VII. PUBLIC HYGIENE ORDINANCES, ETC., OF ROANOKE, VA., SEATTLE, XIV. ENFORCE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY.. XV. FIRE PREVENTION QUESTIONNAIRE.. XVII. FIRES DUE TO CARELESSNESS.. XVIII. FIRE LOSSES HERE AND IN GERMANY. XIX. PERSONAL SAFETY ON THE STREETS.. XX. SUGGESTED MATERIAL FOR THE STUDY OF GOVERNMENT. XXI. LIST OF REFERENCES FOR TEACHERS AND PUPILS.. INTRODUCTION ON the whole the teaching of civics in our public schools has been disappointing. There have been brilliant exceptions. Teachers, imaginative and resourceful, have here and there hit upon stimulating methods. Pupils have been taken to visit local institutions and have been led to examine the administration of them. In one town the school garden area is apportioned in accordance with the provisions of the Federal land law. In many places elections are held with all the formalities of legal balloting. Devices like these ought not in themselves to be overestimated. They are significant of new ideals and a new spirit. The best teachers are rebelling against conventional methods and traditional text-books. Until recently these texts have dealt with the technicalities of political machinery. The vast majority of teachers have lacked the proper perspective and the first-hand contacts with community life and its problems. A new conception is making its way into the teaching of citizenship. It is the philosophy of social evolution. Institutions are seen not as static, but as the outcome of past conditions, as serving a social purpose in a given situation, then as gradually modified in adjustment to new problems. This evolutionary point of view, which has transformed all the sciences and is so essential to an interpretation of social development, has been too exclusively a conception of higher, to some extent of secondary, education. Moreover, political activities have been thought of too much as existing in and for themselves. There seems to have been an idea that governmental affairs could somehow be understood apart from the economic and social life of city, state, or nation. This fallacy of abstraction has too generally made civics a detached, mechanical, rather dull pursuit. There has been little appeal to imagination, and a failure to establish the causal connections which give any study vividness and vitality. The present volume represents an attempt to make the study of government interesting and significant. The why as well as the how is emphasized. An historical background for modern conceptions of political activity is suggested. The concrete problems which have been forced upon city and state by the Industrial Revolution are presented in such a way as to command attention and challenge reflection. The community is represented as a living, growing, changing thing which is constantly reshaping and extending its political machinery to serve its changing and widening purposes. The attempt to present these ideas to pupils in the upper grades of the elementary school is distinctly worth while. The authors have rendered a notable service in preparing a volume which ought to stimulate the new spirit of social interpretation, and provide the definite, concrete material with which such interpretation must deal. All friends of social science and all who are interested in the efficient teaching of civics in the public schools will warmly welcome this little book. GEORGE E. VINCENT. THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA April 8, 1916 A WORD TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS WHO READ One hundred and thirty years ago, at the close of the American Revolution, Josiah Tucker, the learned Dean of Gloucester, said "As to the future grandeur of America, and its being a rising empire, under one head, whether republican or monarchical, it is one of the idlest and most visionary notions that ever was conceived even by writers of romance. The mutual antipathies and clashing interests of the Americans, their difference of governments, habitudes and manners indicate that they will have no centre of union and no common interest. They never can be united into one compact empire under any species of government whatever; a disunited people till the end of time, suspicious and subdivided into little commonwealths or principalities, according to natural boundaries, by great bays of the sea and by vast rivers, lakes and ridges of mountains." Every country and every age has its Josiah Tucker. Maybe you yourself are a Josiah Tucker. If you are, study this little book and stop being one. We want to produce men and women for America who will never say about a thing that is good, "It can't be done "; but who will say, "Let us see if somewhere it is not already done; if it is, we will learn there how to do it; if it is not, we will never stop until we ourselves find the way." |