ed kindergartens, only a small portion of the
children attend them. On the other hand, since practically all school
children enter the grades, it is on them that an inquiry into elementary
education must be focused.

The time has passed when reading, writing, and arithmetic made up the
entirety of a satisfactory elementary education. Like the kindergarten,
the elementary school must touch life; like the kindergarten, it must
provide for child needs. Everywhere schools are turning from the old
methods of teaching spelling, multiplication, and syntax to the new
methods of teaching children,--yes, and teaching them those things which
they need, irrespective of name. Three R's no longer suffice. The child
requires training from the Alpha to the Omega of life.

Compare, for example, the old method of teaching geography with the new.
Under the abandoned system, the child began with capes, peninsulas,
continents, meridians, trade routes, rivers, boundaries and products.
Under the new system, he begins with the town in which he lives. Each
schoolroom in Newark, for example, is provided with a large map of the
city. In addition to these complete maps, each child is given a series
of small maps, each of which centers about a familiar square, store, or
public building. Then, from this simple beginning, the child fills in
the surrounding streets and buildings. Newark geography begins in the
third grade with a description of the school yard and the surroundings
of the school lot. After all, what more simple geography could be
conceived than the geography that you already know. Borneo and
Beloochistan are abstractions except to the most traveled, but what
child has not noted the red bricks and ugly iron fences surrounding his
own school yard? Charity and geography both begin logically at home.

When in the later Newark grades the children are taught about Europe and
Australasia, they are taught on a background of the geography of yards,
alleys, squares, streets and playgrounds with which they are familiar.
Geography thus concretely presented, becomes comprehensible to even the
dullest mind.

III Playing at Mathematics

The passing system of elementary mathematics took the innocents through
addition, subtraction and the abatis of multiplication tables, until
every child was fully convinced that

Multiplication is vexation,
Division's twice as bad,
The rule of three perplexes me,
And practice drives one ma