This working outwards from actual experiences, from the home country to the foreign, from actual contact with real things to things of travellers’ tales, is the only way to bring geography to the very door of the school, to make it part of the actual life.

The beginning of history, as of geography, lies in the child’s foundations of experience.  In the country village he sees the church, possibly some old cottages, or an Elizabethan or Jacobean house near; in the churchyard or in the church the tombstones have quaint inscriptions with reference possibly to past wars or to early colonisation.  The slum child on the other hand sees much that is worn out, but little that is antiquated, unless the slum happen to be in such places as Edinburgh or Deptford, situated among the remains of really fine houses:  but he realises more of the technicalities and officialism of a social system than does the country child; the suburban child has probably the scantiest store of all; his district is presumably made up of rows of respectable but monotonous houses, and the social life is similarly respectable and monotonous.

There are certain cravings, interests and needs, common to all children, which come regardless of surroundings.  All children want to know certain things about people who lived before them, not so much their great doings as their smaller ones; they want to know what these people were like, what they worked at, and learnt, how they travelled, what they bought and sold:  and there is undoubtedly a primitive strain in all children that comes out in their love of building shelters, playing at savages, and making things out of natural material.  One of the most intense moments in Peter Pan to many children is the building of the little house in the wood, and later on, of the other on the top of the trees:  that is the little house of their dreams.  They are not interested in constitutions or the making of laws; wars and invasions have much the same kind of interest for them as the adventures of Una and the Red Cross Knight.

How are these cravings usually satisfied in the early stages of history teaching of to-day?  As a rule a series of biographies of notable people is given, regardless of chronology, or the children’s previous experiences, and equally careless of the history lessons of the future; Joan of Arc, Alfred and the Cakes, Gordon of Khartoum, Boadicea, Christopher Columbus, Julius Caesar, form a list which is not at all uncommon; there is no leading thread, no developing idea, and the old test, “the children like it,” excuses indolent thinking.  On the other hand, the desire to know more of the Robinson Crusoe mode of life has been apparent to many teachers for some time, but the material at their disposal has been scanty and uncertain.  It is to Prof.  Dewey that we owe the right organisation of this part of history.  He has shown that it is on the side of industry, the early modes of weaving, cooking, lighting