848 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
surface. This was not intelligent correlation of whole and part. It was arbitrary creation of a whole to which the pupil's experi- ence did not correspond ; or in another view it was thrusting for- ward a part which pupils had not differentiated from the whole, and did not need to. I presume that every parent, and every teacher who has liberty to use his own judgment, now begins the teaching of geography with that spot of terra firma which is next to the home or the schoolhouse. Whether the plane of the ecliptic ever gets mentioned is a matter of very slight concern. A similar change in the social sciences is well in progress, but it is not yet a prevalent policy. At my graduation from college I passed a respectable examination on the constitution and by-laws of the government at Westminster, but I knew virtually nothing, and was never told that it was worth while to know anything, about the government of the town in which the college was located. My knowledge of the British constitution has never yet found any practical application, but for a decade, as citizen and petty office- holder in that college community, I was subsequently obliged to study and use the town charter and ordinances, which were not worth the notice of my former instructors. Sociology, like charity, ought to begin at home, but, like charity, it ought not to stay at home. The rational method of observation, recognizing the real concentration of life around each member of society, explores the concentric circles of social activity from the actual standpoint of the observer. The child should begin to study economics, literally, the law of the household, he should learn the civics and ethics and history of the household, in the practice of normal household relations. The economy and poli- tics and ethics and history of the school, and then of the parent's shop, and then of the neighboring factory, and later of the whole town, are the best educational material that the sociologist can recommend. In other words, the social desideratum is that the developing member of society shall become analytically and synthetically intelligent about the society to which he belongs. 1
1 SMALL AND VINCENT'S Introduction to the Study of Society is the first attempt to furnish a laboratory guide for this sort of study. It is not a text-book in sociology, but
