Were You Ever a Child ! By Floyd Dell. (New
York : Alfred A. Knopf.)--" We have all been educated, and just look at us!" This is the keynote of Mr. Floyd Dell's book. He is not a professional educationist, but speaks as an amateur. When we look back, he says, upon those years and years which we spent at school, we know that something was wrong. If we remember, we did not exactly at the time approve of the school system. For one thing, we were not prepared for life. We were certainly quite carefully gut ready to go on studying and attending classes and taking examinations, but the real world was not like that. Neither did our school suit us as we were then. " The chief difference that separates us from childhood is the acquisition of a few powers, physical and intellectual, which make us feel, to some extent, masters of our world.'' Should not education first of all consist in giving a child a pro- gressive sense of power through a physical and intellectual mastery over its environment ? Would not the acquisition of increasing mastership deprive the child of the need for those outbursts of rage, malice, and mischief which are to-day a characteristic trait of childhood, and which are only the child's attempts to deny his shameful helplessness ? Though sound, Mr. Floyd Dell's book is almost excessively chatty. He seems to have encountered an impervious type of educationist that is fortunately almost extinct in England, and gives the impression of beating his fists on the shell of a very large, very indifferent tortoise.
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