there is space out-of-doors and the children can find branches for
huts, clay for pots, etc., the work is much easier for the teacher and
more satisfactory. But even where that is impossible and where one has
sometimes to be content with miniature reproductions, the interest is
most keen. Children under eight cannot really produce fire from flints
or rubbing sticks, nor can they make useable woollen threads with which
to do much weaving. But even they can get sparks from flint, make a
little thread from wool, invent looms and weave enough to get the ideas.

The romance of "long ago" ought to be taken advantage of to deepen
respect for the dignity of labour. Our lives are so very short that we
are apt to get out of perspective in the ages. Reading and writing are
so new--it is only about four hundred years since the first book was
printed in England, the Roman occupation lasted as long, and who thinks
of that as a long period? Perhaps it is because we are in the reading
and writing age that our boys and girls must become "braw, braw clerks,"
instead of living on and by the land. History, particularly primitive
history, should help us all to be "grateful to those unknown pioneers
of the human race to whose struggles and suffering, discoveries and
energies our present favoured mode of existence on the planet is due.
The more people realise the effort that has preceded them and made them
possible, the more are they likely to endeavour to be worthy of it: the
more pitiful also will they feel when they see individuals failing in
the struggle upward and falling back toward a brute condition; and the
more hopeful they will ultimately become for the brilliant future of a
race which from such lowly and unpromising beginnings has produced the
material vehicle necessary for those great men who flourished in the
recent period which we speak of as antiquity."[29]

[Footnote 29: _The Substance of Faith_, p. 18.]

Professor Dewey urges that "the industrial history of man is not a
materialistic or merely utilitarian affair," but a matter of
intelligence, a record of how men learned to think, and also an ethical
record, "the account of the conditions which men have patiently wrought
out to serve their ends."

This interest in how human beings have created themselves and their
surroundings ought to be deeply interesting to any and every age. Young
children can reach so little that one hopes the interest aroused will be
lasting and lea