f classical or choice historical
materials, representing a great period of German as well as of Jewish
or Christian life, and especially suited to interest and instruct
children, while illustrating moral ideas and deepening moral
convictions. The body of historical narrative selected for any one
grade is calculated to form a _center_ or nucleus for concentrating all
the studies of that year. Reading, language, geography, drawing,
music, and arithmetic largely spring out of and depend upon this
historical center, while they are also bound to each other by many
links of connection. A full course for the eight grades of the common
school, with this double historical series as a nucleus, has been
carefully worked out and applied by Professor Rein and his associates.
It has been applied also with considerable success in a number of
German schools.

This great undertaking has had to run the gauntlet of a severe
_criticism_. Its fundamental principles, as well as its details of
execution, have been sharply questioned. But a long-continued effort,
extending through many years, by able and thoroughly-equipped teachers,
to solve one of the greatest problems of education, deserves careful
attention. The general theory of concentration, the selection and
value of the materials, the previous history of method, and the best
present method of treating each subject, with detailed illustrations,
are all worked out with great care and ability.

The Jewish and German historical materials, which are made the
moral-educative basis of the common school course by the Herbartians,
can be of no service to us except by way of example. Neither sacred
nor German history can form any important part of an American course of
study. Religious instruction has been relegated to the church, and
German history touches us indirectly if at all. The epochs of history
from which American schools must draw are chiefly those of the United
States and Great Britain. France, Germany, Italy, and Greece may
furnish some collateral matter, as the story of Tell, of Siegfried, of
Alaric, and of Ulysses; but some of the leading epochs must be those of
our own national history.

Has the _English-speaking race_ in North America passed through a
series of historical epochs which, on account of their moral-educative
worth, deserve to stand in the center of a common school course? Is
this history adapted to cultivate the highest moral and intellectual
qualitie