Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/516

498 mediæval, and modern European history—and with the literature forms a unit course. English as a study does not appear, or else history and English are each given half time, and run through both years.

In the third year three periods are given to United States history, civics, and economics, and two to literature and theme writing. The nationalistic work here is commonly of high grade, but the English is weak, and the whole structure rests upon insufficient foundations.

It remains for me to suggest how the manual training idea, that of learning by doing, is applied to studies apparently so abstract, for undoubtedly the idea does permeate the entire English work. The one effort is to give reality to the instruction and to make it arouse the self-activity of the boys, to have it creative rather than merely assimilative. To carry out this idea, the composition work of the first year is limited to subjects in which the material can not be had from books, but must result from direct personal observation and experience. In the second year the history and the literature are closely correlated, and each lends an interest and reality to the other. For example, when ancient history is being studied, the literature will belong to that period—Plutarch's Lives, or portions of the Iliad, or some of the excellent translations of Greek plays, the Alcestis of Euripides, or the Antigone of Sophocles. Boys are thought not to care for literature, but really they take a keen delight in the more full-blooded sort. They may not care for subtleties of thought, but they do care for action, and they sympathize with the strong primitive passions of the Greek heroes. And it seems to me very wholesome in these cold northern winters of ours to have the boys plunge into the open sunshine, the pure animality, the sincere passion of the Greek world, and return warm and invigorated. Ivanhoe, or Men of Iron, is good collateral reading for mediæval history. I have known a non-book-loving boy to read Men of Iron three times in less than a fortnight. Kingsley's Water Babies is a good breath of the modern spirit. The American work, if I may so call the history, civics, and economics of the third year, is made strong and real by the use of original documents, by local illustrations, and by the study of current social problems. Here, again, it all depends on the man. In the hands of the unimaginative, economics is apt to become a mere effort to formulate social abuses with the idea of justifying them, and the boys get little inspiration out of such dreary work. • The English work is still formal. The boys read Shakespeare and other middle English authors, works that I have come to believe had much better be left until the boys come to them privately and of their own accord.

Let us look now for a moment at the work in mathematics. In