In this general scheme three periods or phases are recognized: first
comes the generalized and simplified history—history which is hardly
history at all in the local or chronological sense, but which aims at
giving the child insight into, and sympathy with, a variety of social
activities. This period includes the work of the six-year-old children
in studying typical occupations of people in the country and city at
present; of the seven-year-old children in working out the evolution
of inventions and their effects upon life, and of the eight-year-old
children in dealing with the great movements of migration, exploration,
and discovery which have brought the whole round world into human ken.
The work of the first two years is evidently quite independent of any
particular people or any particular person—that is, of historical data
in the strict sense of the term. At the same time, plenty of scope is
provided through dramatization for the introduction of the individual
factor. The account of the great explorers and the discoverers serves to
make the transition to what is local and specific, that which depends
upon certain specified persons who lived at certain specified places and
times.
This introduces us to the second period where local conditions
and the definite activities of particular bodies of people become
prominent—corresponding to the child’s growth in power of dealing with
limited and positive fact. Since Chicago, since the United States,
are localities with which the child can, by the nature of the case,
most effectively deal, the material of the next three years is derived
directly and indirectly from this source. Here, again, the third year
is a transitional year, taking up the connections of American life with
European. By this time the child should be ready to deal, not with social
life in general, or even with the social life with which he is most
familiar, but with certain thoroughly differentiated and, so to speak,
peculiar types of social life; with the special significance of each
and the particular contribution it has made to the whole world-history.
Accordingly, in the next period the chronological order is followed,
beginning with the ancient world about the Mediterranean and coming
down again through European history to the peculiar and differentiating
factors of American history.
The program is not presented as the only one meeting the problem, but
as a contribution; the outcome, not of thought, but of considerable
experimenting and shifting of subjects from year to year, to the problem
of giving material which takes vital hold upon the child and at the same
time leads on, step by step, to more thorough and accurate knowledge of
both the principles and facts of social life, and makes a preparation for
later specialized historic studies.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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