geography explains the environment, while 
 science can give an insight into the development of 
 industry. Not that character should be regarded 
 as solely determined by environment and the activi- 
 ties consequent upon environment ; this error comes 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 29 
 
 not from combining history with modern geography, 
 but from keeping them apart. The learner is then 
 apt to see circimistance operating upon character, 
 and character operating upon circumstance, as two 
 separate, even contradictory, ideas ; whereas he 
 ought to be realising the progressive interaction 
 between circumstance and character. This is an 
 instance of the scientific humanism now renascent 
 amongst us. The ideal can only be realised in prac- 
 tice through the co-ordination of the mind's different 
 activities and modes of outlook. 
 
 The co-ordination of historical geography with 
 Bible history is of great importance if Scriptural 
 events are to have reahty for the mind of the learner ; 
 much of the unreahty that is the bane of religious 
 teaching is due, not to any lack of conviction and 
 sincerity on the teacher's part, but to a failure to 
 give Scriptute its proper setting in time and place. 
 The classic example of George Adam Smith's study 
 of the 23rd Psalm shows how much can be done to 
 make the wonderful imagery of the Bible come to 
 hfe ; this should be regarded as an example to be 
 imitated and made general, not as a rare oasis. In 
 general, the connection of picturesque geography 
 with the world of ideas and feehngs is a valuable 
 link between thought and reality-. We may seem 
 to be insisting more upon the benefits that geo- 
 graphy can confer upon related subjects than upon 
 the teaching of geography itself ; but it is precisely 
 through its effectual touch with other subjects that 
 
30 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 every subject enlarges its content and significance. 
 The next step for the modern exponent of geography . 
 teaching, having earned our admiration by working 
 out what may almost be called a geographical philo- 
 sophy, is to impress the value of that philosophy 
 upon all those, outside the geography class, who have 
 need of it. His function will then be, in his own class, 
 to centralise and systematise a geographical outlook 
 that will be part of his pupils' general outlook. 
 
 This represents, broadly, the function of all 
 teachers in the common working out of a synthetic 
 curriculum ; but geography is in a specially favoured 
 position in virtue of the fact that it has been able to 
 make its own tradition. It can now lead the way — 
 it has, indeed, already begun to do so — in showing 
 how one subject can pervade and vitalise others, 
 while itself drawing vitahty from every point of 
 contact. 
 
 VIII 
 
 All work, including school work, should have at 
 least a touch of art about it ; and the aim of art 
 work in schools, already differentiated 
 Work!" ^™™ t^® conception of study that found 
 birth in formal schools of art, has to 
 become still more comprehensive. The artistic 
 perceptions must not be awakened only in drawing- 
 rooms, in concert halls, and picture galleries; the 
 true end of the aesthetic outlook, as of the philoso- 
 phical and the religious, is that the mind and spirit 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 31 
 
 may have life, and have it more abundantly. The 
 artistic perceptions can vitalise everything, from 
 the workings of Nature to Greek syntax. It will be 
 easiest to speak first of the correlation of art work 
 with Nature study, because this connection is already 
 established to some extent in practice, and also 
 because the relation between art and Nature is a 
 truism. 
 
 The chief difficulty in correlating artistic with 
 intellectual work is that what is good as a picture is 
 not necessarily good as an illustration. The intellect 
 demands diagrams ; the artistic sense requires the 
 more or less direct transmission of feelings, though 
 the feehng transmitted be no more complex than a 
 child's pleasure in a bright colour or a pretty shape. 
 A child ought to be painting flowers rather than 
 petals, sepals, and anthers. But is the opposition 
 necessary ? Any teacher of art would agree that 
 feehng for structure should go hand in hand with 
 feehng for form and colour. The diagrammatic sense 
 is necessary to the pictorial sense (witness the strange 
 swing of the pendulum from Impressionism to Cubism) , 
 and for artistic training the balanced development of 
 both senses is needed. Art is an extra-intellectual, 
 but not a non-intellectual, process. The use to the 
 intellect of the art that goes beyond diagram making 
 is less obvious. But every teacher of science knows 1 
 that there is artistry in the true scientific imagina- 
 tion ; and it may be inferred that sound artistic 
 work develops this quahty of the imagination. But 
 
32 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 it is wise to make the artistic sense actually, as weU 
 as potentially, available for the advantage of the 
 scientific sense, by making artistic work to a con- 
 siderable degree illustrative of scientific work, 
 beginning with the simple correlation, now so 
 generally carried out, of brush drawing with Nature 
 study. The direct correlation of artistic drawing 
 with more advanced scientific work has obvious 
 limits; but the writer has' seen sketches of glass 
 laboratory apparatus, rapidly drawn with white 
 chalk and charcoal upon brown paper (it is remark- 
 ably easy to render the characteristic Hghts upon 
 glass in this. way), which gave an undoubtedly artistic 
 representation of a boy's feeUng for the concrete 
 paraphernaUa of an experiment. And there are 
 many types of experiment that lend themselves to 
 illustration in the drawing class. 
 
 The possibilities of connection between physical 
 geography and the art work of schools ought to be 
 too well known to need elaboration here ; we would 
 only put forward our usual plea for collaboration 
 between teachers, so that the drawing may be carried 
 out under the gtiidance of the teacher of drawing, 
 not hurried through in the geography class. The 
 history teacher, unless he happens to be also the 
 singing master, does not teach his class the songs 
 of different periods ; such teaching is a useful adjunct 
 to history, but it is given, when it is given, by the 
 teacher of music, just as the literature of a period 
 is studied in the hterature class, when there is one. 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 33 
 
 None the less, the historian is wise to collaborate 
 with the teachers of literature and music so as to 
 establish the connection between the period and its 
 •art ; and they are wise to listen to his suggestions 
 for the sake of the additional interest that will accrue 
 to their work. Further, both language and history 
 stand to gain by the elementary dramatic work that 
 is now beginning to find a place in schools ; and 
 there are the orations and " lectures," prepared and 
 deUvered by pupils, which are so well exemplified in 
 Mr. CaldweU Cook's work, " The Play Way." For 
 this branch of art the teacher needs little more than 
 a sense of drama and of style and — a point of first 
 and last importance — a good voice and delivery ; 
 since the art of speech is learned by imitation far 
 more than by rule and precept. . 
 
 As there is no exact dividing line to be drawn 
 between artistic drawing and the making of illus- 
 trative diagrams, so the art work of schools, in 
 general, shades off into the practice of various types 
 of handicraft, valuable in part for the training that 
 they give in the co-ordination of mental and muscular 
 adjustments, in part because they develop a type of 
 conscience that does not grow well, in children, upon 
 intellectual work alone — the conscience, half artistic 
 and half moral, which leaves the learner dissatisfied 
 until he has " made a good job " of a given concrete 
 undertaking. This, of course, reacts upon the corre- 
 sponding type of intellectual conscience : an ill-cut, 
 gaping joint, in wood work, is the analogue of an 
 
34 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 ill-fashioned turn of argument in an essay, or of a 
 sentence in Latin prose that is without grip or cadence. 
 There is a certain simplicity and directness of mind, 
 too, that 'goes with the shaping of concrete things. 
 In this respect the morality of handiwork is good 
 for both the intellectual and the artistic sense. There 
 is such a thing as a soft and lax development of the 
 artistic capabilities ; this comes not of artistic train- 
 ing, but of artistic temperament to* which proper 
 training has been denied ; but it is best avoided 
 when the sense of workmanship is brought out 
 through the use of concrete material. A final point 
 ought to need no emphasis ; that the handicraft 
 work of schools should be devoted to a great extent 
 to the making of simple apparatus for use in the 
 experimental work of the class. Here, again, col- 
 laboration between the teachers is called for, and it 
 is a collaboration of the most elementary kind. 
 
 IX 
 
 It is unfortunate that in ordinary speech between 
 parent and schoolmaster we talk of teaching the 
 
 Bible as literature, or of teaching religious 
 TeSng. history, with tlie imphcation that we are 
 
 neatly avoiding the teaching of religion. 
 It would still more attract the agnostic, and repel 
 those whose religion is only a bad habit, if we 
 spoke of studying religion from the scientific 
 standpoint. Yet no rehgious teaching can carry 
 the mind as well as the emotions along with it 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 35 
 
 unless it is integrated with the study of language, 
 history and science. It is necessary to teach the 
 Bible as literature if we are to give it for the future 
 an equal chance with other books of being seriously 
 studied and thought over, not relegated to the posi- 
 tion of a curious mine of talismanic " texts." It is 
 necessary to see the Jewish people and the Christians 
 of apostohc times in relation to the general history 
 of the world around them, or we cut off from the 
 stories of two gigantic moral struggles more than 
 half their significance. And it is necessary to show 
 how reHgious inspiration, so far from " contradicting 
 the facts of science," was able to anticipate, on 
 grounds of conscience, many of the laws of man's 
 advance that are now scientifically known — to make 
 clear the unity of Kant's " moral law within " with 
 his " starry vault without " — if the next generation 
 is not to suffer another wave of materialistic thought. 
 We have not disposed of Haeckel and the Divine 
 Atom until we have shown forth a divinity who may 
 be supposed to have access to the ordinary sources 
 of scientific information. 
 
 To make reHgion a subject that can interpenetrate 
 the other subjects of school study we need to be 
 clear on the controversial question of dogmatic 
 teaching. Doctrine can be kept for the divinity 
 period alone, if that is the existing compromise ; it 
 does not follow that the existence of religion as a 
 fact in human life must be disregarded in other 
 classes. In the history of letters, the Bible has been 
 
36 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 one of the great formative influences, and the litera- 
 ture class that does not study passages from the 
 Eible is neglecting an essential part of its subject. 
 Many of the poetical and . prophetic utterances in 
 Scripture make magnificent passages for recitation 
 and reading aloud, and take a place that can be 
 filled by no other example of the spoken wbrdi 
 Where the recitation class also does a certain amount 
 of dramatic work it will be found that many stories 
 from the Old Testament lend themselves admirably 
 to dramatisation ; and the process is one that leads 
 to the acceptance of these stories in the unsophisti- 
 cated spirit in which they were written. The advo- 
 cate of doctrinal teaching may reflect that this type 
 of work gives body and background, to a study of 
 the evolution of behef ; while those to whom all 
 dogma is antipathetic can wish nothing better (as, 
 indeed, the dogmatist also should wish nothing better) 
 than that belief should be considered in the Ught of 
 its origins, and of its progress by trial and error 
 through the mists of human fallibility and lack of 
 comprehension. 
 
 Again, the mistrusters of dogma will demand that 
 the influence "of religion upon history should be 
 taught without avoiding the dark corners' — the 
 intolerances, the inquisitions, the burnings alive ; 
 and here the teacher of doctrine should be only too 
 ready to encourage the distinction between the 
 doctrine that enslaves and the doctrine that frees. 
 There may be differences as to the tj^e and degree 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 37 
 
 of enslavement ; there are sturdy medievalists who 
 will have it that a Grand Inquisitor was a genial 
 philanthropist compared with any of the later fol- 
 lowers of Calvin, but even they are prepared to 
 point out that the Grand Inquisitor, in the absolute, 
 had his faults. And it is the chief negative duty of 
 the doctrinal teacher to show that doctrine can be, 
 and that true Christian doctrine must be, dissociated 
 from the black cruelties of intolerance. History — 
 not only the history of religious beUef, but of the 
 correlative social, political and economic creeds — 
 shows the advance of man in so far as he can learn 
 tolerance without losing force and virility of con- 
 viction. AU this region of thought is the province 
 of the teacher of history, if he is allowed to mention 
 the fact that there have been times when Christians 
 have been exceedingly bad Christians. He will have 
 plenty of examples of good Christians for contrast. 
 
 Meanwhile the teacher of science, if he is con- 
 cerned to teach upon a broad basis the discovery 
 and interpretation of the workings of Nature, must 
 be conscious of a certain insufficiency about his final 
 term. Nature, for the purposes of the science teacher, 
 is the Absolute ; or. perhaps it would be truer to say 
 that there are two absolutes — Nature, and the dis- 
 interested truth-seeking impulse that reaches out to 
 comprehend it. To put the matter in very simple 
 metaphysical form, he is concerned with a Thing 
 and a Mind ; with reaKty, and with that in the 
 young human spirit which wants to get hold of it. 
 
38 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 Religion makes a unity of the two by interpreting 
 Nature, the discovered and the yet-to-be-discovered, 
 as the outgrowth into expression of a universal Mind 
 within which ours and our pupils' are included. It 
 is not the business of science to teach that there is 
 such a Mind, but it is very much the business of 
 science to leave the inference open ; and, especially, 
 to give due weight to the fact that all knowledge 
 has sprung from a belief that there is a scheme, an 
 order of things, which only waits to be found out. 
 The step from belief in an order to belief in an 
 Orderer is the province of the theologian, of the 
 divinity teacher ; but the scientist is neglecting his 
 duty unless he is continually working out the con- 
 ception of an order in the universe, and an order 
 that, the more we know about it and the more 
 patiently we investigate, corresponds the more 
 closely to that which we regard as a moral order. 
 This reasoned belief is the common fundamental of 
 science and religion, as of all faith in the general 
 proposition that life is worth while. 
 
 X 
 
 It might be said that our suggestions, so far, 
 reduce themselves to the recommendation that 
 every one should teach every one else's 
 Branches^ subject. This is true, in the sense that 
 no one can teach one subject properly 
 without teaching an outlook upon all knowledge, 
 that is to say, upon all subjects ; but it is not true 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE ,39 
 
 in the sense that the foundations of the school 
 subjects are to become vague and shifting. Still, 
 we would prefer to change the metaphor, using a 
 transition in accordance wilii the accepted change 
 in educational doctrine, and to say that it is the 
 roots of subjects, rather than their foundations, that 
 must not only be left intact, but encouraged to plunge 
 deeper. But the roots thrust deeply in order that 
 the branches may spread more widely ; and it is 
 here that our metaphor breaks down. For the 
 branches of the different subjects interlace to vitahse 
 and fructify one another ; and it is this process that 
 we have been chiefly endeavouring to depict. At 
 the same time, we have had something to say about 
 the roots, to which it is the primary business of the 
 subject teacher to attend. Let us now put forward 
 a simple theory about that phenomenon of which 
 we hear so much, the overcrowding of the curri- 
 cxilmn : that it is nothing but the encumbrance of 
 lifeless branches that have no effective roots. The 
 separate dissociated sci,ences ; the separate gram- 
 mars of different languages ; the separate foot- 
 lengths of history that are called " periods " ; these 
 are the things that aimlessly jostle one another. 
 The roots of the subjects are comparatively few and 
 simple. It is only necessary to cut out the dead 
 branches, and to allow the hve ones to bear their 
 fruit on the other side of the garden wall — in our 
 colleague's classroom — ^if it is in that direction that 
 they naturally tend. Some of his produce will come 
 
40 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 our way by the same law, and both will benefit by 
 the exchange. 
 
 The great problem, the insoluble problem, as some 
 would have it, that confronts the synthetic method 
 is the provision of synthetic teachers. We have not 
 got, and we do not seem likely to have, for some 
 generations, a race of teachers who are prepared to 
 take all knowledge for their province. One remedy 
 has been continually suggested in these pages, a 
 remedy that is to be found among the branches : 
 the collaboration of teachers to work out the natural 
 system of relations that is to be found between the 
 main subjects of the curriculum. The " pansophical 
 way " of Comenius may be impossible of attainment 
 for every teacher, as an individual ; but it will 
 always be possible for any group of teachers who 
 will try to teach as a community. This is a way 
 that can lead to profound and far-reaching reform 
 in educational method. Those who have tried it 
 look back in wonderment upon the dreary and 
 fruitless hours that used to be spent in the manipu- 
 lation of dead examples and illustrations, when live 
 ones were no farther off than the next classroom, 
 and upon their hurried extemporising of work, such 
 as the mathematics of science and geography, which 
 should have been leisurely and profitably carried out 
 in its appropriate class. The collaboration of teachers 
 is undoubtedly the first stage in the development of 
 the synthetic method, and fortunately it is a stage 
 that can be approached by small and easy steps. 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 41 
 
 But this, even in its completion, is not all ; it is 
 only promoting the right and natural growth of the 
 branches. We have stiU to get down to the roots. 
 And our teachers, if they need not be universal philo- 
 sophers with every subject at their individual finger- 
 tips, must at least be philosophers each of one main 
 subject or group of related subjects. That is not an 
 extravagant demand ; but it is not an easy demand 
 to fulfil, although it has always been the demand 
 of education upon those who would really teach. 
 We have not yet come to the end of the possibihties 
 of co-operation in teaching : when the school staff 
 begins to work as a whole towards the production of 
 a S5nithetic curriculum', each member of the staff 
 is stimulated to think out a simple philosophy of 
 his own subject. It broadens our outlook upon any 
 subject to see it in its natural relation with other 
 subjects ; also, the process of staff discussion 
 encourages every one, from proper pride, to make 
 as much of the significance of his own subject as 
 possible. (There will, no doubt, be some healthy 
 rivalry and disputation before our S5mthetic teachers 
 have fully discovered how to play into one another's 
 hands.) But there is needed, besides, an individual 
 effort of mind on the part of the teacher. 
 
 The first stage in this effort is to dig below the 
 complexity of appearances, and to reahse that the 
 roots of subject teaching, are few and simple. It 
 will be a great help to have once allowed the branches 
 to spread naturally, instead of keeping them con- 
 
42 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 strained in a close tangle that obscures every principle 
 of growth. We can then see that" language teaching 
 springs from one root principle, science teaching 
 from another, history teaching from a third. But, 
 again, there is the demand upon the teacher. To 
 teach language synthetically he must know all the 
 languages that are to be taught ; to teach science, 
 all the sciences ;■ to teach history, all the histories of 
 all the peoples ? Or, a demand that would Mmit our 
 supply of teachers even more drastically, must he 
 be endowed with a cast of mind that sees everything 
 synthetically by the hght of Nature ? These ques- 
 tions bring us to the real crux, from which many of 
 us turn aside in despair, deciding that the synthetic 
 method, if it is ever to come, cannot come, yet. It 
 is incumbent upon us, while we admit that it cannot 
 come at once in its completeness, to show that it 
 can come by a process of gradual and organic change, 
 not only through co-operation between teachers, but 
 through the not too difficult training and self- training 
 of the individual. 
 
 XI 
 
 We have spoken of an organised co-operation 
 between the members of the school staff in order to 
 realise, in practice and by practical stages, 
 Teacher what is meant by the synthesis of subjects ; 
 we haye now to speak of the task that lies 
 before the individual teacher who would play his 
 part with effect in such a co-operation. It will 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 43 
 
 already be clear that the teacher, in his own class- 
 room, has some not inconsiderable feats of synthesis 
 to perform. He has to break down, in his own mind, 
 many of the smaller partitions between " subjects " : 
 to regard single languages not as subjects, but as 
 part of a main subject called language ; to view 
 historical periods in relation to one another and 
 to that whole which is world history ; to see the 
 sciences in that unity which is true science, or natural 
 philosophy. But few will deny that it is absolutely 
 necessary, for the vitaUty of education, that these 
 feats should be performed. They only seem remark- 
 able to those who have let their minds get into d. 
 state of subject-paralysis, such as we encourage when 
 we ask for a teacher who knows, say, mechanics and 
 the direct method of teaching French and, by impU- 
 cation, does not " know " simple organic chemistry, 
 geography, or Enghsh Hterature — to confine our- 
 selves to a handful of modern side subjects alone. 
 
 Indeed, it is the heads of schools who have the 
 first remedy for the dispersion of subjects in their 
 hands. There are the training colleges ; but even 
 when all teachers go through them, it will stiU be 
 the school itself that is the principal training college. 
 It is by far the easiest course for the head of a school 
 to send for a teacher who " knows his subject " and, 
 thereafter, to let him teach his subject as he has 
 been taught it ; but this is precisely the course that 
 overcrowds the curriculum with " cobwebs of 
 learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and 
 
44 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 work, but of no substance or profit." Also it is the 
 way by which narrow subject- work is perpetuated, 
 since the all-too-effective demand of the heads of 
 schools necessitates a continued supply of mere 
 subject-teachers, be the training colleges never so > 
 zealous to provide something better. The harder 
 and the only profitable course is for the heads to 
 demand not petty specialists, but teachers who are 
 keen on principles and ready to make teaching the 
 e.xpression of principles ; ready to go to the roots, 
 not to remain perched each upon his individual 
 branch. It is the harder course, because it leads to 
 a state of things in which the head must reaUy 
 administer the working of his curriculum ; and the 
 head is sometimes a subject-man himself — and his 
 subject is not education. But our suggestion is 
 merely that he should make education his subject. 
 The alternative is that he will have to administer 
 not a curriculum, but a chaos ; and that he will 
 have under him not teachers, but apothecaries of 
 knowledge. 
 
 From the point of view of teachers, then, the first 
 difficulty is to see their way to an effective demand 
 for synthetic work. But they must also be ready 
 with the supply that forces the hand of demand ; 
 and in this the training colleges are more than ready 
 to back them up. We would only urge upon those 
 who are responsible for the training of teacliers that 
 they cannot dwell too often or too emphatically upon 
 the work that every teacher can do — indispensable 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 45 
 
 work, however small the result of his efforts may 
 appear to himself— to hasten the day of the synthetic 
 curriculum. Every attempt to teach principles, and 
 to Unk subjects together by the teaching of prin- 
 ciples, must tell in the long run, however Fabian the 
 methods to which teachers may be confined under 
 existing dispensations. 
 
 But the ultimate necessity is the readiness of the 
 teacher himself to endure the pains of thought in 
 the cause of real teaching ; to read up his subjects 
 with an eye, not only upon certificate and salary — 
 though these things are important if he is to live to 
 teach — ^but upon that connection and unification 
 of subjects which is their life for the minds of the 
 yoimg. This, as we have hinted, is not a matter for 
 the period of studentship alone, but for every stage 
 of practice ; none of us knows, as yet, the full possi- 
 bilities of the method that we are beginning to 
 explore. But now the main crux is before us ; how 
 are we all to become philosophers and synthetists of 
 knowledge ? By feverish midnight hours of encyclo- 
 paedic study ? By becoming about ten times as con- 
 scientious as it is in the nature of any weak mortal 
 to be ? The answer is very much simpler, and does 
 no violence to the reahties of human nature. The 
 child is the real sjmthetist ; and by studpng the 
 actual needs of his mind we arrive, naturally and 
 inevitably, at the method that makes a unity of 
 knowledge. This open secret of all the teachers who 
 have ever reaUy taught is all the tahsman that we 
 
46 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 need. Almost the whole of the synthetic method 
 can be evolved by the simple 'process of starting a 
 subject, letting children ask what they want to know 
 about it, and helping them to systematise their own 
 questions and work out the answers. Any one who 
 doubts whether they will land among the root prin- 
 ciples of the subject or not does not know children, 
 or has never won himself the position of the leader, 
 rather than the drover, of their thoughts. We come 
 home to a truism : the right curriculum, like every- 
 thing else that is right in education, comes from the 
 union of our minds with the mind of childhood. 
 
 XII 
 
 A FINAL question has still to be asked and answered. 
 Are children really as much interested. in generahsa- 
 
 tions * as we have been making out ? Are 
 Learner ^^^^ capable of tracing with us, not 
 
 merely learning from us by rote, the prin- 
 ciples in which the unity of knowledge is rooted ? 
 If not, it is of no use to talk of simphf5dng the prin- 
 ciples for them. If the framing of principles is the 
 business of the adult and not of the child, let us drop 
 all idea of making the child an imitation philosopher, 
 for it will be a very feeble imitation. But in that 
 case we must not only refrain from the project of 
 teaching principles intelhgibly : d fortiori, we must 
 
 * As Prof. Sonnenschein remarked in a letter to The Times 
 Educational Supplement, I should have said "concrete univer- 
 sals " ; but I feared to use so academic a term. 
 
THE SECONDARY COURSE 47 
 
 give up teaching them as we commonly do at present, 
 unintelligibly : we must give up trying to teach 
 them at all. There has, indeed, been some movement 
 of late in this direction among exponents of " ad- 
 vanced " methods. The question is whether this is 
 not emptying the baby philosopher out with the bath- 
 water of used-up scholastic method. The question 
 is, in fact, whether there is a baby philosopher at all. 
 
 These studies, and others that have preceded them, 
 have been based on a conclusion springing from the 
 writer's experience of teaching, that children are 
 bom philosophers. Many, as they grow up, achieve 
 a contempt of philosophy from having a crabbed and 
 lifeless notion of it thrust upon them ; but for the 
 natural child the abstract idea, the soul of the facts, 
 is the living reality amongst shadows. In children's 
 play and children's stories the facts may be as wild 
 as you Hke, but there is no tampering with principles. 
 Quite young children want a philosophy of life ; and 
 they want a philosophy of their own — that is, a 
 philosophy of their own building. . And as education 
 brings knowledge to them, and makes knowledge 
 part of their hfe, they want a philosophy of that 
 knowledge. This is as true of the nine-year-old and 
 of the twelve-year-old as of the adolescent. 
 
 Indeed, there is much in the way of abstract prin- 
 ciple that children can best work out, in its simpler 
 fundamentals, during that valuable period of mental 
 Umpidity which comes before the adolescent's task 
 of finding a more personal application. 
 
48 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 The word philosophy may seem a weighty term 
 for the speculations of childhood. The word curri- 
 culum is a weighty term, for that matter. All that 
 we are contending for is a treatment of knowledge 
 that will enable- a child to reaUse that which chiefly 
 interests him about it : how it grows, and how it 
 spreads, and how it fits together. As a matter of 
 simple, practical method, we cannot teach effectually 
 without this interest ; and we teach so many subjects 
 dully, and teach them over and over again without 
 making them stick, because we fail to evoke it. The 
 purpose of the synthetic curriculum is to make this 
 interest paramount, by making it possible for chil- 
 dren to see how things fit together as they learn 
 them. The other plan is to require children to learn 
 things first, and wait to fit them together until they 
 are older. This plan has been tried honestly, con- 
 scientiously, and for a long time, and it does not 
 work. The things are learnt slowly and uncertainly 
 and, in the great majority of cases, forgotten. There 
 is httle enough reason why they should be remem- 
 bered. It certainly seems that, if children cannot 
 put things together until they are " older," they 
 •cannot effectually learn them at all until they cross 
 this somewhat vaguely-defined and ill-provided-for 
 Rubicon of mental development. 
 
 Our real difficulty runs in a vicious circle. We are 
 accustomed to hold generalisations in contempt- — 
 witness the fact that we nearly always speak of 
 " a mere generalisation " when we mean a thin or 
 
THE. SECONDARY COURSE 49 ' 
 
 a faulty generalisation — ^because we ourselves were 
 not taught to make generalisations real. The habit 
 of mind is ingrained in " the neglected class," to 
 which we aU, in greater or less degree, belong. The 
 writer of " The Neglected Class," * besides diagnosing 
 our disease of contempt for thought, put forward, 
 one broad system of treatment : seek out principles, 
 and teach them. There is another and a comple-- 
 mentary treatment : to put ourselves under the 
 tuition of the learner. Children have, as we all have, 
 a natural taste for the unifying idea ; they have it 
 in an elementary and a fanciful form ; but they 
 have it in an unsophisticated form. Where we 
 cautiously Usten to one theory, they wiU joyously 
 propound half a dozen, if we give them the chance. 
 And we ought to give them the chance. We are 
 cautious about theories because we are afraid they 
 may turn out to be childish — " mere " generaUsa- 
 tions. But our theories are Mkely to be childish as 
 long as we leave the chUdish power of theory-making 
 undeveloped. This is the power that we must add 
 to our own if we are to make the synthetic curriculum 
 a living reahty, for it is .upon the development of the 
 childish theory of knowledge that the next genera- 
 tion will depend for its conception of the unity of 
 knowledge, and for the harmony of its thoughts, 
 feelings, and actions. 
 
 * This is the title of a valuable and spirited series of 
 articles that appeared in The Times Educational Supplement 
 in 1917. The neglected are those who are well, even amply, 
 provided for in all but the things of the spirit. 
 
 c. E 
 
PART II 
 
 THE 
 ELEMENTARY COURSE 
 
 I 
 
 A CONCLUSION from experience has been put 
 forward, in Part I., that young children take a 
 Elements natural delight in ideas, if these are taught 
 and naturally ; and that their prospect of 
 
 developing into thoughtful beings depends 
 very largely upon the opportunity that is given them 
 to think out, while they are young, the idea that 
 knowledge is a unity and not a miscellany. It may 
 be of use if we set out a draft of the teaching that is, 
 or should be, possible under present conditions in 
 the elementary school, with two definite objects 
 before us : to show the connections that can be 
 established by children between the different 
 branches of their early knowledge, and to show how 
 their simple root-ideas about the things that they 
 first learn can be made the real groundwork of later 
 knowledge. 
 
 There is some danger that the old formula of 
 " a thorough grounding " may lose, instead of 
 gaining, significance as a result of the doctrine of 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 51 
 
 originative activity for children; that activities 
 valuable in themselves and excellent for purposes of 
 immediate development may yet fail to lead any- 
 where in particular. Recent psychological studies 
 show how much that goes wrong with the mind can 
 be traced to the mental history.; it should follow 
 that by attending to the mental history we can 
 make sure that things shall go right. What one's 
 medical history is to the doctor one's mental history is 
 to the psychologist ; and for that history education, 
 and especially early education, is largely responsible. 
 The more it is a history capable of being mapped out 
 upon broad, clear lines, the better for mental health, 
 and for consistency not only of thought, but of 
 character. Development is continuous in any case, 
 but it is possible to have development in incon- 
 sistency and its relative, inconstancy. One safe- 
 guard against this is an elementary curriculum that 
 looks forward and encourages the child to look 
 forward ; that gives an interest and an attraction 
 to the future as weU as to the present. It is this kind 
 of curriculmn that we shall try to define in the 
 present Part, while endeavouring, as well, to make 
 it a cmxiculum that is genuinely coherent within 
 itself, not only to the teacher's mind, but to the 
 child's. If we do not teach children to see their 
 school work as a whole, we shall never teach them 
 to see anything as a whole. 
 
 We shall not aim at novelty of subject-matter or 
 treatment, but rather avoid it as much as possible, 
 
 E 2 
 
52 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 The first step is to make the excellent elementary 
 curriculum that is already in being more of a reality 
 both to those who teach and to those who learn ; to 
 draw it, as we might say, out of the sub-conscious 
 into the conscious region — the collective conscious- 
 ness which is the most important thing about a 
 school. For this we need a stronger connection 
 between the different activities and interests of the 
 school, and an increased sense of the curriculum as 
 a vista, a thing of purpose and promise. As a sketch 
 of the available means, these studies will necessarily 
 cover much ground that is already in different stages 
 of cultivation, under different hands ; here again we 
 shall be aiming at unities rather than novelties. 
 
 Following our former plan, we shall regard the 
 teaching of the science and the art of language as 
 one centre for the co-ordination of ideas ; round 
 another nucleus — that of history — ^we shall group 
 all the teaching that develops a sense of the past, 
 and of the present and the future in relation to the 
 past ; while knowledge of the present in itself, how- 
 ever humble in its presentation for young children, 
 will come under the heading and lead up to a general 
 conception of science. The most revolutionary sug- 
 gestion we have to make is that these simple headings 
 of language, history, and science, or others that are 
 simpler and better, should be adopted in elementary 
 schools. They keep both teacher and class aware 
 of the main thing that they are doing in a given 
 lesson, and give a preliminary foothold to the desire 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 53 
 
 to get one's ideas arranged — a desire that the 
 youngest school-child possesses in rudimentary form, 
 though we are apt to disregard it, and apt thereby 
 to damage the earliest natural growth of his powers 
 of thought. 
 
 Further, there is the wide field of elementary 
 school practice — it would be wider still if supplies 
 of material could be more generous — in which handi- 
 crafts are pursued, both for their intrinsic educa- 
 tional value and for the sake of the intimate con- 
 nections that ought to be realised by children between 
 doing and thinldng. These, in the case of young 
 children, do not need to be classed under a special 
 heading ; they should rather pervade every branch 
 of work. There is a great part of every subject that 
 a young child can learn much best with his fingers. 
 It wiU be convenient for our own purposes, however, 
 to give a separate heading to this subject, not so 
 much that we may discuss it with teachers and those 
 who are responsible for the training of teachers as 
 that we may try to interpret their view and their 
 demand to a few of those who control supplies and 
 criticise time expenditure. The lesson of Froebel is 
 not yet fully learnt, either in respect of the unities 
 that were his end or of the activities that were his 
 means. It is for the school to realise the unities, and 
 for those who control the school from the outside 
 to see the point of the activities and to reaUse 
 that expenditure upon them can be a national 
 economy. ' 
 
54 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 II 
 
 A CHILD begins from his babyhood to learn the 
 
 nature of things, persons and ideas ; partly through 
 
 his own instinct, partly through the 
 
 and encouragement of his elders — a rudimen- 
 
 '"^^' tary kind of education. As he learns to 
 talk, he is fitting a name first to this and then to 
 that conception of a thing, a person or an idea. The 
 most familiar and delightful presence of all is called 
 mother ; a different one, of more doubtful' import, 
 is called father ; there is a small place called "bed," 
 and a large place called " out " ; there is a state, of 
 harmony called " good," and a mysteriously dis- 
 cordant state called " naughty." Some names, such 
 as big and little, good and naughty, shift about and 
 get tacked on to other names that remain fixed to 
 their possessors. Then there come words. that do 
 not seem to be names, but words for what you do 
 or what happens ; these are unreasonably change- 
 able, and you get them wrong. And there are a 
 great many odd little words besides, that you find 
 you can use to stick the other words together when 
 they don't fit of their own accord. 
 
 This is grammar, as it is half-consciously realised , 
 while the baby becomes a child. Then, not so very 
 long ago, he used to go to school and learn something 
 called grammar that had no relation at all with these 
 natural excitements ; something about substantives 
 and verbs and adjectives, labels that explained 
 nothing until he had learnt the rather uninteresting 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 55 
 
 word-game with which they were connected. Small 
 wonder that grammar was a failure ; and small 
 wonder that formal grammar has been so largely 
 abandoned. But there is a real grammar — a gram- 
 mar that is real to children. It consists simply in 
 bringing to expression the ideas about words that 
 are already stirring in their minds. It is a funda- 
 mentally mistaken notion that we must determine 
 an age at which children may be considered ready 
 to " begin grammar." They have begun it already ; 
 and they are learning grammar all the time, either 
 . weU or badly. We often think that children are not 
 old enough to begin a study until they are old enough 
 to memorise, if not to understand, an arrangement of it 
 that is suitable for the adult mind. We think, in this 
 instance, that they cannot touch the parts of speech 
 until they can classify them all, a task not without diffi- 
 culty for the expert. On the contrary, an understand- 
 ing of the parts of speech, and of grammar in general, 
 should be established step by step as the children are 
 ready for it. Words, and ideas about the use of words, 
 should be sifted out into grades, and the different 
 grades distributed over the different standards. 
 
 To begin with, we can be satisfied to distinguish 
 words that are names (there is no need, yet, to call 
 them nouns) from other words. Then, things that 
 are named can be distinguished from persons and 
 ideas. You can leave a blank in a sentence, pointing 
 to a thing or a person instead of sa3dng the name ; 
 you cannot do this for an idea. This is a first lesson 
 
56 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 in abstractions. Formulated ideas, for children, 
 ought to be exceedingly simple ; but they ought to 
 be formulated, and the identification of words that 
 express ideas ought to be one of the first steps. Its 
 importance for their later thinking can hardly be 
 overestimated. Meanwhile, as they identify the 
 names of things they ought to be classifjing things, 
 as all children do by nature when they are left to 
 themselves. This elementary classif5dng of things 
 belongs to rudimentary science, and will be con- 
 sidered, later, under that heading ; but this is the 
 place to notice that the first arranging of things in 
 classes ought to be very closely and directly asso- 
 ciated with the first arranging of words in classes. 
 It is useless to separate the study of words from the 
 study of things if we want either to be understood. 
 
 This point brings us to the words by which we 
 actually do classify things, after the very simplest 
 kind of classification, which is only putting things 
 of the same naine together, such as all the books, or 
 all the pencils. Some names — most of them words 
 for ideas — :are sorting-names : large and small books, 
 red and blue pencils, smooth and rough cloth, hard 
 and soft stone. Here children begin to learn not 
 only what adjectives are, but how to use them ; 
 they begin to learn the comparative use of words. 
 It is silly, to talk of soft stone in comparison with 
 cloth, or butter, but quite sensible when we are com- 
 paring a bit of chalk or sandstone with a bit of flint or 
 granite. In connection with the handling of things 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 57 
 
 should come, also, the recognition of the words for that 
 which we do with things ; and presently we are laying 
 the first foundation of syntax by gradually getting 
 the distinction expressed between subject, verb, and 
 ob j ect. Gradually, for this root idea wiU not be intro- 
 duced all at once ; it wiU be among the many reaUsa- 
 tions that the teacher has to study to bring stage by 
 stage to the threshold of consciousness, till the idea is 
 ready for statement and for the formulation of a rule. 
 An increasingly intelligent gradation, in accord- 
 ance with the natural development of the child, is 
 the essence of elementary method. The idea of 
 language-structure that is built up, not from clots 
 of formulae, but from children's own use of words as 
 they come to use them more precisely, is an idea 
 that lasts because it lives and grows. Grammar 
 becomes an interest instead of an infliction, and an 
 interest that bears continual fruit in clearness of 
 understanding. The practical difficulties of its 
 connection with object work and rudimentary science 
 are real, but they are merely mechanical and can 
 be circiunvented with a Mttle thought. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It has been suggested that a sense of words is 
 
 important for 6very child, not only in itself, but in 
 
 a close and clear connection with a sense 
 The 
 GrammaT of things and of ideas. Without this 
 
 ** ** ^' connection, worked out through a full 
 
 and Uvely contact with things and a development of 
 
58 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 the natural childish interest in an idea for its own 
 sake, a fine sense of words might seem only an absurd 
 preparation for hterary dilettantism — no recreation, 
 even, for the working majority. We have to mould 
 and sharpen the tools of language, during the elemen- 
 tary course, so that they will be at the service of 
 higher proficiency' in the trades and crafts, the 
 practical sciences, and those regions of civic and 
 political thought in which uneducated democracy 
 flounders so helplessly. And for this, manifestly a 
 large task, we cannot seek out beginnings that are 
 too early or too simple, provided that they are 
 beginnings. We must teach a comprehending care 
 for words from the very start, avoiding both the 
 arid " grammar " that stifles interest, and the equally 
 fatal neglect that leaves the sense of words to the 
 subconsciousness, where it develops, so far as it does 
 develop, in a perpetual blur and muddle. If there 
 were no other argument, we could point to the fact 
 that " subconscious " thinkers cannot discuss their 
 thoughts, but can only assert their conclusions, and 
 at cross-purposes. 
 
 We have touched, in the preceding section, upon 
 the elementary treatment of words in themselves ; 
 a note or two may be added now upon " suiting the 
 action to the word," in the old phrase, or, more 
 correctly, and more to our purpose, suiting the action 
 to the sentence, and the sentence to the action. " The 
 teaching of verbal structure depends entirely, in its 
 early stages, upon the reahty of the connectior^ that 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 59 
 
 is set up between doing and describing ; and it is 
 this connection, rather than the " grammar " it may 
 be used to subserve, that is really an essential subject 
 in the early curriculum. It is set up in any case 
 either well or ill, whether grammar is taught as a 
 subject or not. It is not set up by mere parsing and 
 analysis, hence the usual dullness and sterility of 
 these exercises. It is either established intelligently, 
 or left to establish itself " by instinct " as we say, 
 or subconsciously, which means in this case obscurely. 
 We intend no disrespect to the unconscious mind, 
 but only to suggest that it cannot safely forgo its 
 partnership with the conscious. 
 
 To awaken the indispensable sense of reality, it 
 is necessary to go beyond the usual actions illus- 
 trative of the simple sentence ; but on this point 
 we may note the value of dramatising, so to say, 
 the action of the words themselves, by giving chil- 
 dren roles to fiU as subject, verb, and object, adjective 
 and adverb. This is more than an amusing method : 
 it is an elementary introduction to the philosophy 
 of words. When, for instance, the object-child 
 becomes the subject-child, with the change of the 
 verb from active to passive, the difference between 
 the subjective and the objective is really brought 
 home to his imagination, in a way that is significant 
 precisely because it is so childishly simple. The 
 changes undergone by a child who is cast for a, 
 personal pronoun have a Hke significance ; they 
 lead him to think outside himself, which is the key 
 
6o THE. CURRICULUM 
 
 to intelligent discussion and intelligent reading. This 
 leads up admirably to the whole of that which may 
 be called the " prut-yourself-in-his-place " method in 
 teaching, and can indeed be combined with it when 
 sentences are taken from the subject-matter of other 
 lessons, thus giving wider scope to the bodily illus- 
 tration of a mental act. 
 
 But illustration is not everything ; and the gram- 
 mar of reaUty can only be taught by bringing every 
 available interest to life in the teaching of sentence- 
 structure. These interests are not a mere bait or 
 appetiser. They are the substance of that real desire 
 for satisfactory expression which can give the child 
 a taste for words as for other tools. He becomes 
 bored only, and very naturally, when the tools miss 
 their function of shaping something real. The 
 essence of grammar teaching is to start from a verbal 
 job that wants doing, and to search for the verbal 
 tool that will do it. A child learns to construct 
 sentences by trying to construct simple epigrams- 
 pithy, compact summaries of points taken from 
 recent lessons in any subject, or from occurrences of 
 interest to the school or the locality. He learns to 
 handle clauses by the natural method of trpng to 
 fit subordinate points ne'atly into his sentence. He 
 is thus, indeed, learning grammar " through his 
 skin," or sub-consciously, but he is also bringing it 
 upwards into conscious and interesting formulation. 
 He learns grammatical terms because he discovers 
 the need to label his tools for convenience. When 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 6i 
 
 the sentence is half made he calls out excitedly, 
 
 " You want a ," and then stops short for a name, 
 
 and values it when it is given. 
 
 This teaching does not lend itself to a prescribed 
 syllabus, unless of the widest and the most general, 
 or to the use of a text-book that has to be " learnt " 
 a page at a time. But it teaches grammar ; and a 
 good deal more than is commonly understood by 
 grammar. It gives a central basis to the intelligent 
 treatment of words, a nucleus of mental habit without 
 which understanding tends to remain vague and 
 impermanent. 
 
 IV 
 
 The careful hnking up of a child's sense of words 
 with his sense of reahty, such as we advocated in 
 the preceding section, leads naturally to a 
 Reading, choice of reading that wiU connect his sense 
 of reality with his dawning a!ppreciation 
 and enjoyment of literature. For one thing, accuracy 
 and appreciation go hand in hand when accuracy 
 is made a genuine interest for the growing mind ; 
 for another, a keen sense of the bearing of words 
 upon the simple reahties that they express leads to 
 a further interest, highly relevant to the choice of 
 reading material. 
 
 A child always asks, about anything that he reads 
 or has read to him, " Is it true ? " We have touched, 
 in an earUer study of school method, upon the sig- 
 nificance of this question ; it shows the first workings 
 
62 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 of his desire to distinguish fact from sjTmbol, direct 
 reality from pictured reality. Since the working out 
 of this distinction is the never-ending task of the 
 human mind, it is not unnatural that the child-mind 
 should seek to begin the discovery of its own bearings 
 in respect of Truth as soon as possible. And the 
 beginnings of the quest have an immediate and 
 practical meaning for the teacher. A child's reading 
 ought to be quite distinctly divided into fact, fable, 
 and fancy. Not that hard-and-fast divisions can 
 be drawn ; in this classification, as in the classifica- 
 tion of words and of things, we must always teach, 
 the truth that convenient groupings shade off into 
 one another. But we can make our groupings dis- 
 tinct with an easy conscience if we make it" clear 
 that the distinctness is chiefly a convenience — that, 
 while Jack the Giant Killer is a fancy that can also 
 be regarded as a fable, David and Goliath is a fable 
 that may also, very probably, be a fact. Gradually 
 we can work out the real point : that the distinctions 
 in themselves are absolutely definite, while the stories 
 are often mixtures, and can always be taken out of 
 one group and put into another, to see how they 
 look there. The practical sceptic may be assured 
 that' this undoubtedly abstract point really appeals 
 to children, and helps them to think simply and 
 clearly. All kinds of muddles result from a haziness 
 about the nature of fact. 
 
 Looking to the children's future, apd to the mind 
 that they will bring to bear upon the work and the 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 63 
 
 citizenship of later life, we may say that in their 
 scientific view of things (which will affect their 
 position as workers) they have to develop a keen 
 sense of fact ; while in their historical view of things 
 (which will affect their position as citizens) they have 
 to develop a keen sense of fancy. The first proposi- 
 tion is obvious ; the second may look paradoxical. 
 But citizenship depends upon ideals, and true and 
 false ideals are true and false fancies. Political 
 idealism is often engaged in trying to make fairy 
 stories come hteraUy true. . Is it a far cry from this 
 region of thought to the question of children's reading 
 in the elementary schools ? If so, it is the schools 
 that are at fault, and the results will appear in the 
 democratic ideals of the near future. 
 
 It will be clear that in considering the position of 
 reading in the elementary curriculum we are making 
 the question, what shall be read, subordinate to the 
 question, what shall be thought. This is the only 
 attitude, in reading, as in other matters, that puts 
 reform of the curriculum beyond the famifiar criti- 
 cisms of inertia which are represented by the words 
 " tampering " and " tinkering." All growth of the 
 curriculvun must be justified as natural growth from 
 within, not as grafting from without. Let us see 
 what demand upon the subject-matter of school 
 " readers " is made by the kind of reading that we 
 have just outlined. It should contain the right 
 proportion of scientific fact — " scientific," in the 
 sense that the simplest facts, well arranged, are 
 
64 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 science. .The choice and arrangement of these facts 
 must be considered in a later section. It should 
 include historical stories, aiming rather at the present- 
 ment of a simple historical idea than at the iixing 
 and nailing down with dates of an historical incident. 
 The provision of a framework for this historical 
 material must also be considered later on ; the point 
 at present is that the stories should be read as stories, 
 for the kindhng of the imagination. Distinguished 
 from these as being certainly not hteral fact, but 
 equally to be read for their meaning, fable and 
 allegory claim a place for the thought that they 
 contain, no less than for their moral or artistic value. 
 A great deal depends upon holding a just proportion 
 between these three elements, and it has to be seen 
 to that " readers " representing all three are con- 
 tinuously and concurrently in use. A prolonged 
 spell of bare fact, for example, is unfair to the 
 imaginative child, and perhaps still more unfair to 
 the unimaginative. 
 
 The importance of developing the art of reading, 
 including the art of reading aloud, must also be 
 insisted upon. We have dwelt more upon the 
 material than upon the manner of the reading lesson, 
 but it wiU be remembered that interest in the 
 .material is very largely dependent upon the treat- 
 ment of language as a beautiful thing. Flat, toneless 
 reading makes for flat, toneless thinking. The 
 efficacy of the reading class can be largely judged by 
 the sound that proceeds from the classroom.. 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 65 
 
 V 
 
 Under the old Education Acts it was not worth 
 while to try to teach real history in the elementary 
 Storv schools, though the desperate attempt was 
 
 and often made ; under the new Education, Act 
 
 it will be worth while. We can undertake 
 a history course which is not subject to the distressing 
 alternatives of being cut short as soon as it has begun, 
 or of being scurried through in a condensed form that 
 is quite unsuitable for the young pupil. The first 
 thing, perhaps, of which to make sure is that we 
 adjust our teaching to the new scale of time ; and 
 the first point to be fixed in that scale is the point at 
 which consecutive history should be begun, as dis- 
 tinct from the estabhshment of childish interest in 
 detached historical stories. The principle has been 
 emphasised more than once that the transition from 
 story to history should be gradual ; the beginning 
 of fully consecutive method must be led up to by 
 a steady drawing together of the subject-matter of 
 stories, arranged more and more in sequence as the 
 young pupil's time-sense develops ; but this is all 
 the more reason why we must have a known point 
 to aim at, a point at which the transition is to be 
 regarded as complete. Otherwise there will be con- 
 fusion between the elementary and the secondary 
 courses. 
 
 It would be an easy simplification to leave con- 
 tinuous history to the secondary schools; but this 
 does some injustice to the mind of the older elemen- 
 
 C. F 
 
66 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 tary children. These are at the stage when a valuable 
 readiness for the simplest forms of systematic think- 
 ing begins to make its appearance — ^if the ground has 
 been properly prepared ; and it would be the greatest 
 pity if this time were to see no opening up for them 
 of the historical vista. On the other hand, it is quite 
 impracticable to start a continuous course at the end 
 of the elementary period and to expect that the 
 threads will be picked up neatly in the secondary 
 course. This is to expect a degree of co-ordination 
 between schools which is not yet in sight. Whatever 
 continuous teaching was given in ihe higher elemen- 
 tary standards would simply be blurred by succeed- 
 ing unrelated work. 
 
 Our suggestion is that the concluding stages of the 
 elementary course should take in a very broad and 
 simple study of World history. This may seem, at 
 first sight, to be rushing into the difficulty mentioned 
 in our first paragraph : if continuous English history 
 can only be scamped and scurried in the elementary 
 school, how hopeless will be the enterprise of tack-' 
 ling, even with increased time, the whole history of 
 the world ! But the comparison does not really 
 apply. World history can be ta^ght with any degree 
 of broad simplification, and remain interesting. The 
 history of a country cannot ; it is too much depen- 
 dent upon interwoven detail. A story of the chief 
 civilisations of the world can be made interesting 
 and memorable, for children twelve years old, in a 
 single lantern lecture. Events group themselves in 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 67 
 
 large, distinct masses, viewed upon such a scale. 
 The same thing can be done, less interestingly, with 
 the " Ancient British," Roman, Saxon-Danish, and 
 Norman periods of Enghsh history ; but, as soon 
 as these waves of contrasted racial influence are 
 over, the subject " goes flat," and only detached 
 detail, of the biographical or picturesque order 
 will revive it. And then broad outlines dis- 
 appear. 
 
 World history is the easiest consecutive history 
 to teach — given the broad and simple knowledge 
 which it is also easy to impart to teachers ; and its 
 advantages, for the child who is shortly to leave the 
 elementEiry school, are obvious. It offers a timely 
 extension of outlook, at a period when the young 
 mind is eager to try its wings ; it increases the likeli- 
 hood that any later historical work wiU be seen in 
 due proportion and time-perspective ; and it corre- 
 lates admirably with geography and with elementary 
 humanistic science in a general co-ordination of the 
 broad and simple aspects of knowledge, such as the 
 conclusion of the elementary course ought to provide. 
 But this general drawing together of the elementary 
 material must be left for later consideration, when 
 other regions of the curriculum have been dis- 
 cussed. 
 
 For the lower standards, meanwhile, the historical 
 story can be given an additional hold upon the 
 interest and memory in virtue of the promise that 
 more will be heard, later on, of the people and coun- 
 
68 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 tries concerned. The teacher, also, will find a motive 
 for so arranging the scheme of stories that a given 
 people or period — and, in connection with geography, 
 a given region — ^is touched upon at recurrent inter- 
 vals ; there seems to be little point in such planning 
 with no goal in view. Not that the reading and 
 recounting of historical stories should be carried out 
 with a sole eye upon their ultimate " placing " within 
 the broad outUnes of world history ; they should 
 also be connected with the interests of contemporary 
 lessons, as with geography. Scripture, and (in the 
 case of stories about the making and building of 
 things) handicrafts, and early, embryo-scientific 
 explanations of how things are made. Also, stories 
 from EngUsh history will have a special place, and 
 these will not be among the pictures designed for 
 later arrangement in world-sequence ; they will 
 rather be the seed of an interest in consecutive Eng- 
 lish history after the elementary school stage. But 
 it is of very real importance that a child should begin 
 early to know about the world, and to think about 
 it as the world ; he will then have time to grow 
 naturally into the kind of citizen who takes broad 
 views. It may well be that in any given school the 
 standard of comprehension wiU not be high enough 
 for very systematic treatment of world history, 
 even in its simplest aspects ; but systematisation 
 is a matter of degree, and, at the least, a con- 
 tinuous series of illustrative world-stories can be 
 taught. 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 69 
 
 VI 
 
 It is blindness to talk about the teaching of science 
 in the elementary school as though this were a remote 
 ■ and Utopian possibility. We are teaching 
 Soieifce!^ science, well or badly, whenever we teach 
 children to classify and distinguish the 
 simplest things, to form any idea about natural 
 forces, or to think about the behaviour of any living 
 forms. It would be upon such general groundwork 
 that their reading and understanding of science 
 would stiU depend, for the future, if the Utopia of 
 some scientific enthusiasts were reahsed to the extent 
 of, say, an hour's chemistry and experimental physics 
 a week for the upper standards. And the virtue of 
 the chemistry and physics would depend entirely 
 upon the extent to which they were deduced from, 
 and made to explain, everyday phenomena. Before 
 we think of introducing elementary sciences it is as 
 weU to consolidate our groundwork of elementary 
 science. This does not mean the introduction of any 
 fresh work into the elementary curriculum, though 
 it may very profitably mean the re-grouping of 
 present work so as to bring the frincifia of 
 science together, with the consequent discovery of 
 many gaps that can easily and naturally be filled , 
 in. 
 
 The geography, nature study, and drawing classes, 
 given a reasonable amount of care to correlate their 
 activities, form an excellent basis for the beginnings 
 
70 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 of science. It remains to bring into connection with 
 these the embryo-scientific work of the reading class, 
 upon which we have aheady touched. Also, before- 
 sufficiently fluent reading is available, there should 
 come the first, simple classification of common 
 things, in connection with the words for them ; this, 
 too, has been mentioned in an earlier section, and 
 should be so arranged as to lead up to a scientific 
 grouping. The old-fashioned classes of " animal, 
 vegetable, and mineral " are simple, while they call 
 for a little thought on the child's part ; the last term 
 is perhaps open to objection, but it will soon be 
 replaced by " inorganic," with its subdivisions of 
 metal and non-metal, while "mineral" is 'retained 
 in its stricter sense. Meanwhile, the first classifica- 
 tion leads at once to a healthy curiosity about the 
 origin and manufacture of different objects, and 
 this can be satisfied to the extent that the children's 
 present power of comprehension will allow. Further 
 questions of this kind will arise out of the stories in 
 the school-reader that touch upon the making of 
 things. 
 
 In connection with nature study, it is important to 
 reaUse the perpetual changes of state that matter 
 undergoes within living forms. This general notion 
 can only be worked out by degrees, but it is of value, 
 not only as bringing out the significant fact that the 
 life and form of an organism are more permanent 
 than the arrangement of matter which it happens 
 to be using at the mordent, but also for the later 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 71 
 
 understanding of much in agriculture and industry 
 that depends upon the taking of a product at exactly 
 the right moment. Country children, for example, 
 should know what is the difference between ripe hay 
 and grass " bents " that have been left till all the 
 foodstuff in the plant has been dissipated or with- 
 drawn into the root. Generally, the idea of matter 
 as something that does not " stay put " nearly as 
 much as it seems to is at the root of many important 
 conceptions, theoretical and practical ; and it can 
 be brought out in very simple ways and by every- 
 day instances, though a few experiments to illustrate 
 such changes of state as solid, liquid, and gas, and 
 other elementary phenomena of physics and chemis- 
 try, will be all to the good when time, teaching and 
 apparatus can be found. 
 
 The primary forces of Nature, in the same way, 
 can be distinguished as they operate in the simplest, 
 phenornena of weather and climate, land-structure 
 and the movements of water — to take only one or 
 two connections with geography. Children soon 
 begin to inquire about forces, and naturally begin 
 by confusing force with matter ; this confusion 
 ought to be cleared up from the earliest stage, even 
 if no more than a first hint can be given as to the 
 nature of energy. Later, the more obvious kinds of 
 energy can be classified in simple terms ; it takes 
 very little time, and makes a world of difference to 
 the comprehension both of immediate lessons and 
 of natural process in general. The only need is 
 
72 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 that elementary teachers should know what they 
 are about, and not teach nonsense ; this is a 
 matter for the care of the training colleges. The 
 arrangement of the syllabus so that Hnes of ele- 
 mentary scientific comprehension can be progres- 
 sively followed will come naturally out of know- 
 ledge and interest on the part of the body of 
 teachers. 
 
 Simple ideas about the behaviour of matter and 
 energy lead to the problems of matter and energy 
 as these are used and directed by life — ^if we can 
 avoid a quarrel with scientific materialism by admit- 
 ting that, scientifically, we do not know what life 
 is, any more than we know what matter and energy 
 are. At the least, it is a convenient and necessary 
 generalisation in elementary teaching. Here we 
 come into touch with the teaching of the laws of 
 health, which ought to be a distinctive feature of 
 all school work, and with ideas as to national and 
 social health that belong to the elder children's 
 understanding of history, as well as with matters 
 like the growth of crops and industrial plants, and 
 {he food problem which is now providing so excellent 
 an object-lesson. It is a matter of real and far- 
 reaching importance that the unity of the laws of 
 life should be made clear to children ; and little 
 more is demanded of' the teacher than a desire to 
 do this, together with the readiness which naturally 
 follows to seize and draw together the instances that 
 almost every lesson provides. 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 73 
 
 VII 
 
 We have claimed to dignify with the title of 
 " science " the very simple reahsations that all 
 ,j,jj^ children form about the nature of things 
 
 Scientific and forces, because it is important to view 
 these realisations as a whole, and to see 
 that it is a weU-arranged whole. No knowledge is 
 too simple to be clearly grouped, and the smaU child 
 who is preserved from muddle in his first and easiest 
 groupings is laying unconscious foundations for the 
 science that wiU be increasingly needed by the 
 worker and the citizen of the future. It is worth 
 while to consider what these groupings should 
 amount to by the end of the elementary course. 
 
 It may clear the ground to suggest that the 
 elementary school child has no business with either 
 the vocational or the academic end in science. Both 
 these ends are unreal to him ; there is nothing yet 
 to which he can attach them. Understanding, for a 
 child, means the understanding of a child's world, and 
 of the grown-up world only in so far as this impinges 
 upon his own. The scientific end, for a child of 
 twelve or fourteen, is an understanding of the world 
 as he sees it at twelve or fourteen ; this child is the 
 father of the man who will understand the world as 
 he sees.it at twenty or at forty. At the same time 
 a child can have his interests ranged and ordered in 
 his mind without thereby making them inappropriate 
 to his world, so that they cease to be interests. He 
 likes arranging his collection of ideas, as he likes 
 
74 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 arranging his collection- of 'bus tickets, as long as it 
 is his collection and his arrangement ; and to make 
 it his collection and his arrangement is the chief 
 object of all mddern method in teaching. But we 
 are rather apt to neglect the help that we can give, 
 not only legitimately, but most usefully, and to the 
 child's own profit aipid pleasure, by making his 
 arrangements broader and clearer. We either 
 neglect this, and think it natural that his ideas 
 should remain scattered and disorderly, or else we 
 try to impose adult arrangements and kill interest. 
 The key to the right kind of help is a sympathetic 
 understanding of the childish world. We have to 
 suggest arrangements of fact and idea that will tally 
 with childish interests, which are perfectly real and 
 logical, and are destined to develop by their own 
 natural gradation into adult interests. 
 
 It is a great thing not to despise crude and elemen- 
 tary interests when they are also fundamental. 
 Children are very much interested in food — so 
 are we all ; and the sorting of things into the 
 groups of foods and not-foods, and of foods into 
 groups according to their properties and effects, is 
 both a useful and an interesting bit of simple scientific 
 work. The subject, taken as far as interest will 
 carry it, leads a long way into natural history, geo- 
 graphy, childish economics, and the laws of health. 
 Also, the ethical consideration is worth taking into 
 account : the child who 'becomes interested in 
 thinking rationally about food is drawn away from 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 75 
 
 a greedy and selfish interest in it. The same thing 
 is true of a number of childish interests of the 
 " young barbarian " order, which we generally leave 
 to be catered for by the cinema and the story of 
 sensational crime. It seems to be the fact that the 
 child is, in some degree, recapitulating the mental 
 growth of primitive man ; and it is certainly the 
 fact that the young primitive, in civilised society, 
 shades off easily into the young criminal. But it 
 is possible to take his interest in crime and turn it to 
 good account by awakening in him, not the young 
 criminal but, so to speak, the young criminologist. 
 We can sate his appetite for Homeric tales of piracy 
 and combat by picturing for him the life and struggles 
 of real barbarians of the primitive age, and lead him 
 at the same time to see that their behaviour belonged 
 to its own day and is out of place in ours. Stories of 
 primitive man have their obvious connection both 
 with science and with history ; there is also the 
 interest, and the very sound moral advantage, of 
 identifying him with the hooligan. It becomes re- 
 spectable to play at being a Red Indian or a cave 
 man, but a duU and decadent amusement to play at 
 being Jack the Ripper. 
 
 These two random examples may illustrate the 
 tj^e of interest that must always enliven our teach- 
 ing of embryonic science. For the general sense of 
 arrangement that we want the children to possess, 
 it is most important that such interests should be 
 properly related to one another ; in our two examples 
 
76 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 the relation of primitive man to his food supply and 
 the development of stealing for livelihood from a 
 form of valour to a form of crime can be brought out. 
 It is a great mistake to think that you teach children 
 to condone evil when you teach them to understand 
 why it is evil ; and this understanding, in connection 
 with other simple bearings of natural impulse upon 
 social life, is perhaps the most important foundation 
 of aU for their view of the world they have to live in, 
 as sociology is perhaps the most important of the 
 sciences. 
 
 VIII 
 
 There is one respect in which the vocational and 
 the cultural demands upon the elementary school 
 obviously coincide. To produce capable 
 Handiwork, and intelligent ■ craftsmen or operatives 
 continuous training in the handling of 
 tools and materials is essential ; it is also essential 
 to ensure the right rhythm and interrelation between 
 the development of mind "and of body. The only 
 divergence between the two claims is fast disappear- 
 ing. It used to be thought that a particular, rather 
 than a general, proficiency must be the aim in any 
 work of a vocational trend ; we now know that a 
 boy of twelve does not' learn joinery by learning to 
 imitate a set series of pattern joints — ^he only learns 
 to disUke woodwork. As with the mind alone, so 
 with the partnership of mind and muscle : we saw 
 that a child's science must be the science of a child's 
 world, and a child's craftsmanship must be the crafts- 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 77 
 
 manship that can be connected with the interests of 
 his particular period of life. His keenness — the most 
 important thing about him — can only become a 
 keenness on the daily task of the future by being 
 developed as a keenness on the daily tasks of the 
 present. 
 
 Pedagogy, meanwhile, has learned a similar lesson : 
 the most adequate prescription, psychologically 
 speaking, for the training of hand and eye, may fail- 
 completely because it does not touch the imagination 
 of the child who has to carry it out. It is only sound 
 in the context of an adult psychology which he does 
 not understand, and therefore it does not bring his 
 vital faculties into play. These negatives are clear ; 
 but what we still seem to lack is a positive rule for 
 education in the sense of craftsmanship. The prin- 
 ciple that handiwork must be allied with the interests 
 of the learner's present phase of development is 
 useful as far as it goes, but we require hght as to 
 what these interests are, or should be. Perhaps there 
 is most promise to be found, at any rate for a begin-^ 
 ning, in an aUiance with the mental interests of the 
 schoolroom. These, certainly, require the accom- 
 paniment and support of manual activity to any 
 extent that can be devised ; and in general, the 
 more the thing-making and the thought-making 
 faculties can be run in double harness the better. 
 
 A full acceptance of this aim alters the demand 
 upon authority for educational " apparatus." It 
 becomes a demand not so much for apparatus as for 
 
78 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 materials and tools ; and this may prove a demand 
 that will be more readily conceded than the other. 
 Without being at all in love with the check that is 
 maintained upon education by " the dead hand of 
 amateur control," we can trace the workings of 
 common sense in a mistrust, though it be an ignorant 
 and even a parsimonious mistrust, of ready-made 
 schoolroom machinery. There is something about 
 its ready-madenesg that suggests unreality ; and 
 there is often justice in the comment that it repre- 
 sents only the pedagogic fashion of the moment. 
 (An aesthete among the critics may also have some- 
 thing to say about yeUow varnish.) But the true 
 criticism is educational. What is ready-made is 
 dull ; it stultifies the imagination ; in particular, it 
 denies all activity to the constructive imagination. 
 We might even urge, on purely pedagogic grounds, 
 that no apparatus at all should be used in a school 
 that has not been made in the school ; and that 
 what the school cannot yet make, it is not yet quali- 
 fied to use. This, however, is to distinguish appa- 
 ratus, absolutely, from tools and materials ; and 
 the distinction is by no means absolute. A reason- 
 able rule might be that the children should at least 
 have a hand in the making of all apparatus,- if only 
 in the putting together of parts ; and that no. parts 
 should be ready-made that their own workshop 
 could have produced. But every possible stimulus 
 should be given to the invention of home-made 
 devices, so long as these are not allowed to be ram- 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 79 
 
 shackle and unworkmanlikie. The simplest and the 
 most homely device is often the best. The rainfall 
 measured in a bottle that has had a scale painted on 
 its side, in school, seems more real than that which 
 is collected in a graduated jar ; the latter is a 
 bought magic, in which anything might happen. 
 
 The children should certainly haye " their " work- 
 shop without class distinctions, in the sense that one 
 class should make, or help to make, apparatus for 
 another, and should take an interest in its purpose. 
 The workshop and its eqmpment, to begin with, 
 may be an extemporised affair ; and its existence 
 in any form wiU be a centre of interest for the chil- 
 dren, and a meeting place for the interests of different 
 classes, besides furnishing the most teUing claim 
 upon authority for help to reahse the project further. 
 There is no argument that so reinforces a claim for 
 help as a display of initiative. And meanwhile, the 
 exercise of inventiveness in thinking out malceshifts, 
 besides appeahng to the Robinson Crusoe instinct, 
 will be the best of preparations for the respect that 
 should be paid to proper equipment as it comes. 
 Even to desire vainly, for a time, the means for 
 making what one wants, is an educational step above 
 a vain desire for the thing itself ; and the effect upon 
 children's minds of seeing a common desire, a social 
 desire, brought to its most reasonable expression, 
 has a value beyond that of seeing many cases of the 
 most delectable tools and apphances set in order for 
 them. 
 
8o THE CURRICULUM 
 
 IX 
 
 Given some approximation, however rudimentary, 
 
 to a school workshop, a clearing house for the prin- 
 
 „ , . cipal handicrafts connected with class 
 
 Making *^ 
 
 and work (and it is remarkable how the whole 
 
 " '"^' question of handiwork is broadened and 
 simphfied by being brought to a common centre), 
 we can discuss the connection of the activities to be 
 carried on in it with those of the classroom, and of 
 both with the arrangement of ideas that has been 
 suggested as the notional framework of the elementary 
 course. The development of the child's sense of 
 language stands outside any detailed connections 
 with handiwork, though it is never to be forgotten 
 that verbal explanations in the workshop are as 
 much a part of our language-teaching as any other 
 use of the spoken word, and may, indeed, more than 
 probably have an especially direct influence on the 
 childish appreciation of phrase. Workshop talk has 
 to be of a careful lucidity ; and lucid explanation of 
 what is done, and why it is done, should be asked for 
 as well as given. But correlation, in any detail, 
 will be established chiefly with the group of ideas 
 that we have placed under the heading of " science " ; 
 and, in a lesser degree, with the iUustrational side of 
 elementary history. 
 
 Much will depend upon the equipment of our 
 " workshop," which may at first be no more than a 
 play-shop, subsisting chiefly on makeshifts and 
 hopes ; but a few general suggestions can be made. 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 8i 
 
 The beginning of science is measurement ; and it 
 makes the greatest difference to a child's under- 
 standing of measurement if he has contrived even 
 the simplest kind of measuring apparatus for him- 
 self. This also helps greatly to encourage the 
 arithmetic that is done sensibly, by thinking of the 
 quantities concerned, rather than in the muddled 
 state that comes from thinking only of the figures 
 and of the rule of thumb that will produce an 
 " answer." Concrete things are essential, in any 
 case, to establish concepts of number and quantity 
 — and not only as counters ; sheets of paper, for 
 instance, perforated like sheets of postage stamps 
 by means of a toothed wheel and a ruler, are most 
 useful in teaching elementary factors — ^but a special 
 virtue attaches to things that children have had some 
 hand in making. Just as the " stick boat," in Sir 
 James Barrie's study of the coasts of the Round 
 Pond, is more of a nautical reaUty to a child than 
 the best-found model yacht that money can buy, 
 so the trifles of matchwood or cardboard that school 
 children have shaped for themselves, however fum- 
 bhngly, are more arithmetically real to them than the 
 most ingenious " objects "that they receive ready 
 made. We have to remember that it is actual reality 
 that inheres, for them, in things of their own con- 
 triving, and it is their own sense of reality, as we 
 find it, that we have to educate, not to dismiss as 
 babpsh fancy and dreaminess while we try to sub- 
 stitute reaUty as it appeals to ourselves. 
 
82 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 It would be absurd to say that every ruler, for 
 example, must be made by the children themselves ; 
 but it is a sound regulation that specimens of every 
 measure should be made, as soon as the given quan- 
 tity comes up for consideration in class. Besides 
 the visual and tactile associations that make a quan- 
 tity real, the act of maJcing, in itself, gives reality 
 and exactitude to the idea of extension in space. 
 The workshop develops the " instinct " for quan- 
 tity — the power of " measuring up " by eye, which 
 a bricklayer gains through the handling of bricks — 
 while the arithmetic class brings the instinct to 
 expression in figures ; and then the figures mean 
 something. In the same way, a geographical model 
 of the school district, for which every child prepares 
 some part — a hedge, a block of houses, a representa- 
 tion of a park or pond that wiU be stuck on in its 
 proper site — aids the power of seeing a place whole 
 in the mind, and leads up to the power of seeing a 
 map as a picture that reveals something. Many 
 such activities can be carried on in the classroom, 
 but they are unavoidably cramped there ; and also 
 it is a good thing to distinguish the actual making 
 of an object from the discussion and planning before- 
 hand, and from the illustrative use of it afterwards. 
 A change/ of venue keeps the child's mind much 
 clearer as to the purpose of the things he is doing, 
 and gets them into a distinct relation, rather than 
 a jumble, with the things he is thinking. 
 
 It is easier to write of handiwork as an aid to 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 83 
 
 exactitude of mind than as part of the training of 
 imagination, because we are slow to learn that the 
 imagination is, for its own sake, worth any expendi- 
 ture at all of school time, particularly when the time 
 is spent in bringing the image to concrete expression. 
 Yet we know that imagination must be evoked if a 
 historical story, for example, is to become real to 
 children, and that the story must come to Ufe for 
 them if it is to be of any use in developing their 
 historical sense. All this, however, tends to seem 
 reasonable only as a matter of talk ; to make a 
 childish model of a primitive village, or of a baron's 
 castle with its appurtenances, at once suggests to 
 the practical minded that time is being wasted in 
 mere play. Every effort has to be made towards 
 the gradual overcoming of this idea, because the 
 union of imagination with practical understanding 
 — ^and, we will dare to add, the union of play with 
 work — ^is most essential to the health, in the sense 
 of wholeness, and to the vitality of the mind. It is- 
 perhaps best, for the education both of the child 
 and of the " practical " critic, to work out every 
 possible means of making imaginative handiwork 
 conduce also to accuracy in education. That the 
 connection between imagination and accuracy can 
 be established is a matter of experience ; it can be 
 established by seeing to the connection between 
 exact making in the workshop and exact thinking 
 in class, thus giving scope to the child's own very 
 insistent desire that what he makes shall be true to 
 
84 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 what he thinks ; and in no other way can we improve 
 upon the merely local accuracy — ^marked " not 
 transferable " — which is conferred by rule of thumb. 
 
 X 
 
 Broadly, there are two aspects of physical training 
 of which only one is in the strict sense educative. 
 
 There is muscular exercise arranged to 
 Education counteract the prevailing deficiency of 
 
 natural exercise — running, jumping, 
 climbing, wrestling — or the ill effects of " civilised " 
 hampering — constrained positions at the desk, bad 
 clothing, clumsy boots ; and there is the activity 
 that cultivates the natural rhythmic interplay of 
 body and mind, in addition to the value that results, 
 as we learn in practising the methods of Froebel, 
 from well-conceived handiwork. We grope towards 
 this, the real end of the physical training that aims 
 at the development of a complete human being, in 
 very faint emulation of the Greek " musical " system, 
 for which " rhythmic " is perhaps our nearest word. 
 And we grope the more fitfully under pressure of the 
 knowledge that this is the last value which any one 
 will be persuaded to regard as practical, when we 
 speak of life-equipment for the young proletarian. 
 But this is the value that attaches in rudimentary 
 form to our little action songs and musical drills ; 
 and if we can point to classes that are brighter, more 
 alert, and with more stamina in their keenness on 
 account of these activities — as we undoubtedly can 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 85 
 
 — ^we justify our demand for time, and for a piano, 
 on a thoroughly sound practical basis. 
 
 The necessary t3^e of physical training which we 
 have just classed as counteractive or remedial needs 
 to be recognised as the artificial means that it actually 
 is. We have to get physical exercises carried out with 
 zest, if they are to do any good ; and we have to 
 develop, through them, a healthy habit of body and 
 mind that will last. The exercises are dull in them- 
 selves, and we have to rescue them from dulness by 
 awakening an interest in their purpose. There is 
 some attraction, based on the rhythmic sense, in 
 any movements carried out smartly and in concert, 
 and some pleasure (chiefly for the stronger children, 
 who stand less in need of help) in the physical glow 
 and stimulus that follow ; but these are not enough 
 to make the work as wholehearted as it can be made. 
 And an educational interest, which is also a health- 
 motive that will remain in later Mfe, can be attached 
 to the daily drill. Children can learn, in connection 
 with the health lessons that should be a. continuous 
 element in their early a,pproaches to science, what 
 it is that physical exercises do for the circulation, 
 the breathing and the nervous system. To begin 
 with, this knowledge makes the exercises more effec- 
 tive for their purpose, as professional experts in 
 physical culture have learned to impress upon their 
 clients ; but it also gets the idea of purpose into the 
 minds of the children, so that as they grow up they 
 will be the more likely to recognise and provide for 
 
86 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 the body's need of regular re-invigoration. Other- 
 wise, when the particular exercises stop, the habit 
 stops, because it was only a habit of performing those 
 exercises on being told to do so. 
 
 Further, the development of the children's idea 
 that health, in our largely artificial conditions of 
 Ufe, is a thing that has to be defended by reasonable 
 watchfulness and precaution' means the development 
 of a common care for health, along the lines of sanity 
 and not of hypochondria, which is badly needed in 
 modern communities — ^witness the vast annual 
 expenditure in patent medicines, and the annual 
 acreage of their advertisements. Here we have a 
 true and a highly important educational value, the 
 reaUsation of which would do a great deal towards 
 the reform of society. But this value is not attained 
 by health lessons that remain a matter of informa- 
 tion only, or by exercises that do not exercise the 
 understanding as well as the muscles. It is part of 
 the law of connection between doing and thinking 
 that health lessons gain reality in proportion 
 as they are brought into a fully explained associa- 
 tion with everything that is being done in the 
 school for the sake of health. This does not 
 mean a continual harping upon hygiene, which 
 bores children, and ought to bore them. It can 
 be effected with very little talk, and no fuss, by 
 simply telling the child what he is to do a thing for 
 at the same time as you tell him how to do it, just 
 as you teU him what he is doing a simple experi- 
 
THE ; ELEMENTARY COURSE 87 
 
 ment for at the same time as you explain how it 
 should be done. 
 
 It might be maintained, as against the views of 
 some apostle of eurhythmies for the million, that we 
 must learn to walk before we CcUi run — or dcUice ; 
 that we have to develop the Hellenic sense of health 
 before we try to reproduce the Hellenic joy in the 
 poetry of motion. But the human faculties are 
 interdependent, and can be developed apart from one 
 another only to a strictly limited and a somewhat 
 useless extent. The aesthetic faculty, in however 
 rudimentary a form, can only be left out of physical 
 education at the cost of dulling that education and 
 robbing it of vitality. Besides, the best physical 
 education is unseK-conscious ; the less we have to 
 think about our physical processes the better, though 
 it is most important that when we do have to think 
 about them we should be able to think straight, and 
 to think naturally. We must not postpone our use 
 of action-songs, illustrative dances, or any other 
 means of rh3rthmic education that are to our hand ; 
 rather, we have to improve upon them — to get a 
 Uttle more reality and sense into them, without 
 making them unchildlike. It is strictly Greek, and 
 strictly sensible, to let a children's dance illustrate 
 a scene from history, and to let the children invent 
 the dance ; and many other connections with school 
 interests can be thought out. An arithmetical action- 
 song, for example, can be made both amusing and 
 pretty and, inall seriousness, a genuine contribution 
 
88 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 to the rounding off of the mathematical sense. And 
 in general, aU connections that can be set up between 
 the rhythmic and the intellectual, by way of the 
 dramatic faculty, have an interest value which we 
 cannot afford to neglect. 
 
 XI 
 
 Throughout the foregoing sections the condition 
 has been implied that there should be an effective 
 Making correspondence between the different sub- 
 Things jects and methods pursued in the elemen- 
 *''*• tary course, not only a correlation of 
 
 subject-matter in detail, but an organised unity of 
 plan which produces one course of development 
 rather than several divergent ' courses. • We have 
 discussed both the principle and the general practice 
 of this in Part I., and though the matter is funda- 
 mental enough to bear many workings out in dif- 
 ferent aspects, we wiU take its general importance 
 as read, confining ourselves to a few special applica- 
 tions for the elementary teacher. 
 
 It is easiest for the head teacher to begin by 
 planning one continuous main line of instruction, 
 not in order to make other Unes subsidiary to it, but 
 in order to focus the effort for continuity in one place 
 at a time and so to make it more effectual. The line 
 that most requires straightening, if it has been drawn 
 at aU, is the line of sequence in the subject-matter 
 of reading lessons ; and the writer has found that 
 the simplest way to straighten it is to set down fhe 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COtRSE 89 
 
 chief things the children have to learn in all branches 
 of their work, and then to see that each is represented^ 
 with a frequency determined by its relative import- 
 ance, in the reading iriaterial of the class or in the 
 discussions that arise out of the lessons. In default 
 of an ideal abimdance and variety of good school 
 " readers," this is a task that calls for some ingenuity. 
 But it is also a very interesting task, and, with 
 increasing experience, the arrangement of the avail- 
 able reading material becomes an artistic pleasure to 
 the arranger. The first considerations, we have 
 already suggested, will be a well-thought-out sequence 
 of historical stories and a series of readings that will 
 build up the child's early general notions of science. 
 So far a moderately good selection of existing 
 " readers " will meet the case. Geography also, 
 related both to history and to simple science, is fairly 
 weU catered for. But the search must not cease 
 where the obvious supply gives out ; this is where 
 the opportunity for invention and the chief interest 
 begin. When hooks and eyes are not to be found 
 ready made they have to be contrived ; and the 
 principal contrivance is to discover and note the 
 points at which the " reader " offers scope for a 
 fruitful and, equally important, a relevant digression. 
 Suppose the head teacher is working out a series of 
 readings connected with simple science — ^preferably 
 in collaboration with the teacher who is to conduct 
 the work — and has on his list, among others, the sub- 
 headings of health lessons. Nature study, and manu- 
 
90 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 factures. (Our choice of divergent subjects is inten- 
 tional.) He can find enough about manufacttires, we 
 will say, in the available " readers " ; something, but 
 not enough, about Nature study, and nothing that 
 touches directly upon health. But he can note, in 
 an account of this or that manufacture, the mention 
 of some animal or vegetable product that is used, 
 and indicate the opportunity to ask where it came 
 from, and under what conditions ; or, ag£iin,> he can 
 mark the opportunity to compare one industry with 
 another in respect of health — one providing a healthy 
 life by its nature, another having its dangers to health 
 for which safeguards can be discussed. In a similar 
 way every reading can be made to furnish some Unk 
 with other interests. The links are small ; none of 
 them need take long to elaborate, and for many a 
 momentary allusion wiU suffice ; but their cimiular 
 five effect in promoting a unity of the understanding 
 is immense. It wiU be readily seen that if this process 
 is carried over the whole course of the reading lessons 
 we are well on the way to a unified fine of advance. 
 It takes trouble, like everjrthing else that is worth 
 doing ; but the trouble is repaid in interest, and in 
 the removal of that strain upon the educator which 
 comes of the continual effort to force diill work along. 
 Interest and vitality in a school are largely achieved 
 through many-sided interests and their free expres- 
 sion. 
 
 Meanwhile it will be found that a well-planned 
 sequence of reading, with links of interest plentifully 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 91 
 
 supplied (and many more than are on the programme 
 can and should be suggested by the children them- 
 selves), has done something to pull the other lessons 
 together and to give them sequence and purpose. To 
 dispose of the other two R's in this matter of con- 
 nection building; we can note that there is some point 
 in writing out a sentence as beautifully as possible 
 when the sentence is one of those classroom con- 
 clusions which have been brought to the grammar 
 lesson for neat and thoroughly understood expres- 
 sion, and then to the writing lesson to be put per- 
 manently on record ; and we can re-emphasise the 
 importance of making arithmetic deal with the many 
 simple problems of quantity that can be extracted 
 from or associated with the subject-matter of reading 
 and other lessons. Both writing and arithmetic 
 f oUow a fairly clear, predetermined sequence of their 
 own ; and this is not weakened but fortified by the 
 provision of a continuous bond of union with the 
 child's general activity of concept-building. 
 
 Of other elementary " subjects " it will hardly be 
 of use to say more, as regards the question of sequence 
 and continuity, than that the principle of studied 
 lines of advance, with plentiful Unks of intercom- 
 munication, can be followed out upon the analogy 
 of our reading-class work. It will be.seen that the 
 reading sequence contains the germ of a whole 
 system, and that experimental work in science, for 
 instance (to take one of the more Utopian dreams of 
 the reformer), if it can be made continuous and 
 
92 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 systematic, can also be made full of interesting con- 
 nections both with reading and with any other line 
 of advance that we may be able to establish. 
 
 XII 
 
 We spoke, in the first section, of a drawing together 
 of the elementary material that should leave the 
 learner equipped with " a general co- 
 Conclusion, ordination of the broad and simple aspects 
 of knowledge, such as the conclusion of 
 the elementary course ought to provide " ; we may 
 now consider what the total should comprise, so far 
 as it is possible to be definite, considering the wide 
 difference at present between the teaching and 
 learning capabiHties of different schools. 
 
 In language the characteristic uses of words (as 
 noun, verb, and so on) should all have been realised. 
 This is our end in elementary word-classification ; 
 not that any word, in itself, can be labelled — many 
 words need four or five labels — ^but that any word 
 in a not too difficult context can be classed by what 
 it does there. The child then has the uses and values 
 of words grouped so as to aid the expression of 
 thought ; the difficulties and interesting ambiguities 
 of form-classification he may or may not study later 
 on. Clear, expressive and well-modulated reading 
 should have become natural through the desire both 
 to take in and to give out the fuU meaning and 
 interest of the thing read ; and in the same way, good 
 writing should have become the valued means of 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 93 
 
 fixing a thought tha± has been found worth thinking, 
 formulating in clear language and putting on record. 
 
 In history a progressively coherent sequence of 
 stories, connected with the reading activity, should 
 have laid a triple, foimdation. First, there are stories 
 that will have been " placed," in the upper standards, 
 within a very broad and simple framework of world 
 history, viewed in picturesque groups of events and 
 in association with historical geography. Second 
 (but these divisions are not mutually exclusive), 
 there are stories that wiU have been connected with 
 first Ideas in civics, and in the general art of social 
 behaviour. Third, there are stories that wiU have 
 sown the seeds of interest in English and, we may 
 hope, in European history — seeds whose further culti- 
 vation, in fully consecutive history, will be the work 
 of the secondary and the continuation school. The 
 reasons for putting simple world history before the 
 fuUy consecutive history of a country were discussed 
 in Section V. 
 
 In the wide field of elementary knowledge that we 
 have included within the hospitable boundary of 
 science the child should have a working idea of thing- 
 classification, well correlated with his equipment for 
 the handhng of words ; and this should consist, 
 broadly, in the habit of mind that traces things to 
 their origins in the organic or the inorganic world. 
 The habit makes it natural always to inquire about 
 the process by which a thing has come to be what it 
 is, and a natural tendency to such inquiry is invalu- 
 
94 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 able in later work, and in Ufe. It should already 
 have inspired, in conjunction with other interests, 
 and especially geography, some search for an expla- 
 nation of the forces of Nature, with a first classifica- 
 tion of these in simple terms, and an effectual wish 
 to understand mechanical and industrial processes. 
 The different forms of life need not have come in for 
 any . intensive classification ; rather, the conditions 
 favourable and unfavourable to Uving forms should 
 have been considered, dweUing especially upon the 
 great principle of interdependence and co-operation, 
 and upon the primary laws of health that affect men 
 and societies. We have here a region- in which many 
 t3^es of elementary knowledge are drawn into a 
 unity. 
 
 From a number of the foregoing interests material 
 should have been sought for arithmetical treatment, 
 so that the mathematical sense may grow in its 
 proper association with the other faculties. For the 
 same reason arithmetic should have beien kept in 
 close connection with handiwork, which has its 
 interest, and its special rounding-off of the faculties, 
 to contribute to nearly all the class-room subjects 
 in one aspect or another. If possible, the activity 
 of handiwork should have had its secure centre in 
 a"^ school workshop ; the psychology of this is still 
 more obvious when , we look' to the future of the 
 elementary pupil. The manual shades off into the 
 artistic activity ; and we venture to promise that 
 the more the artistic faculties have been developed, 
 
THE ELEMENTARY COURSE 9 
 
 both for their own sake and for the interest and the 
 illustrational help that they can bring to the routine 
 work of classes, the more inteUigeht and the more 
 whole-minded the pupil will be found to be. More- 
 over, there is the connection of art on its rhythmic 
 side with physical education, which gains greatly by 
 association with the study of health in our simple 
 science lessons, so that bodily training develops as 
 a habit of purpose and not merely as a habit of 
 doing, but cannot expand into its full influence upon 
 the health and happiness of body and mind without 
 some approach to the Greek expression of joy in the 
 union of pm^jose with function. 
 
 In so condensed a summary, our programme may 
 appear formidable ; but it will be remembered that 
 what we have here crowded into a brief section, as 
 a conspectus for the adult mind, wOl have been 
 worked out little by little, over a term of years, 
 through the smaU personal discoveries and illumina- 
 tions that are the natmral Ufe of a child. We need 
 only try to see the ends of child-life, and try to adjust 
 our method to its actual and manifest needs of 
 expansion, in order to find at our side an adolescent 
 fuUy prepared for the duties and responsibilities of 
 his further growth without having lost, but rather 
 having gained inexpressibly, in the power to put 
 heart and soul into the eternal present that remains 
 the most vital concern of youth. 
 
PART III 
 
 CONTINUATION 
 COURSES 
 
 I 
 
 The aims of the continuation school must be high 
 
 while its methods are kept very broad and simple, if 
 
 we are to found a national system that 
 The 
 First will grow under our hands with the growth 
 
 Needs. qJ experience and opportunity. We can 
 afford no smatterings ; and we can afford no intri- 
 cacies. The first step, if we are to discuss the con- 
 tinuation curriculum to any purpose, is to find one 
 formula for the need of the learner — the " young 
 person " of the Act — ^which is a need for development 
 and training, and the need of the community, which 
 is a need for good workers and citizens. But if we 
 attach a wide enough meaning to the terms "worker " 
 and " citizen," they may point to the prime needs of 
 the pupil no less than of the community. We want 
 good workers, in the sense that we want every one, 
 without class distinction, to be able to do the best 
 work of which his developed powers are capable, and 
 this is largely the secret of a full and happy individual 
 Ufe ; and in wanting good citizens we are aiming at 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 97 
 
 the completion of that life by adding to it the power 
 of effectual fellowship. If there is any danger that 
 our " worker and citizen" formula may acquire a 
 Prussian sense, the remedy is to insist upon its wider, 
 humanistic aspect, and not to allow it to be set in 
 any false opposition to the humanistic ideal. 
 
 As our curriculum will regard the individual as 
 something more and better than a docile implement 
 for industrial and national ends, ijot by denying 
 these ends, but by going beyond them, so it will cut 
 across the often useful, but often arbitrary and mis- 
 leading, distinction between vocational and non- 
 vocational training. The worker will be a better 
 worker, more likely to find the work that he can do 
 best and to do it with interest and vigour as well as 
 with precision, if he is trained to a wide understand- 
 ing of the nature and purpose of work, not only to 
 a particular, narrow proficiency. The citizen will be 
 a better citizen for having a vocational as well as a 
 general training, provided that the two are made 
 one for him and that he can see the responsibilities 
 and interests of the particular task in relation to 
 those of his citizenship. It is implied, in the title 
 that we have given to this Part, that distinct courses, 
 rather than a completely imified course, are as much 
 as we can at present indicate for the continuation 
 curriciilum. It is no use to put forward the ideal of 
 a unified scheme before it can be reahsed ; and we 
 have enough to do, for the present, to find the right 
 teachers and to get them started, each upon a single 
 c. H 
 
gS THE CURRICULUM 
 
 line of profitable work. But we can avoid the main 
 pitfalls of divided aims, and look forward to the 
 synthesis of method that must come later on ; and 
 the most obvious requirement is that we should not 
 aUow the vocational iim to develop apart from the 
 general pursuit of knowledge and understanding. 
 
 It is upon the courses of teaching which may carry 
 out the general, non-vocational aim that these studies 
 will chiefly dwell, since vocational courses must vary 
 widely with different local conditions ; but the two 
 tj^es of training can only come to full Ufa in con- 
 nection with one another. What object- work and 
 handicrafts are for the child the beginnings of voca- 
 tional work are for the adolescent — ^his points of 
 contact between abstract and personal reality. We 
 shall try to indicate every connection that can be 
 made for the learner between the abstract and the 
 actual, so far as this can be done without entering' 
 into elaborate detail ; and we would suggest as a 
 guiding aim, and as a first and very necessary step 
 towards an eventual unity of method, that the 
 teachers of general and of technical courses should 
 be encouraged in every way to help one another out 
 — that each should make some effort to keep in touch 
 with what the other is doing, and should draw upon 
 his colleague's work for continual reference and 
 illustration. Speaking very broadly, we may say 
 that the one is training the pupil as a worker, the 
 other as a citizen ; and the one has to bring out, 
 through the actual interests and associations that 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 99 
 
 are ready to his use, in the learner's mind, the relation 
 of work to citizenship, the other the relation of citizen- 
 ship to work. AH opposition of technical to general 
 training only obscures these essential relations, and 
 results in a life that is lived in a dual world, with a 
 dual personaUty, and in aU the dangers and discom- 
 forts that arise from having one's nature divided 
 against itself. 
 
 The suggestions that will foUow for continuation 
 courses can for the most part be worked out under 
 the threefold division of local, national and inter- 
 national interests. It will be clear that a just pro- 
 portion of emphasis upon each of these interests, 
 and a careful study of the relations between them, 
 are among the prime needs of education for citizen- 
 ship ; and also that this mental grouping of our 
 subject-matter should help towards a broad and a 
 socially right conception of work, by relating the 
 work of the locality with that of the nation and with 
 the world's work as a whole. This is a very elemen- 
 tary plan for getting structure and sense of purpose 
 into the continuation curriculum, and it obviously 
 stands in need of much amplification ; but for the 
 present we must be prepared to sacrifice a great deal 
 to simplicity and breadth. And it cannot be too 
 strongly insisted upon that some plan we must have 
 if we are to educate as well as to instruct ; while we 
 have nothing ready to our use in the form of the 
 traditional aims, such as they are ,and such as we 
 half-consciously realise them to be, that somewhat 
 
100 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 fitfully inspire our secondary school work. Con- 
 tinuation work starts upon an almost blank page, 
 and we have to see in advance the spacing and 
 arrangement of that which we are going to write 
 there. An arrangement in terms of service and 
 citizenship, viewed from the standpoints of home, of 
 country and of humanity, is at least fundamental, 
 and should lend itself to further development as 
 time goes on and experience shows us our more 
 detailed requirements. 
 
 II 
 
 One of the first aims of continuation work will be 
 to enable the learner to read for himself with profit 
 and understanding. The question is 
 Science of gradually coming to the front in secondary 
 work, whether more attention should not 
 be paid to training in the use of books of reference — 
 and, in a sense, all serious books are books of refe- 
 rence — whether, in fact, it is not better worth while 
 to train the power of finding knowledge as, it is 
 wanted than to impart knowledge which is Hkely to 
 be forgotten before it can be turned to any fruitful 
 purpose. In the continuation school the question is 
 simphfied by the fact -that there will not be time to 
 impart a compendium of knowledge, even if we 
 suppose that the compendium would be retained as 
 permanent mental equipment. Any attempt to drum 
 in a maximum amount of information during the 
 320 hours will inevitably fail. We have not to teach 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES loi 
 
 facts so much as methods : methods for finding, 
 digesting, and making use of facts. The methods of 
 finding come first ; and of these reading is the 
 ultimate resource. 
 
 First, we may consider what interests, in the. 
 pupil's mind, we can discover and build upon. 
 Experience has shown, in such voluntary continua- 
 tion work for the adolescent as already exists — in an 
 institution like Morley College, in South-East London, 
 for example — that a strong interest is ready to be 
 evoked in anything that touches upon social science. 
 The desire to grasp social conditions and causes 
 appears to be a good second, even in those whose 
 prime motive is the wish for some wage-earning 
 proficiency rather than for self-development in the 
 abstract. It is to be remembered that these are 
 older adolescents,, beginning almost where the con- 
 tinuation school wiU leave off, and that some of them 
 have been at secondary schools ; also that they are 
 at work with adults, whose wish, on the whole, is 
 more for intellectual interest than for equipment ; 
 but our data at least show what is there to be 
 evoked by suitable treatment and atmosphere. The 
 voluntary interests of the pupil foUow the ' lines 
 that we suggest as desirable both for himself 
 and for the community : his fines of development as 
 worker and as citizen. This does not mean that he 
 can, or should, be encouraged to read nothing but 
 technology and civics ; rather, it points to a manner 
 pf teaching that will draw together a representative 
 
102 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 variety of reading material around the main ideas 
 of service and fellowship. 
 
 We then have an objective, wide enough to take 
 in a great body of educative reading and distinct 
 enough to give it unity of purpose ; this is the first 
 requirement, if the pupil is to look upon reading as 
 the source of something more than information and 
 amusement, and is to turn to books for the real 
 food of the mind. The next aim must be to develop 
 a regard for reading as the pupil's own activity — 
 his own rather than the school's. As we have said, 
 there will not be time enough for an extensive study 
 of books ; and intensive subject-work is the business 
 of other courses. The reading course has to get into 
 touch with the actual reading of the learner, and to 
 raise that activity to a higher pitch of understanding 
 and appreciation. But it will not do to make any 
 demand upon out-of-school reading that wiU put 
 it in the position of homework. The continuation 
 teacher must always have his eye upon the leisure 
 hours of the pupil, but never in order to encroach 
 upon them. The best method is to start with a 
 discussion of what the class, on the average, actually 
 does read, and to get the pupils interested in the 
 question of what they read for. This soon brings 
 in those who scarcely read at aU, because it makes 
 them anxious not to feel out of the discussion ; 
 they begin to read what their neighbours say they 
 enjoy. Meanwhile, the teacher must not frown upon 
 any of these confessed enjoyments, but must try to 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 103 
 
 develop the appreciative faculty of which they show 
 the rudiments. Nor should he be too ready, even, 
 to extol the more serious reading of the minority at 
 the expense of the cruder preferences shown by the 
 rest ; no one must be left behind. He has to find 
 out what the generahty of his pupils reaUy want, 
 and what they are confusedly trying to get, from 
 reading, if it is only the amusement in hope of which 
 they dully wade through a comic paper, or the sense 
 of vicarious adventure that they get from a sen- 
 sational story. It is something to point out where 
 better humour, and adventure with more reahty in 
 it, are to be found. 
 
 But once we give the class an opportunity to 
 express and develop its own ideas, discussion soon 
 goes beyond these first crudities, by operation of 
 the collective sense of what is worth while ; and 
 once the teacher has shown, through friendly under- 
 standing at the outset, that his suggestions are worth 
 following up, his direction of his pupils' reading is 
 only hmited by his own knowledge of, and care to 
 discover, the right material, and by the availabihty 
 of books. The latter question is a serious difficulty, 
 for which the best solution would be a lending. 
 Ubrary — ^it could be begun on a small scale — attached 
 to the school. The value of the teacher as a sympa- 
 thetic director of reading, and of his class as a 
 clearing house for ideas, wiU extend in the degree 
 to which he is ahve to his opportunities. The main 
 opportunity is to develop a science of reading in the 
 
104 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 continuation school, not to impose a ready-made 
 formula, with a Est of set books, but to give en- 
 couragement and guidance to the existing impulse 
 to read, so that there grows up a power of recognising 
 the needs of the mind as they arise, and of seeking 
 the satisfaction of those needs where it is to be 
 found. The teacher requires, however, some guiding 
 principle ; and we have suggested that it will be 
 found by dwelling strongly upon the idea of service, 
 which all growing natures desire to express, and to 
 which aU other important ideas are related. 
 
 Ill 
 
 If possible, a course in grammar should be carried 
 out by the same teaicher who is responsible for the 
 
 course in reading which we suggested in the 
 of'wOTds ^^^^ section. The two courses may well and 
 
 profitably be blended together. But we 
 must expect httle, at first, in the way of subject 
 co-ordination, and the present section will deal with 
 the adolescent's need of grammar alone. Our first 
 task, both for ourselves and in the interests of the 
 learner, is to Hghten the dreary associations of the 
 word "grammar." It has already been claimed, in 
 Part II. , that a real understanding of, words can 
 only be developed by studying their use in con- 
 nection with real interests, and with ideas that the 
 learner feels an actual need to express clearly 
 and accurately. This means approaching language 
 from the point of view of functions rather than 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 105 
 
 of forms, a practice that accords with modem 
 grammatical theory, and also makes the grammar 
 learnt through the mother tongue very much easier 
 to apply to the uses of any foreign language that 
 may be studied. But such values can remain 
 imphcit at first. The learner need not even know 
 that he is stud5dng " grammar " at all. He is going 
 into the very interesting and obviously useful ques- 
 tion of how to use words effectively ; and the first 
 business of the teacher will be to. bring out the 
 interest and the usefulness. 
 
 Few things are more generally desired than the 
 power of statement ; and we approach grammar at 
 the right end, that is to say, at the active end, if 
 we start from the learner's wiU for expression. The 
 teacher's first consideration must be how to discover 
 the things that his pupils want to say, and to say 
 accurately and expressively. Once this discovery 
 is made, he can put forward his teaching as help 
 where help is needed, not as something that has to 
 be undergone because it is " education," and the 
 Government has ordained it. As with, the process 
 of discovering and building upon the learner's own 
 embryonic interest in reading, so with the process 
 of bringing out his desire for expression ; we must 
 be patient over small beginnings, and not expect a 
 cultured interest to appear out of the void. It will 
 become a cultured interest only as fast as we can 
 draw it out and give it cultivation. 
 The first step is to get the class to discuss some- 
 
io6 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 thing, to ask and answer questions about it, and to 
 be keen on making the questions and answers aUve 
 and to the point. Any subject will do ; it will be 
 as well to have some variety of subjects ; and any 
 connection with the subjects that come up in the 
 reading course will be very much to the good. But 
 the central interest should be a discussion of words 
 themselves ; and the teacher will have to decide, 
 by his own feeling or from experiment, whether he 
 can present the subject of language so as to awaken 
 the interest of the class, or must work round to it 
 by way of interest in other things and the desire to 
 talk about them intelligently. This will depend 
 largely on the teacher's own interest in words, his 
 possession of a good sense of words, and his feeUng 
 that there is an art and a philosophy of language. 
 Some people, without being profound etymologists, 
 have this feeling, and are able to arouse it in others ; 
 and these are the people to make grammar interest- 
 ing. But others, who have not the same tendency 
 or training, can arrive at a co-operation in discovery 
 of the interest of words, by setting themselves to 
 elicit their pupils' needs of expression, provided they 
 frankly put themselves on a footing of co-inquirers 
 with their pupils — always a sound attitude for any 
 teacher to adopt. 
 
 In many cases it is to be feared that continua- 
 tion classes will be found lacking in the power to 
 classify the most elementary uses of words. When 
 it is necessary to start from the rudiments, the 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 107 
 
 method put forward in Part II., sections 2 and 
 3, can be adapted to suit the needs, and the 
 susceptibiHties, of older children; the chief dif- 
 ference being that illustrative action, enjoyed by 
 younger children, will be beneath the dignity of the 
 older — and rightly, because they are capable of 
 visualising the action from a description. The 
 teacher, however, must not neglect to ring the 
 changes upon sentences describing simple acts, so 
 as to bring out the function of noun, verb, and 
 so forth ; the pupil who thinks he knows what a 
 noun or a verb is will generally have only a sketchy 
 idea. The game of turning sentences upside down 
 and inside out can largely be left to the ingenuity 
 of the learner, the teacher only making sure that 
 the action described by the sentence is of enough 
 interest in itself to make the sentence worth the 
 trouble of manipulation. For a single example, it 
 may be mentioned that the invention and drafting, 
 by the class, of imaginary public notices, or factory 
 notices in connection with by-laws, supplies good 
 simple sentences with plenty of alternative con- 
 structions to discuss. 
 
 Local interests should suggest a good deal of the 
 verbal subject-matter at first ; the literary interest 
 can only be used as literary taste develops. In any 
 case, it is well to keep practical interests well repre- 
 sented, for the sake of the clearness and grip that 
 are the first foundations of style. To make expres- 
 sion workmanlike is the first aim of grammar, and 
 
io8 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 it is an aim that has value for a workman in the 
 trades and crafts as Well as any further yalue ,that 
 may develop, upon the same foundation, in the form 
 of literary appreciation arid, in occasional and 
 exceptional cases, Uterary talent. 
 
 IV 
 
 As the evocation of a true interest in reading must 
 depend upon our power of seizing and developing 
 „. the learner's existing impulse to read, so. 
 
 Written if we are to evoke a real desire to write 
 workmanUke English (and without evoking 
 this desire we shall grind at " composition " in vain), 
 we must find and encourage in the learner some 
 germinal motive for expressing himself in writing. 
 The process of discovery and encouragement will be 
 similar to that suggested in " The Science of Read- 
 ing," and it may be said here that the two courses 
 last outhned, this and its successor, " The Use of 
 Words," may profitably be combined, with the . 
 present suggestions, into a single, full course in 
 English, under one teacher. The more they can be 
 interwoven, the better ; but it is in the interests of 
 clearness to follow up the different threads separately 
 before re-combining them, if it be possible, in 
 practice. 
 
 We have seen that every one would hke to have 
 the power of effective statement, and that this wish 
 can be made the mainspring for keen study of the 
 right use of words ; what is the corresponding wish 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 109 
 
 that can be developed into a desire to write well ? 
 It must still be the wish for verbal expression, but 
 in what form of writing ? We naturally look to the 
 most universal function of the pen — the writing of 
 letters. Unfortunately, it cannot be said that we 
 shall find a universal desire, among adolescents, to 
 write a good letter. In most cases we shall find a 
 pronounced dislike for writing letters at aU. But 
 this is nothing to the distaste with which a set 
 subject for " composition " will be. contemplated. 
 The root trouble is, probably, an inner disgust set 
 up by enforced writing which has been made to 
 appeal to no existing wish whatever. The cure is to 
 reawaken the missing wish in the most likely region 
 that can be found. We are purposely considering 
 this question from the standpoint of the most 
 apathetic and iU-educated learner — it is he who 
 holds the class back ; but it is to be hoped, at least, 
 that there will be keen pupils in the class, already 
 essayists in a smaU way, who will rouse in him some 
 spirit of emulation. In any case, it is not difficult 
 for the teacher to bring out the importance of good 
 letter-writing. The vocational value may be put 
 first, as being the easiest to grasp. The pupils are 
 in employment, in which (or out of which) they are 
 anxious to rise ; and they can appreciate the fact 
 that much may turn, at some decisive moment, upon 
 their ability to draft an effective letter. From this 
 first step it \n\l be easy to find the way on to higher 
 ground than personal ambition. The start once 
 
no THE CURRICULUM 
 
 made, interest in well-turned writing for its own 
 sake begins to arise ; and this can be connected with 
 the more human value of good letter-writing as a 
 means of preserving and renewing friendships. 
 
 The business letter and the friendly letter, then, 
 may be taken for a modest beginning. The first 
 guiding rule is that the situation in which the letter 
 is supposed to be written shall be one in which the 
 learner can easily imagine himself : applying for a 
 post and stating his quahfications (it does no harm 
 to allow some imaginative latitude as to these) ; 
 writing to a friend who proposes to join him in his 
 present work, and setting out the merits and de- 
 merits of the Mfe for this friend's benefit ; writing 
 a similar letter to describe the work of the con- 
 tinuation school — ^incidentally, the opinions thus 
 expressed or hinted at may be food for useful thought 
 to an open-minded teacher ; many other subjects 
 for letters readily occur to the mind, and suggestions 
 worthy of adoption will soon begin to come from 
 the class. Local interests should supply much of 
 the subject-matter, and any outstanding local event 
 can be made the occasion for a descriptive letter. 
 The teacher's criticism of the productions should 
 aim, first, at encouragement, by picking out good 
 phrases and sentences for commendation ; then 
 anything faulty can be referred to the class for 
 emendation, the teacher, if necessary, suggesting a 
 final improvement. 
 
 The transition from letter-writing to more dehbe- 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES in 
 
 rate composition wiU develop of its own accord. 
 Descriptive letters, as the motive power behind them 
 increases, will become more like essays, and as the 
 fiction of epistolary form -becomes unnecessary it 
 can be dispensed with. It is well, however, to main- 
 tain in the young writer's mind some notion of an 
 audience, not the teacher and the rest of the class, 
 whom he is addressing ; this keeps his ideas from 
 being bounded by the class-room 'waUs. Following 
 the vocational line, simple instructions can be 
 drafted, as though for a leaflet of useful "do's" 
 and " don'ts " to be circulated among newcomers 
 to a local trade or industry ; it is aU the better if the 
 teacher does not know all the minutiae, so that the 
 pupil has to make things clear to him in writing ; 
 other members of the class will- criticise anything 
 that is wrong. For the expression of more general 
 interests short descriptive articles, such as the local 
 paper can be imagined as pubHshing, are a useful 
 resource. A friendly editor might even be induced 
 to print any specially successful effort, as an example 
 of the school's work. 
 
 One great value of the essay class in secondary 
 schools is that it gives scope for the learner's expres- 
 sion of ideas derived from his other class work ; as 
 far as possible, this should be represented in the 
 continuation school. As we have said, no very close 
 collaboration of teachers with one another is likely 
 to be practicable at first, but this is one of the sim- 
 plest forms of co-operative teaching, and the com- 
 
112 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 position master or mistress should make every effort 
 to keep in touch with the subject-matter of other 
 courses. This will add reahty both to the compositions 
 and to the subjects with which they are connected. 
 
 V 
 
 The question of science teaching in the continuation 
 school gives a good illustration , of the unreahty of 
 
 opposing vocational to general training, 
 ^"d^* k ^° neglect the scientific side of the craft 
 upon which the pupil is engaged is to waste 
 a valuable source of interest, to pass by an open 
 gateway into the domain of general science ; while 
 concentration upon the pupil's daily work, and 
 nothing else, means imposing a narrow and sterile 
 outlook upon the work itself, so that nothing is seen 
 of its connection with other activities and their 
 sciences, nothing realised of its place in the world's 
 work as a whole. This reahsation, of one's own work 
 as a small, essential cog in a vast and interesting 
 machine, is most important to the moral of industry ; 
 the figure is often used to express disgust with one's 
 work, but in this sense the machine is thought of as 
 something that grinds on aimlessly and unintelligibly. ■ 
 Whether we regard the machine of industry as some- 
 thing to be preserved, or as something to be reformed 
 (and the two views are not incompatible), the first 
 need is that it should be understood, looked upon with 
 some imaginative interest and thought over not only 
 by a few controlling minds, but by the collective 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 113 
 
 mind of all who are concerned in it. This is the only 
 way to make it anything better than a machine. 
 
 The first aim, then, of continuation school science 
 should be to seize upon and to expand vocational 
 interest. To do this involves teaching a good deal 
 of general science, especially from the standpoints 
 of geography and simple economics ; and this is the 
 line of work for which it will be least difficult to find 
 or to train competent teachers. Modem geographical 
 study leads by many paths into a wide and useful 
 understanding of scientific relations. At the same 
 time, the study of actual processes connected with 
 the vocation — ^whether the industry be agricultural, 
 textile, mechanical, or of any other kind — leads to 
 something more resembhng the popular idea of 
 scientific training ; some appropriate knowledge of 
 physical and chemical laws, for example, is necessary 
 for the fuU imderstanding of industrial process, and 
 this knowledge, in its turn, has to be Hnked with a 
 more general survey of the sciences involved, if it is 
 to be properly taken in. But there will not yet be 
 many teachers able to correlate technology with 
 general science, and the principal means of expansion 
 will be those that the work of modem geographers 
 is making increasingly available. Meanwhile, it is 
 as well to note that scraps of physics or chemistry, 
 taught without relation to the learner's real world, 
 will be of Httle use, unless to a very occasional pupil 
 who has in him the makings of an expert scientist. 
 It is most advisable that the sciences should even- 
 
 c. I 
 
114 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 tually be taught, and taught as well as possible, in 
 continuation schools ; but this hope can only be 
 fulfilled to, the extent that we produce teachers who 
 can build definite scientific interest upon the basis 
 of real, existing interest. Attempted short cuts to 
 science are a waste of time. 
 
 The method that we suggest follows the golden 
 rule of taking the learner on from where he is, not 
 trying to make him jump suddenly to the attitude 
 of studious competence that we desire for him ; and 
 in science, until some general ground is achieved in 
 elementary schools, the continuation pupil will be 
 nowhere, to start with — ^he will have to be drawn 
 towards scientific interest by patient development 
 of the simplest general interests. But, by the same 
 rule, we must not expect teachers to jump suddenly 
 to an ideal proficiency in the manipulation of interest, 
 such as only the best products of the training colleges 
 are likely to show. 
 
 We must find, or make, the stepping stones that 
 lead from rule of thumb method to the method of 
 interest-cultivation. In the present case we have 
 available the teacher of modern geography on the 
 one hand, and the teacher of local, vocational tech- 
 nology on the other — assuming, that is, that the 
 probable compromise takes place between those who 
 think that continuation training should not be 
 vocational and those who think that it should be 
 nothing else. These teachers can be encouraged to 
 bring as much general science as possible into their 
 
• CONTINUATION COURSES 115 
 
 work. It is clear that modem geography is capable 
 of indefinite extension into general science ; this is, 
 indeed, the criticism levelled at it by those who like 
 their subjects in pigeon-holes. The geography sylla- 
 bus, then, should suggest two principal aims : the 
 building of geographical knowledge outwards from 
 local and vocational interests, and the connection 
 with it of as much appropriate scientific knowledge 
 as possible. Naturally, the science must be mixed 
 in slowly, or there will be lumps in the mixture ; and 
 a scientific outlook cannot be imposed upon any one, 
 teacher or taught, by magic. . The resultant mixture 
 might be labelled scientific geography, or geographical 
 science. The Geographical Association coiild no 
 doubt produce an admirable preliminary syllabus. 
 
 Meanwhile, the many varieties of local, vocational 
 training give as many opportunities for scientific 
 study of the processes, natural and artificial, that 
 are involved. Here we need technological instructors 
 who are keen on science, and ready to give scientific 
 explanations ; this spirit is far from uncommon, and 
 would grow with recognition and encouragement. 
 A great practical step would be to organise the train 
 ing and sending out of teachers with a scientific 
 knowledge of agriculture and farm work, who might 
 also be of great use on local farms. One such out- 
 standing example could be followed up in connection 
 with other industries. It is worth noting that we 
 have colonials among us now possessing practical 
 knowledge both of farming and of teaching, who 
 
ii6 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 might be induced to remain and help us to make a 
 beginning. 
 
 VI 
 
 ■ In considering what the teaching of history can 
 mean for the continuation school, it is more than 
 
 ever needful to remember that the syllabus 
 History. and method of full-time schools furnish a 
 
 model for avoidance rather than for adap- 
 tation to our ends. Secondary school history, culmi- 
 nating for a certain number in specialisation, at 
 school and university, demands a great deal of time 
 — even more time than is actually given to it ; it 
 teaches practically nothing that is memorable to 
 those who do not specialise with enthusiasm ; it is 
 the training of the academic expert, " tried on " in 
 the case of the average pupil, with the effect of 
 sifting out potential specialists and sending the rest 
 more or less empty away. This may or may not be 
 an ideal system in secondary work ; the point is, 
 for our present purpose, that whatever educative 
 result it has in secondary work it will not have in 
 continuation work, if only for the simple reasoi> that 
 there is not enough available time. We have to find 
 another method. 
 
 The possible alternatives may be put under three 
 heads ; we can teach scraps of ' text-book history, 
 surrounding them with plenty of biographical and 
 romantic interest, and trying to make them as 
 nourishing as possible to the historical sense ; we 
 can teach a broad and simple scheme of world his- 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 117 
 
 tory ; or we can develop an outlook upon history 
 that is fundamentally, though by no means exclu- 
 sively, economic, and fits in with our general aim of 
 harmonising vocational with developmental training. 
 We could decide outright upon the third alternative 
 if we had ideal teachers, who could make history 
 upon an economic basis as full of human interest as 
 it is made in Sir Stanley Leathes' text-books, instead 
 of the heavy, detail-congested subject that it can all 
 too easily become ; but the teacher who can expand 
 vocational into historical interests is seldom born, 
 and is not yet made in any quantity. This need not 
 mean that we must throw up aU hope of vocational- 
 economic interest in continuation school history, but 
 it does mean that we cannot start from this basis, 
 since the basis, as far as most teachers are con- 
 cerned, is not there to start from. In Part II. 
 the study of simple world history has been advo- 
 cated for the upper standards in elementary schools. 
 It is there pointed out that the teaching of 
 world history on elementary lines is not such a 
 large undertaking as it might appear at the first 
 glance. Assuming that this is not done, as yet, in 
 the elementary school, it might very weU be done in 
 the continuation school ; or, if already begun, it 
 might be carried further. But again, we have not 
 the equipped teacher ; and a good, simple text-book 
 on the main currents of world history, well correlated 
 with geographical considerations and easy economic 
 teachings, is badly needed. 
 
ii8 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 It seems as though scraps of " period " history 
 would have to be our starting-point for the present. 
 If so, it should be a starting-point to be left behind 
 as rapidly as possible ; and we shall consider one or 
 two of the available means for bringing about a 
 transition from it to the history that the continuation 
 pupil needs — a history that will show him how his 
 own hf e and work, and the life and work of his neigh- 
 bourhood and nation, belong to a system of cause 
 and effect through which the whole principle of social 
 service has been developed. First of all, the periods 
 chosen should be those with which relevant modern 
 comparisons can be made. The position of agriculture 
 and craftsmanship under different historical influ- 
 ences should be brought in as much as possible. Sir 
 Stanley Leathes' volumes on " The People of 
 England " should be in the hands of the; teacher, 
 both for the range of such instances that they give, 
 valuable in the education of the pupil as a worker, 
 and also for the useful sidelights that they throw 
 upon the development of citizenship. Every possible 
 and appropriate reference should be made to the 
 work of the locaMty, and to present-day questions of 
 service and citizenship as they arise from time to 
 time. World problems of to-day should also be 
 associated with events of the past : it is most inter- 
 esting to trace the way in which questions and dis- 
 putes that were formerly at issue between individuals, 
 or between small communities, are now, with the 
 development of the social complex, at issue between 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 119 
 
 large communities within the nation, and between 
 the nations themselves. 
 
 The chief point at which school history of the 
 academic type fails to answer the needs of continua- 
 tion work is its failure either to lead up to or to give 
 any account of the industrial revolution. This, for 
 continuation work, is the crucial historical moment ; 
 and it is from this moment that history — such history 
 as most of our teachers wiU have learnt — retreats in 
 disorder. It is difficult to see how teachers are to 
 pass, unaided, this pons asinorum in the union of 
 recent with remoter history. The difficulty is that 
 once a foot is set upon the bridge present political 
 opinion or prejudice comes in to complicate the issue. 
 Our chief hope must lie in the training colleges ; they 
 can do much, first, by teaching industrial and eco- 
 nomic history, and secondly, by developing the idea 
 that the history teacher's business is with events 
 rather than with opinions, or, rather, that his busi- 
 ness with opinions is to treat them as events, and 
 consequently to present them aU, and try to get them 
 understood, with impartiality. 
 
 VII' 
 
 We have seen that an element of industrial history 
 and an element of economic geography should enter 
 
 into continuation teaching if the worker 
 Politics. is to be one who thinks understandingly 
 
 about the place of his work, and of work 
 generally, in the scheme of things. This field of 
 
120 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 thought naturally leads to political speculations. 
 Indeed, it was this fact that for so long kept it a 
 closed field. Most of us, perhaps, are still in two 
 minds about the development of the worker's range 
 of thought in this region. There are many who will 
 say, not without justice, that it will infallibly lead 
 to questionings, discontents, and a hasty fumbling 
 after fallacious remedies. But the same people wiU 
 regretfully admit that the possibility of denying 
 expression to questionings and discontents is past. 
 They will be expressed in any case ; and we have to 
 consider how they can be expressed so as to help, 
 not to hinder, the task of reconstruction that hes 
 before us. 
 
 Industrial problems must arise ; and sound 
 economic teaching will help them to emerge intelli- 
 gently instead of blindly. But it is not enough to 
 provide for the intelligent emergence of problems ; 
 we have to develop some understanding of the range 
 of possible solutions. This does not. mean that we 
 should teach all the different political " isms " of 
 the day ; these can see to their own propaganda. 
 It means, rather, that we have to encourage balance 
 and breadth of view, so that ideas for the organic 
 growth of a political system may be distinguished 
 from mere poUtical nostrums ; and that we have to 
 provide some basis upon which sound poHtical 
 speculation can be built up. This basis is to be found 
 in a knowledge of the different polities that have 
 come into being, under varying circumstances and 
 
CONTI-NUATION COURSES 121 
 
 influences, in the course of human history. Ideally, 
 such teaching ought to be fused with that of modern 
 geography and simple economics, advocated in the 
 last two sections ; in practice, it is likely to require 
 a separate course, probably a lecture course given 
 by a teacher who has "got up " the subject for 
 this purpose, rather than the educational study 
 by the pupils, which few teachers would be able 
 to instigate. At the same time, such methods as 
 are described in Messrs. GoUancz and Somervell's 
 " Political Education at a Public School " might be 
 thought over by those who will be responsible for 
 continuation work, with a view to the possible intro- 
 duction of corresponding methods into the con- 
 tinuation school. Obviously, a method that produces 
 good results with public school boys is not likely to 
 prove directly adaptable to our purpose ; it is a 
 case, rather, for finding a complementary method of 
 encouraging the new attitude, on the part of the 
 State-school product, that will meet and co-operate 
 with the new attitude on the part of the public- 
 school product. Here, it is true, we are in a region 
 of speculative hope ; but signs are not wanting that 
 Utopia — or at least, a considerable urgency in a 
 Utopian direction — ^is in the minds of many whose 
 will must carry increasing weight in the near future. 
 For the immediate practical purpose, however, 
 we may confine ourselves to the idea of lecture classes 
 in politics, aiming simply at the opening up of broad 
 views. It will probably be best that these classes 
 
122 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 should not begin until after, say, the first year of 
 continuation schooling, when the simpler economic 
 aspects of civiUsation should have been duly realised, 
 since it is upon the rock of economic fallacy that an 
 insecure polity finally goes to pieces, however good 
 the character and intentions of the people concerned. 
 It wiU be a function of courses in history and geo- 
 graphy, as we have suggested, to teach the economic 
 view in close co-ordination with the wider human 
 values. From these courses a series of lessons on 
 the polities of different civiUsations can foUow in 
 natural sequence. None of these must be bfind-ahey 
 studies. As we have suggested in connection with 
 the choice of history periods, the polity that is chosen 
 for special study should be chosen, not only for its 
 intrinsic interest (which the continuation pupil may 
 fail to appreciate), but for its bearing upon some 
 aspect of present-day problems ; and this aspect 
 should be very carefully brought to the fore and 
 connected with those interests of the learner, in his 
 own civilisation and the work of his own world, 
 which it is so vitally important that he should 
 develop and expand. 
 
 The chief difficulty for the continuation pupil, as 
 for other and maturer minds, will be to see the 
 application of any given poUty to this or that element 
 in the confused network of modern civics. Our task 
 ^ of bringing clarity to the mind of the learner is bound 
 up with our task of bringing order into the inevitable 
 confusions of our present system. It will not be a 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 123 
 
 false simplification, but a valuable forward glance 
 along our only line of real simpUfication, if we treat 
 of local government, devolution, and the growth of 
 minor pohties co-ordinated within the modern State 
 rather from the point of view of what might be than 
 of what is. Not that the best available comprehen- 
 sion of that which is must be. neglected — far from it ; 
 but in this case the formulation of projects, followed 
 by discussion of the practical difficulties in their 
 way, is one of the best methods of approach to an 
 imderstanding of the present complex. The ideal 
 State — ^in Utopia — would be a perfect co-ordina- 
 tion, each in its place, of aU the poUties that have 
 proved their value ; and we suggest, with all due 
 caution against the purely visionary outlook, that 
 a little Utopia-mongering, always brought to earth 
 in its relation to present possibilities, might not be 
 without good effect upon the citizenship of the 
 future. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Our last few suggestions have been aimed at the 
 
 social intelligence of the pupil, his outlook upon 
 
 work and citizenship when he regards 
 
 Exact himself as a unit in the social complex. 
 
 Method. , J 
 
 We may now turn a closer regard upon 
 
 his practical equipment as an individual. This is 
 
 not to make a false opposition between his indi- 
 
 viduaHty and his citizenship; he needs as an 
 
 individual the same equipment that he needs as a 
 
124 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 social unit ; and the first requisite of all is clear- 
 headedness. There are many ways, as we have 
 seen, in which continuation work must cast loose 
 from the established formulae and the neat pigeon- 
 holes of secondary work ; and training in exactitude 
 of mind is one of the tasks that cannot be carried 
 to any useful issue, if we look both to the present 
 of the continuation pupil and to his future, by a 
 selection from secondary studies. Our suggestion 
 is that training in general accuracy should be made 
 the subject of a consecutive course, cutting across 
 the boundaries by which, in more specialised work, 
 the different kinds of accuracy are isolated and 
 studied each for its own sake. 
 
 Mathematics is the sheet-anchor of training in 
 exactitude ; and mathematics has long been divided 
 — though the division is breaking down, as regards 
 school work — ^into the theoretical and the practical. 
 Broadly speaking, we have not room for theoretical 
 mathematics in continuation work. But practical 
 mathematics need not mean only book-keeping, 
 accounts, and the calculations that belong to any 
 particular vocational studies of the pupil. All this 
 can be given its proper place as part of the vocational 
 training that must vary with the individual and the 
 locality, and therefore cannot come within the scope 
 of these general recommendations. The other side 
 of practical mathematics belongs to the solving of 
 general, everyday problems — the discovery, in any 
 given question, of how much of it can be expressed 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 125 
 
 in terms of quantity and stated and worked out in 
 figtures. This is a value of mathematics which is too 
 often neglected in secondary work. The act of the 
 mind that sifts out the quantitative element from a 
 problem and realises what can and what cannot be 
 dealt with by figures is an important aid to clarity. 
 Our course in the science of accuracy, then, will 
 include the question of mathematical accuracy (and 
 a good deal of actual problem work in arithmetic, 
 drawn from real and interesting problems of the 
 day), but it will also raise many questions of mental 
 exactitude that begin where calculation in figures 
 leaves off. How do we arrive at accuracy, or com- 
 parative accuracy, in such questions ? First of aU, 
 by making sure what we can know for certain and 
 what we cannot. It is a great help in the study of 
 any problem to have formed the habit of sifting out 
 and viewing separately one's certainties, one's com- 
 parative uncertainties, and one's complete uncer- 
 tainties. A general before a battle — to take the 
 obvious instance — ^knows his own numbers and dis- 
 positions accurately, the enemy's with comparative 
 accuracy, and calculates on the maximum that can 
 be supposed to be against him ; his weather pros- 
 pects, in spite of his meteorologists, are a matter of 
 comparative or complete uncertainty ; the moral of 
 his troops is partly calculable, but not by any directly 
 mathematical process ; and there are many other 
 points of greater or less certainty that he has to 
 consider. 
 
126 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 It wiU be obvious that there are innumerable 
 problems, great and small, that lend themselves to 
 consideration on the basis of the Emits of accuracy ; 
 and the writer's experience of children a good deal 
 below the continuation school age is that they take 
 a keen interest in this preUminary handhng of a 
 problem. They enjoy the sense that they grasp 
 and possess its significant elements, and can hold 
 them apart in their minds and see them distinctly 
 before bringing them together in a reasoned con- 
 clusion, as definite as the case wiU warrant, neither 
 more so nor less. They see that they have before 
 them a way of escape from muddle-headedness, the 
 sense of which makes all young people, like their 
 elders, feel ashamed. And we aU want the power 
 to be decisive without making slapdash mistakes. 
 The question is whether the real need of training in 
 exact method for the analysis and resolution of 
 everyday problems can be supphed by teachers of 
 the average grade. It may be suggested that the 
 proper soil out of which such a course of training 
 might grow is the existing treatment of arithmetical 
 problems. To begin with, problem work in itself, 
 simply as arithmetic, needs a good deal more atten- 
 tion and practice than it usually receives, if we mean 
 the real problem work that is not done by working 
 out examples that have been constructed to fit a 
 rule already learnt, but by an effort of native inge- 
 nuity on the part of the pupil to adapt the rules that 
 he knows to the exigencies of some practical question. 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 127 
 
 The opening stage of the course may well be made to 
 consist in such a study of real arithmetical problems, 
 special care being taken that the rules of proportion 
 are thoroughly understood and sensibly applied, 
 since a sense of proportion is the better half of reason, 
 in mathematics or in anything else. Then, the 
 " problems " course (this seems a possible title for 
 it) can be gradually extended to take in questions 
 to which arithmetic furnishes only a part of the 
 answer. This is already done, to a minor extent, in 
 modem arithmetic teaching, when we encourage 
 approximations and a commonsense view of the 
 requirements stated in a problem. The extent to 
 which human problems can be developed from the 
 arithmetical is a matter that wiU depend upon the 
 teacher, and upon the training that can be accorded 
 to him. A great deal can be done by the simple 
 process of asking for problems of any kind from the 
 class, fielding out how far they are capable of a 
 quantitative solution and then analysing and dis- 
 cussing, as far as possible, any further conclusion 
 that does not fall within the bounds of arithmetic. 
 
 IX 
 
 In many continuation schools, if not in most, it 
 will be advisable to have alternative courses in 
 
 certain subjects, answering to the needs 
 shfj*^™*"" °^ pupils whose daily employment leaves 
 
 them with this or that faculty unexpressed. 
 A certain number will be doing craftsman's work in 
 
128 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 greater or less degree, and these should be receiving 
 appropriate technological teaching, to bring out 
 whatever idea of craftsmanship belongs to their 
 trade or calhng. Others will be in sedentary employ- 
 ment, or giving such subordinate help in industry 
 as provides no development for their craftsman's 
 faculty ; and for these a course of manual training 
 is obviously indicated, for the sake of their general 
 development. These, also, are likely to change their 
 employment as they grow up, and will need to have 
 some practice in doing neat and accurate handiwork, 
 and some sense of pride in the work of their hands. 
 
 The question arises, What will be the best forms 
 of handiwork for the encouragement of this general 
 sense of craftsmanship ? We cannot afford much 
 time, and manual training is worse than useless if it 
 is scamped ; the choice lies between some one 
 activity, such as woodwork, pursued with all the 
 thoroughness that time will allow, and a succession 
 of small, fairly easy jobs, such as go to the develop- 
 ment of a " handy man," each studied with intelli- 
 gence and carried out in workmanlike style, and then 
 replaced by another of a different kind. The latter 
 plan has its recommendations. From the domestic 
 point of view, the handy man keeps a better home, 
 takes more interest in it, and shows a better example 
 to his children ; and we have to remember that 
 continuation schooling is taking some of the time 
 and energy which the adolescent, if he has a bent 
 that way, might be devoting to the cultivation of 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 129 
 
 handiness. We have to cater for this useful tendency, 
 and also to give it a chance to emerge in those who 
 would otherwise have been loungers at street corners. 
 The chief practical problems are teachers and 
 material. We may suggest that instructors should 
 be looked for among the ranks of the genuine handy 
 men — ^to be sharply distingtiished from the universal 
 muddlers who masquerade as such — and that, as we 
 suggested in Part II., a school workshop can have 
 great educational value when it is not provided but 
 comes into being as a cherished creation of the 
 teacher and class. 
 
 As for the activities of the class, a certain number 
 of odd jobs that need to be done about the school 
 building wiU be well within its scope ; and the pupils 
 can be encouraged to bring forward home problems 
 that they would like to tackle — such as the glazing 
 of a window, or the waterproofing of a damp waU, 
 or the making and putting up of a set of shelves for 
 the mother. This calls up the picture of a rather 
 desultory kind of teaching ; but the whole point of 
 it is that it gives an outlook upon desultory employ- 
 ments, that duty of keeping small things ship-shape 
 in which every one should take an interest and a 
 share, and introduces that policy of " thorough " 
 which does so much to smooth and simplify daily 
 Mfe. The mechanical side of civilisation leaves us 
 too much in the habit of letting an3^hing sUde that 
 cannot be handed over to a machine, human or other. 
 At the same time, pupils can learn to distinguish 
 
130 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 between the job that they can do satisfactorily for 
 themselves and the job that requires an expert ; it 
 is part of a training in workmanship to learn not to 
 tinker. 
 
 A second line of activity that we would suggest is 
 the making, by the pupils, of things that they them- 
 selves want, with the teacher to see that they make 
 them properly. Hobbies are not to be despised,- 
 educationally ; for one thing, the adolescent needs 
 some play-activity and needs the co-operation of 
 an adult in the transition from child's play to adult 
 recreation — that power to employ one's leisure which 
 has been said to be the test of the educated man. 
 The street-corner lounger is a boy who has lost his 
 power of play without transmuting it into active 
 enjoyment of a more grown-up kind. Also, real 
 hobbies keenly pursued keep alive a certain inven- 
 tiveness in the mind, which it is not a good thing 
 to let die. But it is most necessary that the hobby 
 should be connected with a good standard of crafts- 
 manship, or it degenerates into an unsatisfactory 
 " makeshiftiness " that destroys all its value. This 
 " makeshiftiness ", comes largely of starting a job 
 without due consideration of what tools and materials 
 are available, or what is one's available skill ; faihng 
 the exact thing that he needs, the adolescent goes 
 back to the spirit of childish play in which " any- 
 thing wiU do." It is here that the teacher can help 
 by suggesting foresight in planning, modifications in 
 the plan to make it thoroughly practicable, and, 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 131 
 
 above all, interest in a workmanlike job for its own 
 sake, pride in a weU-finished product, and a corre- 
 sponding shame about anything that is merely 
 cobbled together. If a course of this t37pe seems too 
 much like amusement for serious consideration, we 
 may remember that it is for those who badly need 
 the association of interest with manual activity ; 
 the many who are doing nothiiig interesting with 
 their hands during their working hours. These will 
 inevitably miss the development that comes naturally 
 to those whose daily work is a craft, unless something 
 is done for them, and on simple and possible lines. 
 
 X 
 
 It is likely that we must wait a long time foi: a 
 studied scheme of artistic training in the continuation 
 
 school, although we are beginning to recog- 
 Drawlng. nise that no one is completely educated 
 
 whose artistic side, be it strong or weak, 
 is undeveloped. We admire the man who is a bit 
 of an artist in his work, whatever the work may 
 be, and we may wish that his type were oftener to 
 be found ; but we are not yet prepared, either in 
 opinion or technique, to give development and 
 expression to the modicum of art that is in every one. 
 The elementary schools, however, are making a good 
 beginning ; and something, at least, should be done 
 in the continuation schools to keep alive the rudi- 
 ments of an artistic outlook and an artistic con- 
 science. It is only necessary that the teaching shall 
 
132 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 be simple and practical : simple, because otherwise 
 it cannot be thorough in the hmited time that will 
 be available ; and practical, because the artistic 
 instinct, to be of any value in a Ufe which is not that 
 of a professed artist, should give its particular colour 
 and zest to everyday doings. It is not enough, 
 though it is a good thing in itself, that the " young 
 person " should go into a picture gallery when he 
 has a chance and enjoy what he sees there. 
 
 Another not unimportant question is the value 
 of pictorial expression in many regions of class work. 
 Most teachers know how much a drawing or diagram 
 made by the pupil can do to ensure the fuU compre- 
 hension of facts and ideas ; ' but teachers of con- 
 tinuation subjects will not have time to teach 
 drawing to those who are unhandy with a pencil, 
 and may be inclined to regard it as a luxury 
 that they cannot afford. 
 
 A drawing class wiU serve, in the first instance, 
 to maintain a standard that wiU be valuable in other 
 classes. There is also the practical value outside 
 school work : in many trades and calUngs the abihty 
 to turn out a good diagram or sketch is a very dis- 
 tinct asset. This, probably, is the point that will 
 appeal first to the pupil who would otherwise see 
 little reason for troubling himself to learn to draw. 
 So far we are on utilitarian rather than artistic lines ; 
 but we may insist that art can only spring out of 
 utility, however far from it it may eventually spring. 
 For the majority it cannot spring far, but can do 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES i33 
 
 something to bring healthy pleasure into a utilitarian 
 Uie. There is something of artistic satisfaction in 
 making a good sketch of a job before setting to work 
 upon it. Several forms of technology" will include 
 the production of working drawings, and pupils who 
 are preparing for such interesting and advanced work 
 as this implies will be all the better for the standard 
 of artistic finish that should be given by drawing 
 lessons ; while even those who may go through life 
 and scarcely ever need to make a sketch of any kind 
 wiU have had their comprehension of line,' form, and 
 proportion strengthened in some degree. Here we 
 touch upon the developmental value that the 
 simplest art teaching has for the mind and for the 
 natture in general. 
 
 Granted the value of a course in drawing, there 
 remains the question of method. The teaching of 
 drawing falls under two heads : practice in muscular 
 control — the ability to put the Hne where the mind's 
 eye sees it — and actual representation. The almost 
 obsolete " freehand " drawing, from printed copies, 
 provided (on the wrong system) for the first element, 
 ignoring the second. Drawing from solid models, 
 made for the purpose, aUows for a certain inadequate 
 amount of representation, giving the mind some 
 translation to effect from form into Hne, while 
 keeping exact enough for the necessary muscular 
 practice. Drawing from natural objects gives a 
 great deal more scope for representation but makes 
 it very difficult for the tyro to see his lines at all 
 
134 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 exactly before he draws them, and so tends to give 
 too little training in control. It is the writer's 
 experience that a great deal of the training in control ' 
 can profitably be detached from representation and 
 studied separately as exercise work. Such exercises 
 as making three dots haphazard on the paper and 
 then trying to draw an arc through them with a 
 single sweep of the pencil do. more for the co-ordina- 
 tion of eye and hand than much drawing from models. 
 It is of no use to be able to " fudge " an outhne into 
 approximately the right shape ; the satisfactory 
 thing is to be able to transfer the line that one sees 
 directly on to the paper. We recommend, then, a 
 good proportion of well-thought-out exercises in 
 direct, rapid line-drawing ; they save time in the 
 long run and obviate a great deal of muddling about 
 with the pencil. (And it may be noted that they do 
 not, in practice, bore the pupil ; he is bored, rather, 
 by having to muddle away at a drawing that he 
 cannot get right.) 
 
 Natural objects, chosen with common sense, should 
 then present no insuperable difficulties ; but we must 
 attend to the commonplace of the art schools — ^that 
 you. must see a fine before you can draw it, and that 
 half the battle consists in learning to see. The pupil 
 needs continual help in picking out the main signifi- 
 cant lines and giving them their right emphasis and 
 no more. But given this judicious help, and also 
 sufficient practice in making his pencil-point go 
 where he wants it, he almost teaches himself, and is 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 135 
 
 best left to develop the style that suits him— though 
 his style should be criticised in general for any 
 weakness or slapdash quality or tendency to " fiddle." 
 We have considered pencil drawing only, as being 
 the most Hkely to be generally taught ; the educa- 
 tional value of the use of colour must be left for 
 consideration to those who are prepared to go 
 farther than our present modest aims. 
 
 XI 
 
 While the general aim of the continuation school, 
 apart from technological training, should be dis- 
 tinctly opposed to specialisation, it will be 
 Subjects. ^^^ *° consider the possibility of one or 
 two special courses into which likely 
 students may be drafted. This will only be feasible 
 where the numbers of the school are fairly large and 
 there is sufficient staff to provide for alternatives ; 
 but the large continuation school should be taken 
 into account, precisely because it makes the first 
 offer of these wider alternatives. 
 
 It has been, with some reluctance that we have 
 kept naodem languages out of our general scheme ; 
 but it is very clear that modern languages cannot be 
 approached with any profit until a thorough ground- 
 ing in the mother tongue has been secured. For the 
 majority, all the available attention will be needed 
 to secure a proper appreciation of the resources of 
 English ; but there wiU be some pupils, coming from 
 the elementary school with their natural language 
 
136 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 bump well developed, who wiU be quite ready, after 
 perhaps a year of further study in English, to pass 
 on to a practical course in French that will both 
 widen their mental outlook (an undoubted effect of 
 studying, however slightly, a foreign tongue) and 
 open up for them the chances that he before even 
 the incipient linguist. The vexed question arises 
 here, whether the grammatical or the direct method 
 should be employed ; the opposition between the 
 two is largely mistaken, but it exists. We can only 
 say that either, by itself, is a roundabout method 
 for which continuation work cannot afford the time, . 
 and urge that an honest attempt should be made to 
 combine the two. (It will be obvious that we are 
 using the phrase " direct method " in a sense that 
 only apphes to the one-sided view of the system 
 which in its more modern development is both 
 " direct " and grammatical.) For this union two 
 things are necessary : that English grammar shall 
 have been taught in an intelligible and interesting 
 way and that the same terminology shaU be carried 
 over from English into the foreign language. It is 
 absurd, and it wastes time, to teach French grammar 
 as something apart from English grammar ; and the 
 grammarless teaching of a language is a slow and 
 nebulous business. 
 
 We have already suggested (in Part II.) a 
 way of approach to English grammar ; on the 
 question of terminology we can point to the 
 report of the Modern Languages Committee, which 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 137 
 
 indorses the findings of the Joint Committee of 
 Grammatical Terminology. The reforms advocated 
 by the latter committee would, we believe, make 
 exactly the difference between being able to teach 
 a modern language in the continuation school, and 
 not being able to teach it — or being able to teach 
 only an inefiEective smattering. Even the selected- 
 pupils whom we have in mind for'a modem language 
 course, those who show some real grasp of Enghsh, 
 wUl make little progress in the available time unless 
 their grasp of EngMsh is utilised. 
 
 Mathematics is another subject in which, among^ 
 the pupils of a large town school, there is hkely to 
 be considerable difference of aptitude and attain- 
 ment. The more advanced will have to be drafted 
 out of the course that will be needed by the majority. 
 What kind of work will be, for these, at once the 
 most useful and the most educative ? Our own 
 suggestion would be that a course in practical mathe- 
 matics should be given, with special insistence on 
 the intelligent use of shortened methods, graphical 
 work, mensuration, and (if we get so far) the first 
 elements of statics and djmamics. The advantage 
 of shortened methods is obvious, and they have 
 much value in promoting quickness of mind, pro- 
 vided that they are thoroughly understood. Graphi- 
 cal work, connected with vital statistics and other 
 civic interests, has very real importance for an under- 
 standing citizenship ; many things that the educated 
 citizen ought to have in mind can best be set out in 
 
138 ■ THE CURRICULUM 
 
 the form of graphs, and we may look forward to a 
 time when graphical representation can be much 
 more freely used in the press. The power of " sizing 
 up," which mensuration develops, has a wide voca- 
 tional usefulness ; and if there can be added some 
 notion of the scientific " sizing up " of forces, as well 
 as quantities, so much the better. Algebra need not 
 be ruled out of our reach if it is approached from the 
 practical standpoint, the symbols being introduced 
 as the need for them arises. 
 
 Something may be done, also, for those who show 
 aptitude in natural science. The main course that 
 we have suggested (" Science and Work ") would 
 develop scientific ideas largely from the standpoint 
 of modern geography teaching-^the most scientific 
 teaching, in the wide sense, that we have in fairly 
 common use. Here, again, there wiU be pupils, from 
 the more advanced elementary schools, who forge 
 ahead rapidly, and soon become fitted for more 
 definite scientific training. For these, the real need 
 is laboratory work, and it will be of no use to persuade 
 ourselves that classroom work can serve the same 
 purpose effectually. We may hope that a time may 
 come, with further educational progress in this 
 country, when every continuation school wiU have 
 its laboratory — not necessarily an elaborate and 
 expensive affair — as a matter of course ; meanwhile, 
 it may be urged that the largest schools, or those of 
 them that are in the best financial circumstances, 
 should take the first step. 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 139 
 
 XII 
 
 Two views of the continuation school are possible : 
 in the one view, its purpose is to provide the pupil 
 with as much knowledge and development 
 Conclusion, as the allotted time will permit — it has to 
 put him on good terms with himself and 
 help him to make good his latent capacities. In the 
 •other view, it must do something to put him on 
 good terms with the world in which he has to Hve 
 and work, and with the community of which he is 
 becoming a citizen. The suggestions put forward 
 in the preceding sections have been directed towards 
 both aims ; and indeed, the two can only be realised 
 in so far as they can be made one. But education is 
 only moving with comparative slowness towards an 
 equal balance between individual and social develop- 
 ment ; the existing body of method that we have to 
 mould to our purpose takes account, predominantly, 
 of the individual ; and it may be as weU to lay the 
 final stress upon social development as the value 
 that we most need to keep in mind. 
 
 In the first place continuation work has to make 
 clear to the learner what it is that his world expects 
 of him, and to overcome the inertia towards full 
 social adaptation — an inertia that easily shades off 
 into hostihty — ^which is natural to those who do not 
 understand their world, or believe that it deserves 
 weU of them. There are few who do not suffer in 
 some degree from what Mr. Clutton-Brock has called 
 a conscientious objection to life in general. The 
 
140 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 remedy for this disease is an awakened interest in 
 one's world and an active, not a perfunctory, attitude 
 towards it Energy follows the lead of interest, and 
 the union of interest and energy is will — in the social 
 aspect of things, the will to serve ; in the corre- 
 sponding individual aspect, the will to progress. The 
 development of wiU, as the necessary complement to 
 the development of knowledge, is the goal towards 
 which modern education is striving ; we recognise, 
 in ourselves and in our civihsation, too much of the 
 type that knows what should be done and does not 
 do it. It is a tragic fact that we needed war to make 
 us begin to realise the importance of will. Peace 
 and reconstruction will need no less, and social good- 
 will is the primary value that we have to develop ; 
 and it can only be developed through social interest. 
 It is for this reason that we have put forward social 
 interests as being so largely the concern of continua- 
 tion Schoohng. Continuation work brings us face to 
 face with a great opportunity, in that it gives us 
 learners in school who are also, and at the same time, 
 learners in adaptation to the wider social life. We 
 have to arouse in them further desire for knowledge, 
 further desire for progress ; but through and beyond 
 everything else we have to arouse a fuller desire for, 
 and understanding of, social fellowship and service. 
 This cannot be done as a matter of theorising and 
 preaching alone ; it can only be done by taking the 
 practical concerns of the pupil's world and helping 
 him, in conjunction with his fellows, to understand 
 
CONTINUATION COURSES 141 
 
 their abounding interest and their vital claim upon 
 him. Thefe is, we must recognise, another side to 
 the picture. Much of industrial life and work is 
 consumingly dull. And it is important for the young 
 worker to look this fact straight in the face, and to 
 consider the why and wherefore of it. The con- 
 sideration would make a good subject in the course 
 that we have outlined imder the heading of " The 
 Written Word." It would be of great use to the 
 learner's view of social Ufe to have considered, from 
 practical examples, how far mere bald drudgery is 
 permanently necessary, how far it is temporarily 
 necessary, and to what extent we can look to better 
 organisation and drudgery-saving machinery for a 
 release of energy to the service of higher ends. We 
 know how many valuable labouir-saving inventions 
 have been evolved by intelMgent and thoughtful 
 workmen of the self-educated type ; the t3;pe might 
 emerge with less rarity under the influence of the 
 continuation school. 
 
 It may be difficult, since we have been trained for 
 so long to think of school subjects in separate pigeon- 
 holes, to imagine education for social understanding 
 and social service as an5rthing but an additional 
 subject or set of subjects. The point is, rather, that 
 any subject can be taught with or without the social 
 aim. In many cases, such as history, the subject- 
 matter can be chosen and presented with an eye to 
 its bearing upon present conditions and problems. 
 This is advisable in all school work, if we wish to 
 
142 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 develop other than academic interests ; iri .con- 
 tinuation school work it will be imperative, because 
 academic developments, if we wanted them, wiU in 
 most cases be out of the question. Next to the choice, 
 whenever there is an alternative, of subject-matter 
 that correlates well with social interests, we have ta 
 consider the extent to which these interests can be 
 brought in, for reference and illustration, to teaching 
 of all kinds. There is nothing that has not its social 
 aspect ; there is nothing to which this aspect does 
 not give increased breadth and reahty ; and we 
 have to unlearn an ingrained habit of leaving it out. 
 Our social reactions to the war, eager, weU-inten- 
 tioned, and largely impotent, show the extent ol 
 the blind patch , that there has been in our field of 
 vision. We need to develop an increasing power of 
 social vision, as a community ; this development 
 wiU be largely in the hands of the continuation 
 schools, as they are at first, and as they will be in 
 the further future ; and their future growth and 
 influence upon our national Hfe wiU be to a great 
 extent determined by the kind of foundations that 
 we lay now for a training in social understanding. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A. 
 
 Abstractions, 23, 46 et seq. 
 Adams, Professor J., " The 
 
 New Teaching," viii 
 Algebra, 24 
 Apparatus, 78, 8r 
 Artistic work, 3, 30 et seq., 94, 
 
 131 et seq. 
 
 C. 
 
 Causation, 11 — 12 
 Chemistry, 10, 12 
 Citizenship, 97 
 Civics, 8 
 Classification : 
 of subjects, 2 
 
 of things and of words, 56 
 Composition, 8 
 Conscience, 33 
 Consistency, 51 , 
 Continuity, 9, 15 
 Cook, Mr. CaldweU, " The Play 
 
 Way," 33 
 Co-operation between teachers, 
 
 40 — 41, 98 et passim. 
 Correlation, value of small 
 
 links, 90. {See also under 
 
 Interrelation.) 
 Cycle of change, in Nature, 10 
 
 D. 
 
 Difiuseness, 13 
 Dogma, 35 — 37 
 Dramatising grammar, 59 
 Drawing, 131 et seq. 
 
 E. 
 
 Economics, 8, 28, 122 
 Environment and character, 
 
 28 — 29 
 Expression, 105, 107 
 
 Geography, 3, 8, 13, 15, 26 et 
 seq., 115 
 
 Geometry, 24 
 
 GoUancz and Somervell, " Poli- 
 tical Education at a Public 
 School," 121 
 
 Grammar, vii, 7, ig, 54 et seq., 
 104 et seq. 
 
 Graphical work, 137 — 138 
 
 Greek, 19 
 
 H. 
 
 Handiwork, 3, 53, 76 et seq., 
 
 127 et seq. 
 History, 3, 8, 13, i^]et seq., 36, 
 
 52, 65 et seq., 116 et seq. 
 Hobbies, 130 
 
 Imagination and accuracy, 83 
 Individual and social develop- 
 ment, 139 et seq. 
 Industrial revolution, 119 
 Inertia, 139 
 
 Interest, childish, 73 — 74 
 Interrelation of subjects, 4, 26, 
 34, ^to, 48, 52, 77, 88 et seq., 
 ,98, III — 112, et passim. 
 
 Labour problems, 120 
 Language teaching, vii, 3, 7, 
 
 18 et seq., 52, 54 et seq., 80, 
 
 100 et seq., 135 — 137 
 Latin, 19 
 Leathes, Sir Stanley, " The 
 
 People of England," 117, 118 
 Letter- writing, 109 
 Life, in relation to energy and 
 
 matter, 71 — 72 
 
144 
 
 INDEX 
 
 M. 
 
 Mathematics, 3, 7, 13, 22 et seq., 
 
 81 — 82, 124 ei seq., 137 
 Morley College, loi 
 Mother tongue, vii, 3, 19 
 
 O. 
 
 •Odd jobs, 129 
 
 Overcrowding of curriculum, 39 
 
 P. 
 
 Physical education, 84 et seq. 
 Picture and diagram, 31 
 Politics, iig et seq. 
 Principle and practice, i 
 Principles for children, 46 
 
 R. 
 
 " Readers, '■ 63 — 64, 88 — 90 
 Reading, 61 et seq., 100 et seq. 
 Relations, '4 
 Religious knowledge, 2, 16, 29, 
 
 34 et seq. 
 Rule of thumb, 25 
 
 Science, 3, 8, 9 et seq., 28, 32, 
 37, 52, 69 et seq., 112 et seq., 
 138 
 
 Small beginnings, 105 
 
 Social interests, 140 — 142 
 
 Specialisation, 4 
 
 Stories, historical, 65 et seq. 
 
 Sijibject-paralysis, 43 
 
 Symbol and reality, 61 — 62 
 
 T. 
 
 Terminology, grammatical, 136 
 
 —137 
 Theories, childish, 49 
 Time-table, 5 et seq. 
 Truth and fact, 61 — 63 
 Tyndall's wave, 11 
 
 V. 
 
 Vocational and non-vocational 
 work, 76, 97, 112 — 113 
 
 W. 
 Will, 140 
 
 Words, child's idea of, 54 
 World history, 15 — 16, 66- 
 Writing, 91, 92, 106 et seq. 
 
 -67 
 
 THE WHITEFRtARS PRESS, LTP., LONDON AND TONBJRIDGE.