The same principle applies with just the same force to history and geography; both of these studies can be made interesting, if they are not regarded as isolated groups of phenomena, but are approached from the boy’s own experience as opening away and outwards from what is going on about him.  The object is or ought to be slowly to extend the boy’s horizon, to show him that history holds the seeds and roots of the present, and that geography is the life-drama which he sees about him, enacting itself under different climatic and physiographical conditions.  The dreariness and dreadfulness of knowledge to the immature mind is because it represents itself as a mass of dry facts to be mastered without having any visible or tangible connection with the boy’s own experience.  The aim should rather be to teach him to look with zest and interest at what is going on outside his own narrow circle, and to help him to move perceptively along the paths of time and space which diverge in all directions from the scene where he finds himself.

It may be indisputably stated that all connected knowledge is stimulating, and that all unconnected knowledge is at best mechanical.  Perhaps one of the most fruitful of all subjects is vivid biography, and no serious educator could perform a more valuable task than in providing a series of biographies of great men, really intelligible to youthful minds.  As a rule, biographies of the first order require an amount of detailed knowledge in the reader which puts them out of the reach of ill-stored minds.  But I have again and again found with boys that simple biographical lectures are among the most attractive of all lessons.  At one time, with my private pupils, I would take a book at random out of my shelves, read an interesting extract or two, and then say that I would try to show why the author chose such a subject, why he wrote as he did, and how it all sprang out of his life and character and circumstances.

Of course the difficulty in all this is that the field of knowledge is so vast and various, while the capacities of boys are so small, and the time to be spent on their education so short, that we quail before the attempt to grapple with the problem.  We have moreover a vague idea that the well-informed man ought to have a general notion of the world as it is, the course of history, the literature of the ages; and at the same time the scientists are maintaining that a general knowledge of the laws and processes of nature is even more urgently needed.  I cannot treat of science here, but I fully subscribe to the belief that a general knowledge of science is essential.  But the result of our believing that it is advisable to know so much, is that we attempt to spread the thinnest and driest paste of knowledge over the mind, and all the vivid life of it evaporates in the process.  The thing is, frankly, far too big to attempt; and, we must henceforth set our faces against the attainment; of mere knowledge as either advisable or possible.