LETTERS TO HILARY

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 180, 14 July 1928, Page 9

LETTERS TO HILARY

(By STEPHEN KING HALL). (Benn, London), There is in this ingenious and unpsual senes of letters some very valuable teaching for teachers. The letters are strictly didactic, but to the boy who reads them they become more interesting than many kinds of efforts at fiction, and he will absorb an amazing amount of knowledge without being at all aware that he is doing anything of the kind. World history is the subject, world history from the cave man to the Tommy in the Great War, but it is all made into a delightful game in which there is never a dull moment, nor the slightest speck of dust from blackboard chalk. Who does not wish that he could have been taught the history of Empire along such lines as these? ‘‘The game of Empires,” says the writer, “can be played very well in a garden. The child ruler sits in the summer house and receives messages from outlying parts of the Empire. There is news of rebellion in the greenhouse. The Emperor makes a tour of his dominion and bears that the people have been oppressed by a beast of a local governor, who is deposed ... .If I had a large garden and more cash. I would have the world laid out to scale and let the children act the history of the world. Dull visitors would be barbarians.” These letters, fifty-two in number, epitomise human history in such a way as to give the child a broad grasp of the main principles of development. If one of the chief difficulties in educational problems is not so much to find the ideal pupil as to discover the right kind of teacher, then in one case at least the difficulty has been solved. This, it should be added, is not merely a book for teachers, but for parents and any who to do with the training of the young idea; above all. it is a mine of information for the children themselves. ♦ * ♦ ♦