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Show Altogether Too Much Emphasis Placed Upon Facts, in Modern Education By MARY JORDAN, of Smith Collega History, tradition, customs and habit must be accepted to a certain point, but cannot be allowed to impose on. us. When I was a child, I was told that facts are stubborn things. To me everything ran into something else. It was a fact that my aunts were my aunts, yet they were themselves them-selves nieces. I decided that fact was the most illusive thing in the world. In school, geography was handed to me in the shape of a thin, flat book with maps and pictures. I learned from my maps that different countries were shaped differently. India, for instance, looked like a ham, and was colored yellow. The men there, I learned, wore funny hats shaped like soup plates. These were facts, yet how significant were they to me ? There was no effort taken to show me that in some of those countries were men whose poetry, music and civilization would be of utmost ut-most importance to me. ' History began with England and its kings. I learned many dates and battles. Nothing suggested had a definite bearing on anything in particular. par-ticular. In arithmetic. I learned the "tables" never with the impression that I was studying mathematics. The teacher gave us the facts. "On a fence were five little birds. If a little boy shot three of the birds, how many would be left?" I was to take the question and answer it whether or not I understood it. Time and space are organic. Time is record, history and fact. Space is' here, now and remote. As we look back we unlearn and relearn some facts of history. One blunder made in the old form of education was the undue emphasis on classification. There should be more emphasis on the real things and not on dates or battle grounds where some battles, a3 I have learned in looking back, were never fought. C-A-T spells cat, that's a fact, and it spells nothing else. But to a first-grade youngster might it not also mean pussy, Tommy, or feline? |