The life of a Roman citizen will be enacted and written about by the classes: all the time the boys and girls will be doing the work; the teacher only flitting about from group to group as his or her presence is required, encouraging here, pointing out errors there, all the time acting as any real teacher ought to act, that is, not foisting his or her opinion on to the form but developing their own ideas on the lines most desirable for them.
The hour instead of passing as hours in school are passing nowadays in periods of long, slowly dragging minutes that make time seem interminable to those who take out their watches in the vain hope that Father Time will take a hint and have mercy, will go so quickly in the interest and joy of real work and progress that the form will only regret having to leave the subject, were it not that the next is just as full of interest, just as helpful.
It is mathematics in this second period carried out in a sort of engineering schoolroom where practical implements are at hand for testing all their theoretical results.
One section of the class to-day splits up into a lot of stockbrokers and the rest into investors. Each investor has his own bag of gold or counters, his own cheque-book, the daily newspapers are brought into school and consulted, and each youthful financier tries his fortune with the investment that most suits his fancy at the time. Day by day he develops his original idea, buying here, selling there, so that his knowledge of stocks and shares by the end of a term is unassailable; the foundation is laid of a character that will not play ducks and drakes with his own real money in later life if he finds that his splashes now hold him up to ridicule from his fellows at school. In geometry the forms will invent their own problems and work out together as a body any that defeat the individual intelligence. And again the teacher's aid will only be invoked as a last resource; the children will teach themselves. Buying and selling, commission and percentage work will all be done as it were in real life by the taking of a case that one of the form invents or by going the round of the shops in the town or village and auditing their accounts, looking into their businesses and receiving real instruction from those whose life's work it is to conduct a trade or business, so that here again the factor of reality so absolutely essential to the intelligent learner shall be brought into play.
By the end of a term each pupil or at any rate each form will have produced its own algebra, arithmetic and geometry, and these will be stored in the archives of the form if they are thought to be of sufficient value. At any rate they will be the only textbooks they will see in these subjects.
The period following on this will be an outdoor one if possible, either one of those mentioned above or a natural history study in the nearest wood, or drawing of the surrounding country, or dancing on the platform permanently kept for that purpose in a corner of the playing-fields to a gramophone, or singing in the open air, or any exercise or physical training decided on as beneficial to the human frame! From this the form will come in refreshed in body ready for more intellectual stimulus.
Then follows the hour of history and geography; the history on a plan rudely devised in the early part of the twentieth century by Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher in his "Sir Roger of Tubney" and Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer in "Ladies Whose Bright Eyes," where all our ancestors, their customs and reasons for their strange actions, stand out clearly in the broadest outlines as real living forces. The Elizabethan adventurer, the peasant, the villein, the Norman baron, the various Kings, the Cavalier gallant, the Augustan Age courtier, the Georgian politician, the powder-puff-age lady satirized by Addison, all will live as actually as our own relatives and friends.
Scenes from history again will be acted in costume, debates will take place in class as to why Shakespeare does not see fit to mention Magna Charta, what effects followed, what causes, why enthusiasm was held in such disdain in the eighteenth century, and altogether, hand in hand with the literature of its age, the history of each period in the nation's life will be carefully worked out, and its bearing on present-day character and custom soundly sifted and thrashed out.
I said geography would be taken at the same time: geography as studied in the new schools will be an excellent mixture of political economy, history (really it is hard to separate the two), science and mathematics, all in their relation to actual facts.