nce. In the country village he sees the church,
possibly some old cottages, or an Elizabethan or Jacobean house near; in
the churchyard or in the church the tombstones have quaint inscriptions
with reference possibly to past wars or to early colonisation. The slum
child on the other hand sees much that is worn out, but little that is
antiquated, unless the slum happen to be in such places as Edinburgh or
Deptford, situated among the remains of really fine houses: but he
realises more of the technicalities and officialism of a social system
than does the country child; the suburban child has probably the
scantiest store of all; his district is presumably made up of rows of
respectable but monotonous houses, and the social life is similarly
respectable and monotonous.

There are certain cravings, interests and needs, common to all children,
which come regardless of surroundings. All children want to know certain
things about people who lived before them, not so much their great
doings as their smaller ones; they want to know what these people were
like, what they worked at, and learnt, how they travelled, what they
bought and sold: and there is undoubtedly a primitive strain in all
children that comes out in their love of building shelters, playing at
savages, and making things out of natural material. One of the most
intense moments in _Peter Pan_ to many children is the building of the
little house in the wood, and later on, of the other on the top of the
trees: that is the little house of their dreams. They are not interested
in constitutions or the making of laws; wars and invasions have much the
same kind of interest for them as the adventures of Una and the Red
Cross Knight.

How are these cravings usually satisfied in the early stages of history
teaching of to-day? As a rule a series of biographies of notable people
is given, regardless of chronology, or the children's previous
experiences, and equally careless of the history lessons of the future;
Joan of Arc, Alfred and the Cakes, Gordon of Khartoum, Boadicea,
Christopher Columbus, Julius Caesar, form a list which is not at all
uncommon; there is no leading thread, no developing idea, and the old
test, "the children like it," excuses indolent thinking. On the other
hand, the desire to know more of the Robinson Crusoe mode of life has
been apparent to many teachers for some time, but the material at their
disposal has been scanty and uncertain. It is to Prof. Dew