SPECIAL SUGGESTIONS.
Children love to read or hear of the people of other lands, and the tactful teacher will wrap her information about the natural features of a country in the "sugared pill of stories."
Books of travel are helpful and interesting in linking together fact and story. From them the child comes to feel a sympathetic interest in the ways of people unlike those he knows.
By emphasizing the idea of continuity of beliefs and customs, we impress the child with the most important lesson history and geography hold for him,—that all countries and peoples are closely related and have mutual interests.
"The acquisition of this feeling of the inter-relationship of the nations of the world, while starting the child out with a broad view of life, will in no wise lessen his love for his own country."
Too often the lonely little stranger in our midst—the foreigner—is viewed with heartless curiosity, or contempt, and subjected to ridicule. Patriotism to many a child means nothing more than a belief that our own country is the best, our own people the smartest, and that we can whip any and every other nation on the globe.
Do the children know that the "blood that boils so hotly against other countries is drawn from the very same sources that feed the veins of our seemingly alien neighbors"?
If any teacher imagines that her pupils have a definite idea of the
meaning of patriotism because they are able to sing "America" and the
"Star-Spangled Banner," let her read Marion Hill's story, entitled "The
Star-Spangled Banner," in McClure's Magazine for July (1900).
THE TRAVEL CLASS.
Nothing in the study of geography is more interesting or helpful to pupils than the taking of imaginary journeys. It makes geography a live subject.