L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 241 



pie our introduction to what Huxley christened long ago as Elementary 

 Physiography. We ought to build up simple and clear ideas from 

 natural experience. 



We start a study of the states of matter with the boiling, evaporation, 

 freezing and so on of water and go on to elementary physics and chemistry. 

 Local topography can form the basis of geography. We shall have to let 

 our learner into the secret that the world is a globe — and for a time 

 I think that has to be a bit of dogmatic teaching. It is not so easy as many 

 people suppose to prove that the world is spherical and that proof may 

 very well be left to make an exercise in logic later on in the education. 

 Then comes biology. Education I rejoice to see is rapidly becoming 

 more natural, more biological. Most young children are ready to learn 

 a great deal more than most teachers can give them about animals. I think 

 we might easily turn the bear, the wolf, the tiger and the ape from holy 

 terrors and nightmare material into sympathetic creatures, if we brought 

 some realisation of how these creatures live, what their real excitements 

 are, how they are sometimes timid, into the teaching. I don't think that 

 descriptive botany is very suitable for young children. Flowers and 

 leaves and berries are bright and attractive, a factor in aesthetic education, 

 but I doubt if, in itself, vegetation can hold the attention of the young. 

 But directly we begin to deal with plants as hiding-places, homes and food 

 for birds and beasts, the little boy or girl lights up and learns. And with 

 this natural elementary zoology and botany we ^ould begin elementary 

 physiology. How plants and animals live, and what health means for 

 them. 



There I think you have stuff enough for all the three or four hundred 

 hours we can afford for the foundation stage of knowledge. Outside 

 this substantial teaching of school hours the child will be reading and 

 indulging in imaginative play — and making that clear distinction children 

 do learn to make between truth and fantasy — about fairyland, magic 

 carpets and seven league boots, and all the rest of it. So far as my con- 

 victions go I think that the less young children have either in or out of 

 school of what has hitherto figured as history, the better. I do not see 

 either the charm or the educational benefit of making an important subject 

 of the criminal history of royalty, the murder of the Princes in the Tower, 

 the wives of Henry the Eighth, the families of Edward and James I, the 

 mistresses of Charles H, Sweet Nell of Old Drury, and all the rest of it. 

 I suggest that the sooner we get all that unpleasant stuff out of schools, 

 and the sooner that we forget the border bickerings of England, France, 

 Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Bannockburn, Flodden, Crecy and Agin- 

 court, the nearer our world will be to a sane outlook upon life. In this 

 survey of what a common citizen should know I am doing my best to 

 elbow the scandals and revenges which once passed as English history 

 into an obscure corner or out of the picture altogether. 



But I am not proposing to eliminate history from education — far from 

 it. Let me bring down my diagram a stage further and you will see how 

 large a proportion of our treasure of 2,400 hours I am proposing to give 

 to history. This next section represents about 800 to 1,000 pre-adolescent 

 hours. It is the school-boy — school-girl stage. And here the history is 

 planned to bring home to the new generation the reality that the world 



