how much of this printed material they have remembered and how well. It has
not consisted of stimulating and guiding the children toward intelligent
inquisitiveness and inquiring interest as to the world, and the skies above, and
waters round about, and the conditions of nature that limit and shape the
development of mankind.
That the latter is the proper end of geographical teaching is being recognized in
developing the new course of study in this subject. Industries, commerce,
agriculture, and modes of living are becoming the centers about which
geographic thought and experience are gathered. The best work now being done
here is thoroughly modern. Unfortunately it is not yet great in amount in even
the best of the schools, still less in the majority. But the direction of progress is
unmistakable and unquestionably correct.
As in the reading, so in geography, right development of the course of study
must depend in large measure upon the material equipment that is at the same
time provided. It sounds like a legitimate evasion to say that education is a
spiritual process, and that good teachers and willing, obedient, and industrious
pupils are about all that is required. As a matter of fact, just as modern business
has found it necessary to install one-hundred-dollar typewriters to take the place
of the penny quill pens, so must education, to be efficient, develop and employ
the elaborate tools needed by new and complex modern conditions, and set aside
the tools that were adequate in a simpler age. The proper teaching of geography
requires an abundance of reading materials of the type that will permit pupils to
enter vividly into the varied experience of all classes of people in all parts of the
world. In the supplementary books now furnished the schools, only a beginning
has been made. The schools need 10 times as much geographical reading as that
now found in the best equipped school.
It would be well to drop the term "supplementary." This reading should be the
basic geographic experience, the fundamental instrument of the teaching. All
else is supplementary. The textbook then becomes a reference book of maps,
charts, summaries, and a treatment for the sake of perspective. Maps, globes,
pictures, stereoscopes, stereopticon, moving-picture machine, models, diagrams,
and museum materials, are all for the purpose of developing ideas and imagery
of details. The reading should become and remain fundamental and central. The
quantity required is so great as to make it necessary for the city to furnish the
books. While the various other things enumerated are necessary for complete
effectiveness, many of them could well wait until the reading materials are