SCIENCE -Supplement. 



FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 1886. 



HOW TO TEACH GEOGRAPHY. 



If American teachers of geography and history 

 could know and appreciate how those subjects are 

 taught in the best schools, and in fact generally 

 throughout Germany, Austria, and France, they 

 would hardly be able to recognize the fact that 

 large and interested classes were in those countries 

 deriving keen intellectual enjoyment, and also 

 acquiring sound and lasting knowledge from and 

 of two subjects which in our primary and inter- 

 mediate schools are, as a rule, matters of weary 

 memorizing and mechanical drudgery. To teach 

 is something that most of our teachers sadly need 

 to be taught ; and of geography this is perhaps 

 unusually true. The usual method in this coun- 

 try is to compel a child of from seven to 

 twelve years to first learn an abstract definition 

 of geography ; then follow some erudite sections 

 as to the distribution of land and water on the 

 globe, races of men, climate, and so forth, all 

 stated in technical language that might well ap- 

 pal some older persons, to say nothing of child- 

 minds, to whom the subject is new and utterly 

 strange. After several pages of this material 

 have been carefully stored away in the wholly 

 unappreciative memory, a map is introduced, and 

 the study of geography proceeds with the learn- 

 ing of the names of countries, rivers, mountain- 

 chains, towns, and other unmanageable details, all 

 of which are treated as if they had no connection 

 whatever with one another. In a year or two 

 geography is 'finished,' and the process of for- 

 getting much of it begins. This barbarous, use- 

 less, and unscientific method of teaching (it may 

 be so called by courtesy) geography is not con- 

 fined to this country : it is the method usually 

 followed in England also : and a paper on the sub- 

 ject, read by R. Elliot Steel, F.R.G.S., before the 

 College of preceptors in London, and reported at 

 some length in the Educational times for May, is 

 quite as deserving of attention here as in England. 

 Mr. Steel summarizes the abuses and deficiencies 

 of the present system of teaching geography 

 under the following heads : 1°. In maps, igno- 

 rance of scale, and failure in remembering the 

 general outlines of a country and its principal 

 physical features, in consequence of the use of 

 maps crammed with details, and unsuitable for 



teaching-purposes ; 2°. More than any thing, igno- 

 rance of physical geography, including the simplest 

 laws of the inorganic world ; 3°. Total neglect of 

 history ; 4°. Ignorance of the commercial aspects 

 of a country. 



The fundamental cause of all these shortcom- 

 ings is the fact that geography is not taught as a 

 unity in any of the universities, and therefore 

 the vast majority of the text-books are written by 

 book-makers, and not by ardent students and 

 teachers of the subject. Thus, the school-atlas is 

 a clumsy, ill-constructed affair, generally designed 

 to help adults find some obscure place or river, 

 rather than to teach geography. The matter of 

 scale is wholly overlooked ; and the child sees no 

 incongruity in asserting Spain to be as large as 

 the United States, or Europe to equal Asia in 

 size, for do not both occupy a full page of the 

 book? This matter of scale is of primary im- 

 portance, and cannot be taught abstractly. It is 

 well to have the schoolroom supplied with a series 

 of maps, all drawn to the same scale, say, 1 : 10,- 

 000,000. But it is far better to teach the child 

 experimentally. Let him measure the school- 

 room in units (feet and inches) perfectly definite 

 and well understood. Then let him draw a plan 

 of the schoolroom on the blackboard, reduced to 

 a scale, and then compare objects with this pic- 

 ture. Gradually the object delineated can be 

 changed from the schoolhouse to the block, from 

 the block to the village or city, from the city to 

 the state ; and so on. This will fairly fix in the 

 beginner's mind the principles of map-drawing, 

 and after that a map will cease to represent to 

 him merely a page of the text-book. 



At present we teach words and phrases, ab- 

 stractions, instead of circumstances, natural laws, 

 and material things. For example : what possi- 

 ble good can be derived from making a child learn 

 from a book that a glacier is a river of ice, which 

 descends the slopes of high mountains, till it 

 finally melts in warmer regions or reaches the 

 sea? Such knowledge as this would not even fit 

 the pupil to read profitably so popular and un- 

 technical a book as Tyndall's ' Hours of exercise 

 in the Alps.' Should not instruction concerning 

 glaciers rather be given somewhat as follows ? to 

 take some snow or pounded ice, to compress it 

 into a hard, ice-like mass, to point out how, in a 

 similar way, after a fall of snow, the upper layers 

 compress by then weight the lower, and how ice 

 thus becomes formed in the cavities and gulleys 



