The same principle applies with just the same force to history and
geography; both of these studies can be made interesting, if they are
not regarded as isolated groups of phenomena, but are approached from
the boy's own experience as opening away and outwards from what is
going on about him. The object is or ought to be slowly to extend the
boy's horizon, to show him that history holds the seeds and roots of
the present, and that geography is the life-drama which he sees about
him, enacting itself under different climatic and physiographical
conditions. The dreariness and dreadfulness of knowledge to the
immature mind is because it represents itself as a mass of dry facts
to be mastered without having any visible or tangible connection with
the boy's own experience. The aim should rather be to teach him to
look with zest and interest at what is going on outside his own narrow
circle, and to help him to move perceptively along the paths of time
and space which diverge in all directions from the scene where he
finds himself.
It may be indisputably stated that all connected knowledge is
stimulating, and that all unconnected knowledge is at best mechanical.
Perhaps one of the most fruitful of all subjects is vivid biography,
and no serious educator could perform a more valuable task than in
providing a series of biographies of great men, really intelligible to
youthful minds. As a rule, biographies of the first order require an
amount of detailed knowledge in the reader which puts them out of the
reach of ill-stored minds.
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