SCHOOL CERTIFICATE HISTORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 448, 23 January 1948, Page 5

SCHOOL CERTIFICATE HISTORY

Sir,-I think any middle-aged person should have been able to acquit himself creditably in the history examination on his leisure reading. Beginning with the thin books in the Sunday school library covered in faded brown, blue, maroon and cheerful green covers, adorned with beautiful brightly coloured old-fashioned bouquets. . These books vanished, giving place to uniformly bound volumes in brown and fawn pub--lished by S.P.C.K. At the same time there would be Children’s Annuals, Mrs, Molesworth, Mrs. Ewing, W. M. Letts, E. Nesbit. Later came John Halifax, Mrs. Gaskell, the Brontes, the Kingsleys, Henry and Charles, Albert Smith, Dickens, the Findlaters, Mrs. Oliphant, Walter ‘Scott, Charles Read, Walter Bessant and George Eliot. Later still Emerson, Carlyle, Arnold Bennett, Wells, Thomas Hardy, Zangwill, a few poets, Tolstoy, Gissing and multitudes of contemporary novels of every kind. But the names are endless in a person’s life-time reading, and why I make any attempt to list them is to show that all this reading (with negligible exceptions) lies within the 150 year period required in the history paper. Perhaps this period is being a little over-empha-sised. It may be approaching old age, but when I seek sanity, I find it more

easily in literature from the 17th Cen tury backwards, No wonder the word "history" i¢ being replaced by "social studies." My young. est son at dinner recently announced that he was going to collect postage stamps with animals on for his "social studies." When my Christmas shopping led me to a book shop, I heard two women discussing a recently published New Zealand book. ‘One said that ng one but a New Zealander would find it funny, and the other said it would be nq wood for eorial studies.

STILL LAUGHING IT OFF

(Dunedin).