Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/863

 SOME DEMANDS OF SOCIOLOGY UPON PEDAGOGY 84?

Sociology demands with equal confidence, first, that for every- body the study of society shall begin with the nursing bottle, and continue so long as social relations continue ; second, that for most people the study of sociology shall never begin at all. If the argument thus far has provoked expectation that I shall recommend the introduction of sociology into the curriculum of the lower schools, as the needed corrective of educational defects, the inference is decidedly at fault. Only exceptional pupils should study sociology earlier than their senior year in college, and probably these few would do better to defer the study till after taking the bachelor's degree. While sociology proper is not a desirable subject for young pupils, our educational methods will be miserably inadequate to their social function till every teacher, from the kindergarten on, is sufficiently instructed in sociology to put all his teaching in the setting which the socio- logical view-point affords. This implies, of course, that the func- tion of education must one day be taken so seriously that only men and women who have more than the bachelor's preparation will be entrusted with its direction.

The study of society which we may reasonably demand in our schools and colleges today must and should be chiefly in connection with the subjects physiography, political geography, anthropology, ethnology, history, civics and economics. The sociological demand with reference to these subjects is that instruction in them shall be rationalized in the same way that the teaching of geography has been reformed during my recollection. I was not the boy who discovered after several years' study of "geography" that the ground on which he walked between home and school was the "earth's surface," but my most lasting recol- lections of the study of geography cluster around some cabalistic representations of the plane of the ecliptic. To this day I am not perfectly clear about the meaning of those ghostly figures which lent weird interest to the earlier pages of the book. They pro- duced in my youthful mind vague imaginings of uncanny gyra- tions among celestial bodies, presumed by the author to be the proper medium for introducing youth to a knowledge of the cart h 's