To gain this comprehensive notion she
must review in her thinking the events that make up history. In the
presence of each one of these events she must realize that this is the
behavior in which antecedent activities functioned. Then she will be
free to speculate upon the character of those activities, what
modifications, accretions, or abrasions they experienced in passing from
the place of their origin to the event before her, and whether like
activities in another place or another age would function in a similar
event. She need not be discouraged if she finds no adequate answer, for
she will be the better teacher because of the speculation, even lacking
a definite answer.
=Machinery.=--She must challenge every piece of machinery that meets her
gaze with the question "Whence camest thou?" She knows, in a vague way,
that it is the product of mind, but she needs to know more. She needs to
know that the machine upon which she is looking did not merely happen,
but that it has a history as fascinating as any romance if only she
cause it to give forth a revelation of itself. She may find in tracing
the evolution of the plow that the original was the forefinger of some
cave man, in the remote past. For a certainty, she will find, lurking
in some machine, in some form, the multiplication table, and this fact
will form an interesting nexus between behavior in the form of the
machine and the activities of the school.
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