past generation was
not its failure to accumulate wealth; in that respect it was more
successful than any generation which preceded it. The tragedy of the
nineteenth century was that, when it had acquired wealth, it had no
clear idea, either individually or collectively, what to do with it.

And yet the house of humanity faces both ways; it looks out towards
the world of appearances as well as to the world of spirit, and is, in
fact, the meeting-place of both. Materialism is not wrong because it
deals with material things. It is wrong because it deals with nothing
else. It is wrong, also, in education because taking the point of view
of the adult, it makes the material product itself the all-important
thing. In every right conception of education the child is central.
The child is interested in things. It wants first to _sense_ them, or
as Froebel would say "to make the outer inner"; it wants to play with
them, to construct with them, and along the line of this inward
propulsion the educational process has to act. The "thing-studies" if
one may so term them, which have been introduced into the curriculum,
such as gardening, manual training (with cardboard, wood, metal),
cooking, painting, modelling, games and dramatisation, are it is true
later introductions, adopted mainly from utilitarian motive; and they
have been ingrafted on the original trunk, being at first regarded as
detachable extras, but they quickly showed that they were an organic
part of the real educative process; they have already reacted on the
other subjects of the curriculum, and have, in the earlier stages of
education become central. In the same way, vocation is having great
influence upon the higher terminal stages of education. All this is
part of the most important of all correlations, the correlation of
school with life.

But the child's interest in things is social. Through the primitive
occupations of mankind, he is entering step by step into the heritage
of the race and into a richer fuller personal experience. The science
which enlists a child's interest is not that which is presented from
the logical, abstract point of view. The way in which the child
acquires it is the same as that in which mankind acquired it--his
occupation presents certain difficulties, to overcome these
difficulties he has to exercise his thought, he invents and
experiments; and so thought reacts upon occupation, occupation reacts
upon thought. And out of that recipr