SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
So Dewey set the children to solving the problems of primitive man and retracing for themselves the steps in the evolution of industrial processes. They picked the cotton from the boll, carded, spun it into thread and wove it into cloth on machines of their own making and for the most part of their own devising. This gave opportunity for personal experimenting and taught them history by repeating history, not repeating a verbal version of history. And the history they thus learnt was the history of the human race, not the history of some chosen people.
This recapitulation theory, like all others, has since been carried to an extreme. Acting on the idea that children normally pass through the same stages as European civilization some teachers seem to think it necessary to keep them to the chronological curriculum. So they cultivate a pseudo-savagery for a year or two, then make them pagans and later teach the ideals of the age of chivalry which are hardly less repugnant to the modern mind. So careful are they to avoid anachronism that if a boy should by any accident behave like a Christian before he reached the grade corresponding to A.D. 28 he would be likely to get a bad mark for it. So, too, I have known teachers of mathematics who would not
[ 242 ]
