transmission. We are beginning to
appreciate the value of this method in our introductory courses of
history in the intermediate and lower grammar grades. The historical
study outlined for these grades in most of our state and city school
programs includes mainly biographical materials. As long as the purpose
of this study is kept steadily in view by the teacher, its value may be
very richly realized. The danger lies in an obscure conception of the
purpose. We are always too prone to teach history didactically, and to
teach biographical history didactically is to miss the mark entirely.
The aim here is not primarily instruction, but inspiration; not merely
learning, but also appreciation. To tell the story of Lincoln's life in
such a way that its true value will be realized requires first upon the
part of the teacher a sincere appreciation of the great lesson of
Lincoln's life. Lincoln typifies the most significant and representative
of American ideals. His career stands for and illustrates the greatest
of our national principles,--the principle of equality,--not the
equality of birth, not the equality of social station, but the equality
of opportunity. That a child of the lowliest birth, reared under
conditions apparently the most unfavorable for rich development, limited
by the sternest poverty, by lack of formal education, by lack of family
pride and traditions, by lack of an environment of culture, by the hard
necessity of earning his own livelihood almost from earliest
childhood,--that such a man should attain to the highest station in the
land and the proudest eminence in its history, and should have acquired
from the apparently unfavorable environment of his early life the very
qualities that made him so efficient in that station and so permanent in
that eminence,--this is a miracle that only America could produce. It is
this conception that the teacher must have, and this he must, in some
measure, impress upon his pupils.

V

In the teaching of history in the elementary school, the biographical
treatment is followed in the later grammar grades by a systematic study
of the main events of American history. Here the method is different,
but the purpose is the same. This purpose is, I take it, to show how our
ideals and standards have developed, through what struggles and
conflicts they have become firmly established; and the aim must be to
have our pupils relive, as vividly as possible, the pain and the
struggl