The Teaching of Geography Author:Archibald Geikie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III General Principles—continued When the elementary stage has been passed, class-books may be introduced. Though some progress has now been made in ... more »creating these, it is still difficult to find in English any geographical class-books that meet all the needs of the case. Where a teacher is thoroughly equipped for his task, the class-book he requires is one that presents merely a general outline of the subject, more especially taking up those parts which cannot be learned directly from a map. With this summary in the hands of his pupils as a guide to them in their advance, he fills in the details partly from his own knowledge and partly by an exhaustive use of the map. But teachers possessing these qualifications are rare at present, and the organisation for training them exists in few places. The ordinary instructor in geography has no special knowledge of the subject. Indeed, in a vast number of cases, he knows little or nothing more of it than is contained in the class-book. If then the book itself is a mere summary which the teacher never tries to expand and illustrate, the knowledge acquired by his class is of the most meagre kind, and its acquisition being chiefly by an act of memory, it makes little permanent lodgment in the mind, passing away by degrees into forgetfulness and leaving no enduring benefit behind. In such circumstances, what are called "Readers" are of service. They supply the want of knowledge on the part of the teacher, and they afford in a more or less attractive way information which the pupils are interested to learn. But on theother hand, they fail in that systematic completeness and that conciseness and precision of detail which are essential for accurate geographical acquirement, and which can only be adequately learnt at school by the pati...« less