_desideratum_ is not in the least compromised or neglected by ordering the acquisition of knowledge in the first instance with reference to the actual business of social life. It is the business of the educator to determine what the subject-matter of the curriculum must be in order to give the pupil adequate knowledge of the world in which he has to live; it is our business here simply to stress the point that this knowledge shall be of a relevant and vital kind. It should have to do not only with the physical features of the world, but with social and political institutions and the like; and indeed throughout it should have more to say about the ways than about the places in which people live. But chiefly this aspect of the educational process should aim to equip the pupil with the necessary knowledge to enable him to acquire more knowledge through his own direct experience of the world. But this knowledge of the world as it is would be hopelessly inadequate were it not connected with some knowledge of how the world came to be what it is. Here again the subject-matter must be defined by the experience of the educator. The business of this writing is to emphasise the requirement that this knowledge of the past shall be ordered conformably to the ultimate social fruitfulness of the pupil. In his boyhood the present writer was required to study geology—at first sight a somewhat irrelevant subject for a lad in his early teens. But he happened to live in a district where slate-quarrying was the only industry; and when he learnt that his bread and butter came from the “Llandeilo Beds”; and that these same “beds” occupied a specific place in a more or less orderly process of world-making, the study of geology assumed a new interest. But its most important action was the awakening of a dim sense of being an “heir of all the ages.” This feeling received a very powerful reinforcement from another side. The writer well remembers his first reading of the story of the Pilgrim Fathers. Hitherto history had seemed to consist mainly of the puerile and discreditable exploits of a succession of royal persons of whom none were better than they should be; and he had wondered what on earth all this had to do with a boy living among the Welsh mountains in the nineteenth century. But the Pilgrims Fathers were different; here at last was something that seemed to have a meaning, and it is easy to see what that meaning would be to a lad whose upbringing had been in a Strong Nonconformist tradition. It took long years to fill with a connected content the interval between the sailing of the _Mayflower_ and the campaign for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales; but from henceforth the lad knew that he stood in the succession of a tradition that had made a difference to the world and that he owed a very great deal to it.