Children now know many things of which their grandfathers had never heard, but I doubt their being so observant or so shrewd: they get too much from print. There was a very cultivated man who was often in this neighbourhood some years ago, and he delighted in reading novels about Devon and the West, but was quite unconscious that he was in the midst of the real thing. He was so accustomed to getting his impressions out of books that he had lost the power of getting them in any other way. The children have not come to that, and never may; but they are being overdosed with books. There is a history in use at Lustleigh school that gives three chapters to the times before the Romans came: the Stone and Bronze and Iron Ages. But here at Lustleigh we have the real thing close at hand--there are hut-circles within a mile of the school, and at Torquay, only fifteen miles away, there is Kent’s Cavern itself and a Museum containing what was found there, the best evidence in England for the Stone Age periods. Children would learn a great deal more by seeing the real thing than they will ever learn by reading of it in a book. And books are sometimes wrong. This history says that the Britons came over here about 400 B.C., and it calls them Britons all through the chapter; but another history (in the same series) always calls these people Celts, and says that the Britons were a cross-breed between the Celtic invaders and the old inhabitants. Which of these statements are the children to believe?
I have lately been looking through the books that are in use in Lustleigh school. One of them, a geography of the World, makes the Bosporos wider than the Dardanelles. It might be better not to teach geography at all than teach it wrong. Another one, a geography of Europe, goes out of its way to say that Marseilles is one of the oldest cities in the Mediterranean. This is quite untrue--Marseilles was not founded until 600 B.C.--and even if it were true, it would not be a thing worth teaching to children in an elementary school here. In another one, a geography of England and Wales, the first chapter starts with this--“Our country really forms a part of the Continent of Eurasia, though not now joined to it. Eurasia is the name given to the Continents of Europe and Asia. Eurasia is only separated from the Continent of Africa by a canal.” Well, at the geological period when our country was joined to the Continent, Africa also was joined to it near Gibraltar and near Sicily: so, if our country really forms a part of the Continent, Africa must really form a part of it as well. And the word Eurasia could not possibly mean Europe and Asia: it is only the jargon of half-educated men.