Materials of Instruction tending the social horizon of the child, in deep-
ening his understanding of human society and
in strengthening his capacity for co-operative action and civic leadership .
6. Every topic of instruction in the social
sciences, if concerned with actuality, contains at
least six elements or aspects : location in physically
conditioned space, occurrence at some point in time, action by human beings, relationship to other social happenings (economic, political, and
cultural), relationship to other ideas and appli-
cation to life situations. The seemingly most simple subject is in fact extremely complex and
capable of comparatively infinite development .
Consequently, almost any social event, prac-
tice, institution or idea, if brought into relationship with the experience of the learner, may be studied with some profit at almost any level of maturity.
7. All of this means that instruction in the
social sciences should begin in the earliest years of schooling, not with the life and institutions of
some people remote in time, space, and, cultural development, but with the life and institutions-of57