should help us all to be “grateful to those unknown pioneers of the human race to whose struggles and suffering, discoveries and energies our present favoured mode of existence on the planet is due.  The more people realise the effort that has preceded them and made them possible, the more are they likely to endeavour to be worthy of it:  the more pitiful also will they feel when they see individuals failing in the struggle upward and falling back toward a brute condition; and the more hopeful they will ultimately become for the brilliant future of a race which from such lowly and unpromising beginnings has produced the material vehicle necessary for those great men who flourished in the recent period which we speak of as antiquity."[29]

[Footnote 29:  The Substance of Faith, p. 18.]

Professor Dewey urges that “the industrial history of man is not a materialistic or merely utilitarian affair,” but a matter of intelligence, a record of how men learned to think, and also an ethical record, “the account of the conditions which men have patiently wrought out to serve their ends.”

This interest in how human beings have created themselves and their surroundings ought to be deeply interesting to any and every age.  Young children can reach so little that one hopes the interest aroused will be lasting and lead to fruitful work later.  But it certainly makes a good foundation for the study of history and geography, if history is treated as sociology and if geography is recognised as the study of man in his environment.

Coming now to practical details, in our own work we have followed fairly closely the suggestions made by Professor Dewey, but everything must vary from year to year according to the suggestions of the children or their apparent needs.  One extra step we have found necessary, and that is to spend some time over a desert island or Robinson Crusoe stage.  Some children can do without it, but all enjoy it, and the duller children find it difficult to imagine a time when “you could buy it in a shop” does not fit all difficulties.  They can easily grasp the idea of sailing away to a land “where no man had ever been before,” and playing at desert island has always been a joy.

The starting-points for primitive life have been various; sometimes the work has found its beginning in chance conversation, as when a child asked, “Are men animals?” and the class took to the suggestion that man meant thinking animal, and began to consider what he had thought.  Often after Robinson Crusoe there has been a direct question, “How did Robinson Crusoe know how to make his things; had any one taught him?  Who made the things he had seen; who made the very first and how did he know?” One answer invariably comes, “God taught them,” which can be met by saying this is true, but that God “teaches” by putting things into the world and giving men power to think.  This leads to a discussion about things natural, “what God makes” and what man makes, which is sometimes illuminating on the limited conceptions of town children.  Years ago we named primitive man “the Long-Ago People,” and the title has seemed to give satisfaction, though once we had the suggestion of “Old-Time Men.”