Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/91

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SOME DEMANDS OF EDUCA TION UPON ANTHROPOLOGY 75

pology itself, it needs to work from the synthetic standpoint if its results are to be of the highest value for educational purposes.

As a possible basis for the organization needed, the accom- panying chart of anthropological development is suggested, as a framework in which to place material already available. To the writer its value is twofold. It gives the general facts of race development in a convenient form, and in so doing it affords a basis for comparing the development of the race with that of the child at the present time, from the standpoint of activities and processes. It thus meets, in a slight degree, one of the needs of the present. The ultimate purpose of its construction, how- ever, was to suggest a principle on the basis of which the facts of child life might be organized, and thus become available for educational purposes. With the general view which the chart affords continually in mind, the facts of child life will be con- stantly seen in their true relation to the social and industrial conditions of the period in which they occur. Their true set- ting in the activities and interests of the period being obtained, as well as their sequence in culture history, true interpretation becomes possible.

Since the framework is of some importance if the results are to have validity, it demands further consideration. No credit for originality is claimed either as to form or organization. The general form was suggested by the chart of social organization in Small and Vincent's Introduction to the Study of Society. The division into stages is that adopted by Morgan, and that of masculine and feminine activities that suggested by Mason. It is a graphic representation, for convenient reference, of data already collected and in the relations they occupy in the works of the authors mentioned.

Any schematic representation of this character is open to criticism on the basis of inadequacy. The difficulty of repre- senting the facts of geological, palseontological, or anthropolog- ical development progressively is that the successive stages are seldom if ever found in nature in their true relations, that many gaps occur for which the missing links cannot be found, and hence the whole is but a skillful piece of patchwork which may