The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young ReadersKummer, Frederic Arnold
General
The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young Readers
Kummer, Frederic Arnold
Cave dwellers -- Juvenile literature; Prehistoric peoples -- Juvenile literature
The writer has followed, with his own children, a method of presenting
the steps in the gradual development of man which has produced most
gratifying results. Instead of treating each fact, each laboriously
accumulated bit of human knowledge, as a mere isolated patch in a
crazy-quilt of information, he has attempted to arrange them in logical
sequence, to form an interesting pattern, so that as the child's fund
of knowledge increases, he feels a deeper and deeper interest in
fitting each newly acquired fact into its proper place in his mental
picture of things.
The result is that the child is constantly building a structure which
he understands. His mass of accumulated knowledge is not heaped
together hap-hazard, like a pile of blocks, but each occupies its
proper and logical place in a slowly developing whole. He derives
pleasure from what would otherwise be hard work, just as he would
derive pleasure from fitting together the pieces of a puzzle picture;
he finds himself progressing toward some understandable end, and
without knowing it, he has not only gathered his facts, and catalogued
them, but he has begun to think about them, and their relation to each
other, in short, he has begun the process of logical thought, which is
the first and greatest step in all education.
In this process of storing away in his brain the accumulated knowledge
of the ages, the child's mind passes, with inconceivable rapidity,
along the same route that the composite minds of his ancestors
travelled, during their centuries of development. The impulse that
causes him to want to hunt, to fish, to build brush huts, to camp out
in the woods, to use his hands as well as his brain, is an inheritance
from the past, when his primitive ancestors did these things. He
should be helped to trace the route they followed with intelligence
and understanding, he should be encouraged to know the woods and
all the great world of out of doors, to make and use the primitive
weapons, utensils, toys, his ancestors made and used, to come into
closer contact with the fundamental laws of nature, and thus to lay a
groundwork for wholesome and practical thinking which cannot be gained
in the classroom, or the city streets.
As has been said, the writer has tested the methods outlined above. The
chapters in "The Earth's Story" are merely the things he has told his
own children. It is of interest to note that one of these, a boy of
seven, on first going to school, easily outstripped in a single month
a dozen or more children who had been at school almost a year, and was
able to enter a grade a full year ahead of them. The child in question
is not in the least precocious, but having understood the knowledge
he has gained, he is able to make use of it, he has a definite mental
perspective, a sure grasp on things, which makes study of any kind easy
for him, and progression correspondingly rapid.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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