To All Who Love Children All Over The World

The Children’s Encyclopedia is the first book that has ever tried to tell the whole sum of human knowledge so that a child may understand.

Nothing could be more false to its purpose than to imagine that it seeks to cram the mind of a child with things that children need not know. It conceives the bringing up of a child as the supreme task in which we can engage, but it has no sympathy with those who would set a child down at a desk before it can run. It believes that a child is largely its own teacher, and that in a right environment it will teach itself more than all the schools can teach it.

It cannot be urged against this book, therefore, that it has come to steal away the joy of childhood and put a bitter grinding in its place. It has come to bring more joy to childhood, believing that true joy of life comes from sympathy and understanding.

One half of the population of the world is made up of boys and girls learning at school and little children playing at home.

Is it beyond the resources of our language to convey to this vast multitude of men and women of tomorrow such an understanding of the world they live in as shall make their lives happier and save the waste of precious years at school?

The creators of the Children’s Encyclopedia believe that it is not, and they have built up the simplest system of knowledge they can devise.

Left to wander in this field, the child will find whatever it wants. For the youngest of all its nurse will find her lullaby. The child in the nursery will find its nursery rhymes and the best stories that have ever been told. The child who can be left out of doors to play will find here the beginning of its interest in natural things.

For the boy and girl at school these pages teem with precious things; for fathers and mothers, teachers and governesses, they may well become invaluable. It is a book for grown-ups and children. It is an encyclopedia of everything that comes into childhood, and by childhood it means all that period of life when the sensitive mind, the most marvellous instrument within the boundless universe, is being formed.

The Children’s Encyclopedia is what it pretends to be. It is not a children’s book that children cannot read. It is written in the words the children know. The writers of this book have been simple by being natural; they have made a children’s book without childishness, a book that children may read because it is simple, and that men may read because it is plain.

If saving of time is lengthening of life, this book should be a priceless gift of years to the generation that is coming. There can be no doubt which of two children a teacher would prefer to take—one familiar with this book or one who is not. Nor can there be any doubt that this book in the hands of boys and girls will add immensely to their understanding, lightening the burden and shortening the years of school life.

Here is a gift to the nation; a thing of measureless value to parents and teachers; a treasury for children to which they may come whenever they will, for whatever they will; an inspiration to childhood which will make these precious years a time of wise and happy building-up. It is a story that will never fail for children who will never tire; and it is the best of all stories, told in the simplest of words, to the greatest of all ends.

From Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, Volume 1

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