St 2 º' W & ſº ºy an ºf &g tº y :
a a sle ºr ºve ºr as ºr's
> w w x * * * * *
n . . a = s.s.
sº º 'º º ſº º
hº
;
st º ºr ºr sº ºn as a
* r n is -× tº r sº
ºn E
ſº
i
:
ºn
tº
i
º
- - - Sº sº a -
s & §5. * - six ºr * 3: , Fs as a so te sº a sº tº
# * * * * * * * * * Sº ſº tº Bº º ºgº º ſº. 3 ºf £ 3:
º
:
º
º
º
º
:
º
5.
i
i
º
º -
º
!
*
E.
\
*
k
}
|::
:
º
º
t
N -
wºw V8 V a.o.º.A wº
:
i
º
:º
:
:
i
i
Univ. of Mich.
º
sº
r
º
ſº
tº .
sº
F.
ºf
º
[...]
º
:
Bé
º
º
it ºn tº ... tº tººl º º Kº ºf Sº gº. 3 tº tº as º ºr... tº . Hººtº º, ºn tº # 3 º' 44 aſ Lºº ºr tº sº tº º D. Rºſſ tº wº ºf Nº.
ºw ºn tº $ tº tº tº tº as a s : * * * * & 2 ºf , º, º ºr w ł z & Asº sº tº ºr .1. ºn G. & Aw is º ºx tºº ſº tº . Cº. ºf T
tº . . . . a. º. º. º. 3 ºr º 'º . . . * * * * As a -k so iſ s r. º. is ºn A tº we ºw it is ºwn º ºr ºn tº gº ºw. - ºr x 8. s.
ºf a nº wºº & G ºr tº sift; sº º º
tº
3 & 1 tº tº ºi r a tº . A tº º ºs º ºs.º
|
six
§ º ºs; ºn twº is is is 9 - > * * * * * * * * # tº º 'º - † : * *
. yº ºn tº e s m sº ºf ºr ºs et f: º tº ºn as sº sº. º
} - 's tº a tº gº º tº ºr “ ”
º
ſº - - º
tº #4 ºf ºn tº
5. ºf it: º w * -º -
* * * * * * : * * * * * * * * *
|
i
i
i
;
º
as ſº - ºn a u
* , , , it tº it tº ſi u : ziz, ºr º,
ºn ºf ſº “ & a tº ºr a Sa & &; ºr s
: * * * * * * * * * : º ºſºs * * **, jºie ºf Bº.
*:::::: 3 & N tº . A sºººººººº - Sºº - sº
* : * * * * * * * * * *; ii ººls & R tº tº a lºg & x * * *.*
# * tº a tº a tº sº ºf * : ***** * * *.
as º ºs ºf a ºn 4 tº gº & 6 tº it. -
* * ** au ºf -
.
:
:
º
At
º
i
s
º
:
|
i
:
i
º
º
;
|
& W ºn tº
i
4s. r. = w ºr n = 3 wº *A -
* = … a tº r * * * * * * * * * * , 'ſ nº & G tº & sº wº
Elº
A ſº tº tº a tº ſº tº:
ºº
:
;
|
i
sº tº:
i
.
:
É
* n e º gº tº a
* * * * * * * * : -
Y. S. * * * * * * * * * * * *
º º § { * *s a sis º: º 5 tº tº a tº .
. . . . § . . . . . . . º. º. 2 ºr 2 & 2, 3 & 2 ºf, tº sº, ſ
345 # 348 as ºf fift iſ #.
ºf # 3 & # * B 5; $5 tº q aws ºf 3 gº tº gº
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * : * * * * * * * º Fº
º
º
A tº
º
º
º
i
|
;
as a sºn i. º. a. º.
; : * * : * * * * * * *
* - R -. § 3; ; ; ; ſº º
BP Rººt * * *
da tº it is a tº tº
ºg k a 3 tº $ $ an ºx. tº:
& 2 in sº tº to E t tº ºn . º ºs tº
ºn v is “pº e º a tº e is sº ºu º º
|
i
Tº
R
º s
º
º, sº is sº flººr tº #5 issº & it is
M: a 8 ſi & 8 kº tº Kºš 3 tº sº a is a tº is ºw.siſ a a tº w w tº s. sº º
is: 8 , s 5 ºf a ſº its ºf sº e s Reg h : * * * * * * **, a ſt a º a tº
º; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; , s: , sº sº. ºf a ś. §: . * . . . º
º Gr - - - -
t{
º
W.
:
.
sº
º
sessº; t < * * * * * * * * ~ * : * ~, a s \ . gº.
tº * * * * * * : * * tº tº
& 8 h tº tº t w is g g g º * . . iR & is
* * * * * * * * * * * * N p. w
Fºº F. ~ * to hºc * Cº. º: 5 & Nº º wº, º a . º ſº
- lº & g º º ºs. º Sºtº M × [.
5 º
Eº
§
º
º
i
º
&f
:
º
i
º º * tº º 'i ºf tº R.t. tº *...* - º
§ 3 ; ; ; ; # ºf ; ; ; ; ::::::::::: ; ; ; ;
ºw u : * * *; i, º, . . . * * : * : * > * ' ". . . . . . . . a tº w a s 5 tº W. & Sº Hº &
Ş.. . * * * * * * * : * * * : z u : * * & sº as ** * * * * * * * * - - * * * * * * * * * * * * :
sº & Mº i ; ;&# 8; tıºğ sº tº # gº as sº; g º 35 tº #88: 898 & Bºº Hº
ºf a ºf 45 tº gº tº #: Rºº & tº # 3 × 3 & 8 * : * * * * * * * *
ºrk tº 5 # ſº ####&n ºf it iſ 9 * * * * * * : * * * * *
ºf ºf a twº º $ tº 3.5 tº wºn ºf ſº s : * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* † is ºr as a nº & J., sº 2: 3: w R is r * * * ºn r s sº tº ºr ºf
ºf a - - tº º 3 tº sº" sº tº sº L fºr § 6 º' tº . . . As ºn a
º::::: º : . . . . . . . . . . .
tº . ; : : º, . . . . ." º º - - * * > . * * * * * * Z.
º ºf Wº º ºſº wºº is tº tº #: a fºr tº ºf º sº tº º, º ºx º
ºr yºu, º is sº wº tº tº tº Bºº Cº § { ... sº tº as a tº a sº tº sº º §§§ º:; * * * * *
[* * * * A * B ºn Fº * c iſ sº tº a sº ºn we as gº ºn gº w
. a sº a 5. A sº tº: sº º: ; : ; ; ;
* . . . sº tº ºs º gº º ºx ºr º ºg 3. . . . . . . . tº $ tº º tº ºr is a ºn tº a ºn m a. as it
º ſº º ºr * * * * * * *** **** Fit tº 3 × . . . . . ; SLR ºr º
* : *::, ; ; ; ; 4: z, sº tº i < *-s a * . * ---- -
* † ºf †: . * Fº º:
º ºr sº ºn 5 tº yº 44, so nº. -
# * * * if: tº tº # 5 - tº a 's at ſt #:
º A sº t e º a ; :::::::: * * * * *... . . A vºd ºxes sº
ºr sº a ºn tº tº - w -
& bi sº a jº s
§ sº tº ºr º
tº dº
§ 3 ºf
###3;
Mºrtº
## tº gº ºf ºf
# * ºr & sº ºf


ĶEĻĻĽĽŁĘJĮĮĶĶĹĹĻĻĽĽŁĮĮĶĶĹĹĻĻĽĮĮĶĶĹĹĻĻĽĮ
－-→№rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrREWNĘ∞∞, ∞, ∞; ∞, ∞; ∞， ∞, ∞， ∞; ∞, ∞; ∞, ∞; ∞ • • • • • • • • ►►
|-NSSR]
Bºº
U.U.NJAC)
Timummifºrmiſſiſſilluminiſtrimmunitiºn
º gº tº º C ºr ººº º sº º ºr a º ºſ C & Jºº º ºs º ºssº as ſº tºº sº º º me dº º º sº º ºs ºº ºr ºſ ºº is sº º º ºsº
Œ
ºil ºf Tºlº
īſtīīīīīīīīīīīīīīīīīīījiſtí
Eº
RT
58

HOW TO TEACH READING,
AND
WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL.
BY
G. STANLEY HALL, PH.D.,
PROFEssor of PsychologY AND PEDAGOGY IN Johns Hopkins UNIVERSITY.
BOST ON :
D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS.
1887.
COPYRIGHT, 1886,
By D. C. HEATH & CO.
J. S. CUSHING & Co., PRINTERs, BosTone
PUBLISHER'S PREFACE.
MANY contributions to the theory or the practice of teaching
are yearly lost to the profession, because they are embod-
ied in articles which are too long, or too profound, or too limited
as to number of interested readers, for popular magazine articles,
and yet not sufficient in volume for books. We propose to pub-
lish from time to time, under the title of Monographs on Educa-
tion, just such essays, prepared by Specialists, choice in matter,
practical in treatment, and of unquestionable value to teachers.
Our plan is to furnish the monographs in paper Covers, and at low
prices. We shall continue the series as long as teachers buy
freely enough to allow the publishers to recover merely the money
invested.
Of this series the four following are now ready : —
Modern Pećrography.
By GEORGE HUNTINGTON WILLIAMS, of the Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity. Price by mail, 25 cents.
7%e Study of Zazine in the Preparatory Course.
By EDWARD P. MoRRIs, M.A., Professor of Latin, Williams Col-
lege, Mass. Price by mail, 25 cents.
Mathematical 7.eaching and its Modern Methods.
By TRUMAN HENRY SAFFORD, Ph.D., Field Memorial Professor
of Astronomy in Williams College. Price by mail, 25 cents.
Aſow to 7 each A'eading and What ſo Read in Zhe
Schools. By G. STANLEY HALL, Professor of Psychology and
Pedagogy, Johns Hopkins University. Price by mail, 25 cents.
The Study of Æhetoric in the College Course.
By JoHN F. GENUNG, Ph.D., Professor of Rhetoric in Amherst
College. Price by mail, 25 cents. -
HOW TO TEACH READING, AND WHAT
TO READ IN SCHOOL.
—Q-
OW to teach children to read, and what they should
read, are two of the oldest and most complicated, as
well as most important problems of pedagogy.
I.
To begin with the first of these problems, there are two
methods of teaching the art of reading: viz., the synthetic,
which proceeds from letters or sounds to words, sentences,
etc.; and the analytic, which begins with pictures, words, or
sentences, and descends to visual or vocal elements. So long
and so far as letters were named from real or fancied resem-
blances between the form of the letters and objects, the process
of naming them no doubt facilitated learning, much as to call
our large A a harrow, B an OX-yoke, etc., would now do. This
latter, or even if a novice in Hebrew were to remember that
mem is water, aleph an ox, nun a fish, etc., would be especially
helpful in writing, which in modern methods often comes as a
very early stage of language-teaching, and where a distinct
name is helpful for each sign. Just when or by whom the
School device of telling off the independent names of letters as
a key to the spoken word (or spelling) was hit upon, is un-
known. Of course, d-o-g really “spells” deogee, and not dog,
any more than delta, omicron, gamma, does. Arbitrary in itself,
spelling has naturally associated itself with harsh methods of
teaching. An old poem tells of a teacher and a pupil who
2 HOW TO TEACH READING,
undertook to settle the spelling of a word by a fight, in which
the teacher was killed ; and a Greek comedian, Kallias, wrote
a letter tragedy. Yet the method had almost universal cur-
rency, despite much opposition and ridicule, down to the
Reformation, and in most non-Teutonic lands still maintains
its Supremacy.
Many unique primer methods have been devised in Europe
to modify or reform the spelling method, beginning as early
us 1534 with Ickelsamer's device of placing the picture of an
animal, its printed name, and the letter whose sound was most
like the animal's voice or cry, in parallel columns. Against the
picture of a dog, e.g., was placed the “growling” r. Against
a bird, the “twittering” z; with a lamb, a, etc. The children
must analyze the words phonetically, and before they saw them
draw the sounds upon the board. The later, but more widely
Current, method of associating a with apple, & with boy, etc.,
was supplemented by utilizing the lingering final sound, and
teaching & with tub, f with rat, etc. Another interjectional-
imitative method, suggested by Neuman in 1832, and lately
modified and psychologically defended by Oehlwein, places
beside the letter m a cow just beginning to low ; with r, a
rapidly-moving post-wagon and the winding of a clock are
pictured ; with a, a crying baby and a Crow ; with o, a falling
Snow man, and the children exclaiming, Oh with ſ, a smith at
his bellows, the sound of which the children may imitate ; with
sch, children driving away hens, etc. By another method, red
letters were printed on blackboard and slate, to be exactly
covered by the children's chalk and pencil. In Basedow's
great work (1774) describing the methods of his institution,
reading, like everything else, was Sugar-coated and made play.
In the pronunciation-games, the children spoke the names of
all the pleasant things they could think of, as apples, Sugar,
raisins, candy, nuts, etc. In the game of lettered cards the
parent or teacher played, e.g., a ; and if a letter that could be
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 3
pronounced with it as a syllable, e.g., b, was played by the child,
who said ab, it could, as a reward, bite an apple, See a picture,
smell a flower, etc. In his school-bakery, Sweet cakes, and
even bread, were baked in the form of letters, and the most
doltish child soon learned to call for a large gingerbread zy
instead of the small i, and usually graduated from an alphabet
diet of four weeks as an accomplished a-à-c-darian. There
were alphabet blocks, alphabet songs, dolls, pictures, rhymes,
games, etc. By some of the philanthropinists, boys were taught
w by twisting their bodies into something like its shape, and
crying woe, they personated f by dressing in helmet, big neck-
tie, and stilts; or s, by putting on an artificial hump and big
belly, etc. Pestalozzi taught his classes to spell long lists of
words by heart before they saw the letters; and then, showing
the letters, had them combined in every way, somewhat after
the fashion of “the house that Jack built ’’; while some of his
followers degenerated to exercises in pronouncing senseless
combinations of forty or fifty letters each. A leading, though
by no means the only, motive of these and many other methods
which might be cited, was to reduce the function of the letter-
name, or defer it to a later stage in learning to read. Although
the letter-name was once defended, because mechanical, the
pedagogic rage against its chief use in Spelling has run very
high in Germany. Kehr' says it has caused children ages of
misery. Heinicke says it required thousands of Superfluous
associations, and that no child ever did really learn to read by
1 See his valuable book entitled “Der deutsche Sprachunterricht in
ersten Schuljahre nach seiner historischen Entwicklung und in theo-
retisch-praktischer Darstellung.” Gotha. I877. Also his two large volumes,
“Methodik des Volksschul-Unterrichts.” Also, Adolph Klauwell, “Das
erste Schul-Jahr.” Leipsig, 1878. Also, Oswald Föster, “Das erste Schul-
Jahr.” Leipsig, 1882. Also, W. Rein, “Theorie und Praxis des Volks-
schulunterrichts,” I., II., and III. Schuljahr. Kassel. I883. See also other
literature on this part of the subject in my “Bibliography of Education.”
4. HOW TO TEACH READING,
it; but, when seeming to have done so, has in fact unconsciously
translated names into phonic signs; that spelling is a child-
torture greater than the Inquisition, etc. Some German writers
asserted that most children did not need to learn to read, not
for the reasons Rousseau said Émile need not read till fifteen,
although he would if or because not forced to it at ten, but
because between the greatly magnified hardship of old and the
fantastic nature of new methods, ignorance seemed preferable.
Jütting lately stated that no one, except an anonymous news-
paper writer, had seriously defended spelling as a method of
teaching reading, for fifty years in Germany. It was forbidden
by law in Prussia in 1872, and several states have since
followed.
The second less purely synthetic method of teaching lan-
guage is the phonic, which crops out in several of the above
schemes, and began to be seriously advocated near the begin-
ning of the present century. Most of the early phonicists
sought to develop a sort of “ mouth-consciousness” by more
or less elaborated drills in vocal positions, some of them almost
at the outset, classifying sounds according to the vocal Organs
which produced them, or the place against which they were
projected in the mouth, or the impressions made on the ear, –
blowing, Cracking, hissing, etc. When asked, e.g., how the sound
of Żh in this arose, the children described the position of lips,
teeth, and tongue, and were then told that the name of the sound
was the lingual-dental-hisser, as th in that was the lingual-
dental-hummer, etc. Some “legographological" systems were
rounded out to such complete fulness that combinations like
gmirós, /mschſ, /s/s, were introduced. Olivier's analysis
elementarized with such subtlety that instead of twenty-six
letters, about four hundred sounds were produced, starting from
a vowel basis and differentiating to the more dependent con-
Sonants. New Systems of script, most of which dispensed with
silent letters, and reading-machines of several patterns, begin-
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. " 5
ning with the well-known Pöhlmann, came into use. Graser
taught the fantastic doctrine that the letters of the German
printed alphabet were pictures of the position of the vocal
Organs in pronouncing them. In the case of o this is obvious ;
but however the letters were tipped and their form modified,
however ludicrous faces the teacher made, and however arbi-
trarily the form was sought in lips, tongue, or fauces, wherever
the analogy seemed most favored, it was in most cases too pre-
posterous, even for the pedagogic passion for novelties which
then was so prone to identify the new and the good, and which
has always, and prečminently in all departments of the reading
question, admitted crude trialette schemes unguaranteed into
the Schoolroom. It certainly has almost none of the merit,
even in this respect, of the admirable system of Mr. Bell.
Of course much sport was made of these sounds which, if
separated as widely as was usual, were as meaningless and irra-
tional as letter-names. To some they seemed only ludicrous,
to others an insult to and a mutilation of human speech “so
brutish that, beside them, the natural noises of animals were
divine.” The extreme systematizers had several schemes of
grading, and a few have insisted that all sounds must be learned
before any were combined. Even the petty variation of an
inverted alphabet was trumpeted as a new method. The phonic
method, however, as more Sanely and commonly applied,
especially with the analytic stage of dissecting out sounds from
a wisely devised set of normal words, constitutes an invaluable
addition to the repertory of pedagogic devices. Spelling is for
the eye and hand rather than for the ear, and consists in describ-
ing, with convenient technical nomenclature, the details of the
word-picture, and in teaching the eye and hand their part in the
complete process of read-writing, and is one of the best and most
labor saving devices which it is folly to dispense with, however
laté in the process we may place it. For training mouth and ear
to their part in the process, the phonic device is no less service-
6 HOW TO TEACH READING,
able and no less psychological. Both should be used in teaching
reading, and there should be no more conflict or rivalry between
them than between reading and speaking, or at least between
silent and oral reading. Children love to put audible into visible
signs, and, for a child with a vivid visual and a feeble auditory
memory, it eases the strain of ordering tones in a series to
adduce a visible sign. Although spelling is to make the forms
of words right, so that we learn to spell by writing, the old oral
way often comes in to help out the hand, not so much in sug-
gesting the more familiar printed forms, as in supporting the
mind by calling in a new and independent series of impressions
to aid through the complex and illogical processes of English
orthography. Now that a blunder will not pass as individual.
taste or an attempt at reform, and Compositors are no longer
given extra pay to correct the Spelling of ladies and gentle-
men, and as phonics tend in a sense to make spelling hard,
eye and hand are not always enough to insure infallibility in
our peculiar tongue.
The name of the letter is no more unlike its phonic value
than the written is unlike the spoken word, or than both are
unlike the thing, act, or quality they have come in the different
languages to designate. Thus, all linguistic processes for a
modern child are in a sense irrational, and for the most part
merely conventional and arbitrary. The letter is not a picture
of the sound, nor the Sound of the thing or act. For children's
minds, however, arbitrary names and associations are far more
easy and natural, and the need of systematic completeness of
method far less, than is Commonly assumed. As, however, man
speaks before he reads, phonic training may perhaps precede
spelling. It should not be forgotten, of course, that name,
sound, and form of letters need to be so early and inseparably
asserted that each shall instantly suggest the other. That the
letter names and forms are themselves far easier than is com-
monly thought for bright children, by good pedagogic methods
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 7
has been often illustrated ; as, e.g., in the case of Mrs. John
Wesley, who, after exciting high expectations and interest,
dressed her children in their best clothes, and taught them the
alphabet in a day.
Thirdly, as spelling has grown less and later, writing, not as
a drill in penmanship or drawing, but to rouse interest in and
direct attention to the physiognomy of words, has gradually
grown to be an earlier and larger function in teaching language.
A very few German teachers have advocated, either in place of,
or before, or beside, the free use of the ruled slate, drill in the
position of the body, hand, and fingers, as exercises prelimi-
nary to writing,”eginning with large shoulder movements and
air-writing, and coming down gradually to finger movements,
perhaps in concert or at Command, just as during the first few
days or weeks of school-life, children must be taught to stand,
sit, turn right and left, place hands and feet in various posi-
tions, speak in chorus, at Call, at bell-taps, hand-signals, counts,
etc., as training to habits of prompt obedience. One writer
insists that in all of such early graphic exercises the left hand
should support the right and train the other cerebral hemi-
sphere by executing mirror-script at the same time. Some,
— because the pencil gives the habit of twirling, always a stiff,
and if hard or short, a heavy hand, clumsy at shading and
hair lines; or with Professor Cohen, who because a white
mark on a black background is much harder for the eyes
than the converse, has invented white slates, – would dis-
pense with the slate from the first, and begin with the pen,
perhaps dry at first. One vagarian finds merit in practice
with closed eyes and in the dark, from dictation of the earliest
normal words. In place of the single forms of letter as with
the early Romans, the Germans have, counting capitals, four
written and four printed forms of letter to learn, and of these
many schools and primers now begin with the Teutonic form of
cursive script, according to what Graser called the “pure write-
8 HOW TO TEACH READING,
read method,” which is now under discussion for the schools of
this Country. Cursive script originated as a more rapid, abbre-
viated and agglutinated kind of writing, and the single letters
are too little isolated and individualized for the analyses that
must come sooner or later. In Germany reading-machines and
Script-type, like Ziller's, with exercises in type-setting, partially
obviate this difficulty. Printed, and especially capital letters,
have more individuality, while their size alone is a great advan-
tage to children whose eye, and particularly whose hand needs
special education in all that is small. The written are farther
removed from drawing than the printed letters, and our best
chirographists have far less art than the mediaeval pen-printers.
Some children enter School with more or less natural knowl-
edge of writing in capital letters which were historically first.
Sizes and distances being equal, a simple word, e.g., man, dog,
hut, is easier to make as a drawing lesson if written cursively,
but is easier to read as distinguished by more definite charac-
teristics from other triliteral words, if printed. Reading cursive
and drawing printed words is therefore harder and later. To
begin with script has the advantage of launching children into
school life with what is absorbing and more likely to be new to
all, and on the whole is, no doubt, if wisely methodized, good
pedagogic economy. (The hand is a great help to tongue, ear,
and eye, for what we do sinks deeper than what we see or
say or hear, because involving more self-activity. Each process
carries and involves the other; but the easiestlingual support to
writing, — and some support though at first a little hard, should
be early taught, instead of the mechanical and instinctive
tongue-chewing, etc., -is innervating in the mouth the letter-
name, because the association of manual work with the eye is
closer than with the ear, and because the letter-name is uniform
and unequivocal for each sign, while many letters have several
Sounds. The phonic support to writing, if insisted on, may
come later.
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 9
Whether words are at bottom auditory and visual images, as
Meynert, Kussmaul, and other psychologists assume, or not sens-
ory but motor-efferent, as Stricker, Ferrier, Geiger, etc., assert,
need not be determined. From the fact that some are made
hoarse by hearing Oratory, acting, and singing, or that “think”
music and speech in the hand, some in the throat, ear, or eye,
etc., we may infer a wide range of individual variations. Not
only are these sensori-motor elements incommensurate, but the
diseases known as aphasia, agraphia, and alexia and deafness,
with their sub-species, show that the faculties of speaking, writ-
ing, reading, and hearing, though so closely associated and
mutually supportive, may any one of them be lost by disease,
without essentially affecting the integrity of the others. Not to
use any one of them is to leave power undeveloped, to go to
waste, and to rob us of a natural motor to School-work. To
apply them unwisely is to accumulate difficulties, and to leave
children to a longer and more disheartening experience of
their own inabilities than was before possible, and to “make the
invention of Cadmus dragons' teeth indeed, and the pedagogues
the armed cruel men that were the fit crop from such seed.” To
avoid the greater evils and secure the greatest good now possible
through modern methods, teachers need more intelligence and
pedagogic training, and more Scope for bringing their own indi-
viduality and experience to bear, than ever before in the history
of education. Even if he were taught reading and writing no
Sooner than by outgrown methods, a child who has been led
judiciously through the phonic, and then the scriptive and spell-
ing courses of training, has had such an experience in overcoming
obstacles, and seeing many processes converge to the unity of
one result, that though he can only read and write he cannot be
called uneducated. If he is especially apt in the use of the
hand, he learns to read largely by its agency; if chiefly visually-
minded, through the eye, etc. If the proportions of the differ-
ent partial methods are duly adjusted, all doors are knocked at,
and all parts of the mind working consiliently.
IO HOW TO TEACH READING,
The accumulated experience of every generation of teachers,
though by no means yet entirely accordant, now tends to a
practical method which it is possible to sketch in a rough, but
brief way. First, objects are presented, natural rather than
artificial, if practicable. These the children look at, and espe-
cially handle freely, if not already familiar. Only after their
natural curiosity has subsided, so as not to interfere with
instinctive spontaneities which are so much better than any
pedagogic devices, and to give free opportunity for the children
to question, the teacher in accurately pronounced, few and well-
chosen words, by a premeditated plan and with cheerful face
and accents, imparts the needed information, calls attention
to the parts and properties of the object, and if possible excites
the children's minds to reaction in conversation. Perhaps
models, colored, and later, because color interferes with form
and drawing, uncolored pictures, which are successive stages of
abstraction, are used. Perhaps the pictures are at first com-
plex and including many objects, as Bock suggests, or more
commonly, of simple, familiar objects at first. Such pictures
are so esteemed in many German schools that they are hung
up later, and used as aids to conversation-exercises in learning
foreign languages, being mostly of kitchen-interiors, barn-
yards, parlors, out-of-door, Summer and winter school-scenes,
farmers and tradesmen at their work. There is great diversity
of opinion among professional pedagogues how long these exer-
cises should be continued. Richter would have them fill
nearly the whole of the first school-year, with no reading and
writing till the second, less to teach the children high German
than to ensure enough knowledge of real things at the start,
that subsequent labor be not wasted in cultivating a desert.
Schäfer thinks four weeks of this enough. The law of Wittenburg
allows so little time for it, that it requires that at the end of the
first year children read easy sentences in script and print, and
write script and capitals. What is wanted is to turn the full,
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. I I
deep current of life and out-of-door interests into the school
activities, and to familiarize children with book language always
separated by a wide and deep interval from their own. The
teacher must draw and give chalk-talks, and Some give no
books and even show no print till towards the end of the first
year, occupying the class entirely with objects, slates, or pencil
and paper, and other simple school apparatus, and insisting
that every written word or phrase be read over and over again.
The primer, which was originally a little religious book used
at prime or dawn, should first of all have large and well-formed
letters, respecting which Javal has lately made important
researches, small type being harder for boys than for girls. If
the lines are too long, say ten centimeters, the eye in passing
from the middle to the end of the line must change its accom-
modation, if the book be held at the normal distance. The
strain thus involved is of course slight till lines are read with
some rapidity, when it becomes excessive, and often leads to
myopia, the seven centimeter lines of the common French
novel being nearer the hygenic limit. The different letters of
print begin to be visible at quite different distances, so that a
change in form for some of the worst of them would consider-
ably increase the amount of legibility to a square inch of printed
matter. The opening of u should be less than n, to seem equal
to it; the bottom of our y, g, and 7 need modification ; h and
& require more differentiation; a, c and e, p, 3, 2, and i could
be improved in ways he details. The specimen pages of Javal's
reformed typography, with lessened lower lengths, and more
differentiation along the upper half of the small letters, which is
the line the eye naturally follows, increased interspaces between
letters being more than compensated in economy of paper Sur-
face by reduced width between the lines, are not only beautiful
and clear, but present the casual reader no innovations, but
only unusual clearness. ---
Some method there must be, or there is great waste. The
I 2 How TO TEACH READING,
first primer-question is, what normal words shall be chosen? a
problem which determines to some extent the previous object-
teaching and the choice of the earlier reading-matter later.
Some prefer many words, and one gets all the forty-three sounds
commonly used into fourteen. Most give precedence to nouns,
while several proceed to adjectives, verbs, and a few to prepo-
sitions and adverbs, while one uses as normal material the forms
of the verb to be. Some prefer monosyllables, some words of
two or three letters, and one, with great pains, takes the name of
each child as its first normal word. Most prefer Anglo-Saxon,
or at least those words that carry their etymologies with them,
that are of familiar meaning and about equally hard to read and
write. Most of the rigorous script-methods begin with a noun
containing the vowel i, which is reached by analysis, and per-
haps permanently painted on the board with slant of the due
number of angles, and transition is made to 24, m, n, and in
German script to e. Sometimes a bias toward Science, art,
industry, etc., is freely indulged in the selection of these words
and the object-teaching which they focus. Sometimes the
form-elements of letters, and sometimes the vocal elements of
speech, minutely analyzed and graded on Some real or arbitrary
genetic principle, or according to the least change in transition,
are the main determinants in the choice of normal words. The
finer the analysis, and the more fully one set of conditions in
the choice of normal words is fulfilled, the less perfectly are the
other desiderata met. All advantages cannot be combined in
any single series of words, or even of meaningless noises, so that
several sets of normal words may have about equal merit, the
best being, of course, those that realize, though but partially,
most of the conditions of excellence. On the concentrative
plan, these words and objects are for a time the focus of nearly
all the work of school ; riddles, so much used in German schools
to the great delectation of children, proverbs, games, out-of-
school occupations, as well as writing, printing, drawing, phonic
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. I 3
drill, and even spelling and the composition of longer senten-
ces, make these words the nucleus of many contexts and con-
notations out through widely dispersive fringes of association.
The heart, and its moods of Sad and gay, are appealed to by
story-telling, the consummation of the primary teacher's art, and
in some lands an important part of her examination.
In Germany, Songs, – sometimes found or adapted, and
sometimes made by the teacher, when they are of Course usually
very poor, and sometimes had in view in the selection of words,
and in one primer-system one for each normal word, taught
by rote, with the aid of that most pedagogic of all instruments,
the violin, – are used as a bond of unity, between teacher and
class, the children themselves and the scattered parts of knowl-
edge. In some recent European programmes this work is
schematized and laid out with one new and different step for
each day in the school calendar, not by way of requirement,
but of suggestions, with great care that but one difficulty be
encountered at a time, and with many reviews, repetitions, and
concert exercises, both presſo and adagio.
Most now assume that knowledge should always precede
practice; that fingers, hand, and arm must be immediately
guided by consciousness; that, e.g., in writing, the child's mind
is also to act, carrying along a feeling of the Sound, whose
graphic symbol it is making, in a sense of the letter-name, or
the meaning of the word; that there must be some develop-
ment of “mouth or hand-consciousness,” etc. The motto,
“all with consciousness,” applied here, means the control of
attention and movement by the will, and the immediate appli-
cation of theory and insight to regulate practice. But the
powers thus exercised, however fit the method, soon tire, and
in some children are exceptionally feeble, so that there is often
peculiar advantage in diverting the attention, and in merely
mechanical repetition. Children are so automatic and imita-
tive, have such a genius for the facile acquisitions of habit, and
I4 HOW TO TEACH READING,
are so easily stupefied by reasons and explanations, that some
seem to learn to read and write so mechanically as to get by it
no trace whatever of really mental discipline or development.
The sooner all these processes are completely mechanized, so
that reading is rapid, sure, and free, the sooner the mind can
attend to the subject-matter. Till then, Benecke thought reading
and writing a necessary evil, and that processes so mechanical
and arbitrary should be taught mechanically and arbitrarily,
hoping for a time when children should be born with the
spelling-mechanism innate and instinctively perfect in their
brains.
There appears to come to many children a period, lasting
perhaps many months, between the ages of five and eight, when
both interest and facility in learning to read culminate ; and if
this period passes unutilized, they learn it with greater difficulty
and at a certain disadvantage. To this, however, we shall
recur later.
Children should not be allowed to suspect these processes
are hard, as they are likely to do if they detect the teacher's
method. It is the inveterate vice of the pedagogue's mind to
forget that all methods are only means, and never ends, for the
pupils; that the highest art is to conceal art; that method in
teaching, as in philosophizing, is only “an arch overhead in
tunnelling” a hill, which serves to keep off the falling sand, that
the work may go on effectively beneath ; that it is not unlike
the bony skeleton, giving form and effectiveness to the body,
but ghastly if exposed. Children love wholes, and their mental
acts are large, generic, and often complex. They abhor ele-
ments, details, abstractions. They find, at least in the vernacular,
sentences easier than words. The passage from Telemachus,
with which Jacotot would begin, is too long; but his error is
far less than that of those systems which begin letter-wise rather
than word-wise, or like some “new methods” which reduce the
letters to formal elements at first. The word “reading” means
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. I 5
gathering, and from the act of grouping letters to words, as the
teacher's pencil points along the line, as it should do at first,
to that of thinking into unity the contents of paragraphs,
chapters, and volumes, the whole work of reading is essentially
synthetic. Whether it be taught by a truly natural method
depends on whether the previous analysis of the teacher has
been correct, or such that only its absence would be felt,
because without it some steps would be too long, too short, or
in too many directions, or out of orderly sequence.
In fine, the growing agreement that there is no one and only
Orthodox way of teaching and learning this greatest and hard-
est of all the arts, in which ear, mouth, eye, and hand must each
in turn train the others to automatic perfection, in ways hard
and easy, by devices old and new, mechanically and con-
Sciously, actively and passively, of things familiar and unknown,
and by alternately resting and modulating from one set of facul-
ties to another, secure mental unity and school economy, both
intellectual and material,— this is a great gain, and seems now
secure. But there is still very much to be learned, which only
long and painstaking pedagogical experiment and observation
can reveal, respecting the most sanative and normal sequence
and proportion of all these ways, respecting which there is still
much difference of opinion and practice. Not merely the
native powers of children, but those of teachers should be
studied and given free scope. The natural tact for some spe-
cial and partial method which so many teachers have, should
be encouraged and not suppressed by the printed official
course or programme.
While a good pedagogic method is one of the most economic
— of both labor and of money — of all inventions, we should
never forget that the brightest children, and indeed most children,
if taught individually or at home, need but very few refinements
of method like the above. Idiots, as Mr. Seguin first showed,
need and profit greatly by very elaborated methods in learning
I6 w HOW TO TEACH READING,
how to walk, feed, and dress themselves, which would only
retard a normal child. Every increase in the size of the class,
too, beyond a certain low point, retards the progress of the
individual child, and necessitates subtle if not hypertrophied
methods. Yet, in the present condition of things, they are
likely to grow more and not less useful in the future. Above
all, it should be borne in mind that the stated use of any
method does not preclude the incidental use of any, and per-
haps of a/Z others. To write the letters may help one child; to
name them another; casual allusion to, or illustration by, the
interjectional method of Oehlwein, or to the gingerbread
method of Basedow, a third. In fine, nothing of this sort
which a tactful teacher knows well can fail to help her and her
pupils.
II.
WE thus come, by a somewhat arbitrary division of our sub-
ject, to the second problem of what to read in school — a far
larger and more important question than how to read, and re-
specting which there is now much less agreement. When a
child has acquired the power to read, a vast and before unknow-
able world opens up before him. On the one hand are means
of culture in what is good and great, which impose new duties
of unselfish living and excite high ideals through high examples;
and on the other hand are degrees of degradation of many
kinds, mental and moral, impossible before.
From antiquity to the present time, many thoughtful men
have declared writing to be not only inferior to speech, but a
spurious form of knowledge. To put things in writing, it has
been said, is the surest way to lose them, for we then cease to
care for them. Writing spoils the memory, and gives rise to
an unreal, evanescent kind of knowledge. We fall into the
habit of thinking we really know what we read, and that it is
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 17
unnecessary to learn it otherwise, and thus, often, the more
we read, the more ignorant we become, and forget that dis-
cipline is quite as much conduct as Science, and that many
lessons must be practised rather than repeated. It has been
said by some one that Plato's designation of Aristotle's house
as the house of the reader, was an intended disparagement,
because he regarded the way of reading as unfavorable to
clear and vivid apprehension, and as calculated to shut man
away from the fresher resources of social intercourse and the
inspiration of solitary thought. Books were at first more
often conversational, sprightly, as under the influence of the
Salons and the national social vivacity many French books
are full of antitheses and dialectic contrasts; but now, con-
versely, books have too often made conversation bookish.
Reading, in emancipating men from their physical and mental
environment, often weakens local pride and local interest, and
creates a distaste for what is nearest, and what, therefore, should
be pedagogically first. Finally, we sometimes find a habit of
passionate reading in children that not only interferes with the
physical development, but destroys mental and moral inde-
pendence, and may be called as morbid as the writing mania.
Thus I have gradually almost come to the opinion that many
of our youth would develop into better health, stauncher virtue,
and possibly better citizenship, and a culture in every way more
pedagogical and solid, had they never been taught to read, but
some useful handicraft, and the habit of utilizing all the methods
of oral education within reach, instead. Our be-pedagogued
age cannot refuse all quality of admiration for men who lived
before Guttenberg, or even before Cadmus, or for those doughty
old mediaeval knights who despised the petty clerk's trick of writ-
ing, because compared to a life of toilsome and heroic action, it
seemed to them slavish and unmanly, and scorned, by reading,
to muddle their wits with alien ideas because their own age and
land and their own thoughts seemed as good for all, and better
I8 HOW TO TEACH READING,
for them, than any other. At any rate, I am profoundly con-
vinced that just as from the point of view that regards charity
as a science rather than a virtue, it is wrong to give doles to
beggars unless we are able and willing, personally or by agen-
cies to that end, to follow them up and see that our gifts are so
spent as to do the recipient good and not harm, so the school
has no right to teach how to read, without doing much more
than it now does to direct the taste and confirm the habit of
reading what is good rather than what is bad.
Even before the more mechanical function of the primer is
ended the strife of opinion begins. The alphabet war of 1776
in Nassau, which is said to have cost 60,000 florins, was against
a secular primer. Whether, in selecting primary reading mat-
ter, regard should be had to the seasons of the year, whether
the order should invariably be from near to far, and whether
country life and scenes should predominate, even for city chil-
dren, the validity of the great stress which Herbartians lay on
Märchen, the proportions and kinds of cursory and stataric
reading, seem now to be questions of growing importance.
Diesterweg, and many since, advocate historical readers, of
which we now have several in this country. Some prefer that
readers should be mainly biographical, a few would include
many extracts from original historical sources, but most prefer
extracts from standard modern writers of history, beginning with
battles, critical debates, etc. Very much can be taught thus of
moral import in terms of action — a language children keenly
appreciate. Others prefer literary readers, made up of extracts
from, and perhaps sketches of well-known authors. Some advo-
cate scientific facts or useful information, as the best material for
school readers. An increasing number of thoughtful teachers
would make reading, including other language work in the ver-
nacular, the centre of all primary and grammar school work.
We have in English the best and largest literature in the world
to draw from, and this makes the task of selection all the harder.
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. I9
Yet most of our reading-books have been made by people not
widely read and not very critical or discriminative, and although
between such and those made by purely literary men we should,
with the Prussian law of 1872, prefer the former, the best of
them have fallen far below our rare possibilities in this regard.
Continental reader-makers have used the opportunities afforded
by their vernacular literature far better than English or Ameri-
can makers. If the names upon our readers are nominal, or
they are “whacked ” together by agents with too exclusive an eye
to the competition of rival firms with text-book committees, as
such committees are now often constituted in our larger cities,
and such professional knowledge as Superintendents could bring
to bear, is excluded, real authorship in this field becomes im-
possible. If, again, extracts from all our popular authors are
not made copyright-free for such use for children, it need not
be wondered at if the great changes since the days of Scott's
lessons and the Franklin readers have not all been real im-
provements. • -
We believe, however, that despite the present confusion it is
possible to discern some of the features of the reading series of
the future ; not only that it will not be exclusively devoted to
useful information or to history, that the newspapers will not be
introduced into the reading hour, etc., but that some elements
now generally excluded will come in. First, young children
have a pleasure in words or noises, as they often, but less
universally, do in large printed words or pictures, which adults
find it hard to understand or even to recognize. Mere non-
sense, jingle, rhyme, gibberish, vocal gymnastics of the Theo-
philus Thistle order, have a certain aesthetic value to them
which is enhanced because they are meaningless Sounds which
most writers now insist should be, for that reason, kept out of
primers. The cries of animals, interjections, the original Mother
Goose, all that is alliterative or onamatopoetic, lines of make-
believe “Choctaw " speech, which a recent primer introduces
2O HOW TO TEACH READING,
and defends, from the strange delight of children to be freed
from conventionalized meanings, and to have their fancy left
with the sound as mere noises, to make of them what it will—
all these have a high aesthetic value for children. Perhaps it
was this fact which vaguely hovered before Pinkerton in his
well-known attempt to decorate the end of English words
for primers thus: “I sato on the topino of a rocko,” of which
it was said it was not adaptado by anybodyini whatsoeverono.
The principle of the gibberish, hog-Latin, etc., many specimens of
which have been collected in the study of children and now lie
before me, is at least very similar, consisting, in most cases, of
adding syllables like iggery to every word to puzzle children not
in the secret. It is applied by the german primer of Oehlwein,
which uses the natural interjections children make at the sight
of objects; e.g., illustrating the Sound Ötz by the picture of one
child, with a sheet over its head, trying to frighten another by
personating a ghost; #2, by the picture of a Snuff-taker Sneezing,
etc.; and was called very important and deserving of further
study by Ziller, and introduced supplementarily in the song-
primer of Rocholtz. Such sounds are at least better than the
senseless a-à = a&, b-a = &a, etc., and children come to school
with an already ripe interest in these things which does not
need to be awakened. In many ways children work easier and
faster than adults because they do not see the full bearings of
subjects, and as mere noise and Sound-work language-lessons
may train the ear for the appreciation of the tone-painting,
quantity, etc., of poetry in the same way as we catch “speech-
music” best, if the words are just too distant to be understood,
get color effects better in an inverted landscape, etc. Again,
from Rössler's table (1863), showing the order in which Ger-
man children learn to make sounds, it may be inferred that some
of those most expressive in this way are mastered after the be-
ginning of school age, and that this instinctive love of vocal
sounds, which is one element in the fascination which even
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 2 I
infants, who catch only here and there a word, feel for stories,
may be utilized in phonic gymnastics to develop their weaker
and more imperfect sounds. Here children have no trouble in
taking the author's standpoint, and treating the subject-matter
emotionally. This element, however, should be admitted only
early and sparingly, and by no means weakens, but only re-
lieves by grateful contrast the principle, of which it is the dia-
metric opposite ; viz., that words with objective meanings should
be the rule. Poetry of the kind that abounds in this element
never loses its charm. s
Secondly, we would see still more prominence given to what,
for want of a more adequate name, may be called mythopoetic
elements in school readers of lower grades. There is material
widely scattered through English and other ballad literature,
Norse sagas, German Märchen, ancient fables and mythology,
legendary heroology and folklore, primitive history, hymns, and .
even in dictionaries of proverbs, maxims, riddles, etc., which,
if carefully worked up and experimented on in schoolrooms
and nurseries in ways which the late Professor Laas has so
wisely suggested, by well-premeditated and methodic principles
Qf selection, so that each extract could be defended against all
thers, would prove, for its share, of far better quality than that
f the anthologies now in use. The objections most commonly
met with, especially in this country, to this element, and which
merit careful attention are, that the animation of lifeless things,
the talking of animals, hovering of fairies, etc., so confuse fancy
and reality that the way even to lying is prepared, that childish
absorption in them is so great that facts seem insipid, and that
much has to be unlearned before the actualities of the natural,
or even the moral, world can be truly seen. Some, therefore,
especially the philanthropinists, would banish them entirely, as
Plato would poets, and others would adopt them only inci-
dentally, by way of stimulus and recreation. Most of the best
German writers on the subject, from Herder and Niemeyer
22 HOW TO TEACH READING,
down to Ziller, Klaiber, A. Weber, Grube, and W. Rein, have
pleaded for this element to train and direct the fancy which
seems to be at its strongest and best at the sixth or the seventh
years, because, if well chosen, it is so saturated with ethical
tendencies, and because it affords the first fresh and conscious
point of contact between the national or ethnic conscience an
the individual soul. Myths have something too high and, in
a sense, sacred about them to be used merely as recreation.
Some one, taking in earnest the Platonic suggestion that the
state should regulate and select myths, Songs, etc., has even Sug-
gested that they be rescued from their present degradation by a
law against printing them, and that the telling of them as an art
be taught in normal Schools, and take its place among “rhetori-
cal exercises.” They have survived and developed for un-
counted centuries independently of print, and by savage peoples
are cherished as a kind of tribal palladium, which it is treason
to the prosperity or even life of the tribe to tell to enemies or
strangers. They are profoundly true, not to the external world,
as the child knows and may be freely told, but to the heart and
the world within. With the good as the pretty, and the bad as
always ugly, and the ethical judgment freely exercised where it
is sure to go right, mythic forms are about as near pure object
teaching as ethics can get. They are the veins of which th
great classical works in literary history are the best outcrop and
revelation, and which are still rich enough to yield new litera-
tures of new kinds, but which children best glimpse and sense
first in their simple and more homely expressions. They lie at
the root of humanistic culture, and are the most solid basis for
sound religious training, which systematically they should pre-
cede. Belabored, long, or annotated, these selections should
not be, but expressly fragmentary, and unsystematic, possibly,
on an assumption well expressed by a late writer, that in lit-
erary as in artistic life, broken work, unfinished sketches, and
sometimes even sentences such as are rarely tolerated in our
|
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 23
schools, which require all to be finished and in order, and fail
to encourage skipping, are commendable partial means to the
kind of culture here sought. When it is realized that one of
the most effective ways of implanting a love of science in
children is by appealing to their passion for what is strange, by
the wonders of the sea, of the spectrum, of the sky, etc., it will
be seen.that genuine myth, which is the oldest subject of in-
struction, is the best propaedeutic of science also, which is
opening new Sources of poetic inspiration. To call this a
“tadpole-tail theory” only adds from natural history another
good illustration of its soundness.
If we admit myth, the field from which to choose is greatly
widened, and the question next arises, what, from the vast
expanse of print, in a land and age where books multiply and
literature decays, we can safely afford to omit? Minds relaxed
by reading novels of the exciting kind children prefer, or goody
Sunday-school books of a too common type, which a healthy,
well-kept mind cannot abide, or much newspaper or periodical
literature for children or adults, may be interested in what is
light and chatty, but cannot read in the severer sense the
school should ever insist on. Pictures, after the earliest primer
lessons, should be omitted. Not only do too many illustra-
tions, like too many or too finished playthings, enfeeble the
imagination, but they do not leave it free to interpret, and they
appeal to the senses where mind and heart should be touched,
while the moral bearings of pictures, of all but didactic kinds,
to which children are to grow habituated by long familiarity, are
so great and so little understood that none is better than those
which are likely to be chosen. Mere instruction or informa-
tion, whether of scientific or historical facts, domestic or indus-
trial arts, household economy, hygiene, good manners, etc., are
invaluable in encyclopædias of what children ought to know, or
as “talk topics,” but should be for the most part excluded from
readers, as should also direct ethical or religious instruction or
24 HOW TO TEACH READING,
exhortation, which is better if personal, without the intervention
of books. All that, for the most part, on which there are great
partisan, local, or sectarian differences of opinion should of
course be avoided. Virchow was doubtless right, against
Haeckel, that evolution should not at present be taught to
children, especially by non-experts. Long pieces, scholarly and
critical annotations, abstract themes, Bible extracts, and all that
is too adult belongs elsewhere, as do fine bindings and superfine
paper. Readers are the most lucrative of publishers' property,
and ought to be the cheapest of all school-books, instead of
the most expensive.
The prime object of the reading series should be, not as
Diesterweg thought it should, the cultivation of the art of read-
ing, nor training to good style, nor grammatical or linguistic
drill, important as these are, but the development of a living
appreciation of good literature, and the habit of reading it
rather than bad, for with this end all others are secured. There
are many things in literature which every one ought to know
well, including patterns and samples of all the chief varieties of
prose and poetry. The emotions are far more independent o
age or culture than the intelligence, and need far less of the
arts of adaptation. There is thus some material, from domestid
to school, town, state, and national life, till home piety merges
into patriotism and philanthropy, generally accepted, respecting
the admission of which there would be little difference of opin-
ion. As for the rest, the labor of selecting the best may be not
irreverently compared to that of selecting the books of the scrip-
tural canon. As long as the Hebrew national spirit was pure and
provincial, Ezra found the selection of the best literature easy,
and its effect inspiring. The mingling of bloods and traditions
which followed the Christian era made the task of the canonists
far harder. Had we a national literature, like; e.g., the Germans
or Italians, our reading-book problems would be comparatively
simple, but our choices must be now more humanistic than















AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 25
provincial. We can never get the best our vast opportunities
make possible without prolonged and systematic discussion of
and experimentations on each selection and by gradation in the
light of a large consilience of pupils’ preferences and teachers'
and parents' judgments and experiences. Could these be gath-
ered by superintendents or teachers, and discussed at educa-
tional meetings, we should expect to find it one of the most
fruitful themes. At any rate, the readers of the future must
arise out of and after long tests in the schoolroom and nursery,
on the basis, of course, of such valuable experience as is already
embodied in the best of such readers as we already have.
Exercises with readers of the kind postulated should be, as
many German pedagogues now make them, the centre and
touchstone of all the work of school, and even of its tone and
discipline, reflecting the life of the pupil, the school, and home,
and guiding and stimulating to much supplementary reading.
It is generally felt and said that we cannot read beyond our
experience; that we must be trained to reading by active life-
interests; that to appreciate great authors we must have had a
vigorous discipline of soul, or be at home in the feelings and
passions of the human heart; that, e.g., if Christian living and
motive is lost, Christ ceases to be understood ; that mankind
must have deeper griefs, hates, fears, loves, than is common in
modern life to appreciate the greatest books; and that there-
fore it is unwise to introduce children to standard literature to
any great extent or in a systematic way in even upper grammar
school grades. There is a profound truth in this, and there
are sentiments, normal in later years, which it is even danger-
ous to find the expressions of too early. But, on the other -
hand, there is much that cannot be taught too early, some of
it perhaps is needed to counteract evil tendencies, truths too
large to be conveyed immediately from one mind to another,
but which must be grown up to slowly, which can be felt if
treated emotionally by carefully trained aesthetic reading, and
26 - HOW TO TEACH READING,
slowly wrought out into ideal shapes by reiterated reading, para-
phrasing, etc. This we often can really learn to know by, and
perhaps only by, active reading, after working our way to the
author's standpoint and conveying its meaning, pushed out by
inner impulse and shaded by inflexions, portatively over into
the minds and hearts of others. This kind of reading even
takes the place, to some extent, of the active experience of
maturer years in exciting appreciation of the best literature.
It is assumed, then, that we must have stated or stataric
readers, uniformly punctuated, containing nothing merely petty
or individual, and its reading must not be degraded as means to
other ends, but must be of central importance, and the best test
of the quality of the teacher and the school work. We must
have regard chiefly, at first, in compiling readers and in using
them in school, not to method, as we have been too wont to do,
but to subject-matter, to content, and its wide bearings. Noth-
ing, again, brings out good reading like the comprehension of
it, involving direct innervation from the higher cerebral centres.
Yet we must here avoid selections the full meaning of which can
be immediately apprehended and conveyed. The mind must
grow slowly up to it by many repetitions, it must be felt and its
drift vaguely caught before and as a condition of the correct
and healthy action of the intellect upon it. The material should
not be all of what is new or unfamiliar save at first. What is
absent and remote has the advantage not only of often exciting
peculiar interest from its strangeness, but of being grasped and
reconstructed by words alone as discipline in getting and han-
dling ideas. Wide ranges of words, tropes, and especially of
styles, ideas, etc., should be included. If we would give chil-
dren a good vocabulary of these of their own, which they can
command and use, which is a very different thing from being
able to understand, this work can hardly begin too early. The
reading-book should be taught with all energy, by a teacher
especially trained for it, who at least loves literature and who
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 27
can read it well and often to her class, omnes conficuére infen-
figue ora fenečanſ (with a revival of the old system of reading-
prizes for pupil and for teacher?). Perhaps there should be
“ methodic unities” by varying the character of the matter each
week, month, or year, to give concentration and deepening, and
to add still another quality, of variety; and it should not be for-
gotten that there is no literature too sacred to be cut or muti-
lated in any way if it can really be made more effective with
children. New pieces should be begun at once, with little
comment or explanation, save Sometimes a preliminary reading
by the teacher. When frequent repetitions have made the
technique of pronouncing, stops, etc., familiar, and the mind
moves freely through the sentences, then only do deeper mean-
ings, unknown till the mouth had acted on them, begin to be felt,
and to appear in stress, accent, inflection, etc. To teach
gesture before these latter are well developed would be to teach
dancing before the child has learned to walk. Manual gesture,
including posturing, is only a more elaborated form of facial
expression and inflexion, which latter might be called vocal
gesture. If natural and spontaneous, if an overflow of the
physiologically more restricted forms of expression after their
capacity is exhausted, its power over speaker and hearer is very
great. There is no surer way to check anger, mirth, or any
other passion or sentiment, than to compel ourselves to assume
the facial expression of its opposite. Delsarte, though as
mystic, symbolic, and unsatisfactory an enthusiast as Froebel,
with whom he might in many respects be compared, is yet no
less than Froebel, a great educational discoverer, the perusal of
whose fragmentarily published theories of expression could not
fail to aid if they did not convince every teacher of reading.
Even the belabored, artificial gesticulation of many school and
college commencements is not without use in freeing and limber-
ing the body to reflect the mind and heart truly before others.
Thus that recitation, declamation, and dialogue, with logical and
28 HOW TO TEACH READING,
aesthetic reading, awaken the effort to impress others, which is
the surest way of impressing ourselves, is only a partial illustra-
tion of the principle that all art to be kept pure must be a
means of education. The danger that Schleiermacher feared in
his day, that political life will suffer from lack of readiness in
public speaking does not exist for us, yet these kinds of rhetori-
cal practice are not likely to be excessive, provided only the
selections are the fittest and best, for they cultivate good taste,
which is well termed by an ancient teacher the recollection of
the beautiful.
After this attention may be given to notes, and especially to
forms. Recasting, résumés, paraphrases, particularly of poetry
into prose, Selections, and copying of the best passages and
phrases, exercises into tropes, discussion of sentiments, or their
fit expressions and frequent memorization, etc., may be tried
in turn. The reading-teacher must not neglect grammatical
drill, which is one of the most important of all educational in-
strumentalities and the basis of the study of language. It has
been overdone in the past, and has often fallen into the hands
of pedagogical Philistines. No less than twenty-eight parts of
speech, twelve tenses, and twelve modes, etc., have been dis-
tinguished in school-books. When the deeper meaning of the
Bible was thought to lurk mysteriously in the sentence-
structure, a good grammarian was proverbially a good theo-
logian, and even now there are pedagogues who assume that
there is something wrong in an author if his idioms, which from
their very nature are anti-grammatical, cannot be brought under
the ready-made formula and “parsed.” But nothing yet known
makes its place good in teaching to talk and write correctly, and
with its neglect in Our Schools an increasing number of candi-
dates for admission to college are deficient in the practical
knowledge of their own tongue. What is needed is, of course,
not prosody but Syntax, and enough parsing and analysis to
develop a “sentence sense.”
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 29
Closely connected with this is theme—or composition—writ-
ing, which some would develop from paraphrases of reading-
exercises, or from talks about these topics, passing on to themes
that require the use of several books, from, e.g., Greek and
Roman life, etc. This is well; the only danger of bookish
topics being, that the pupil will not react with vigor on his mate-
rial, but will only acquire an apparatus of ready-made opinions
and phrases, which will interfere with independence. Culture
here, as elsewhere, is well defined as being at home in our own
personality; yet here, as elsewhere, we may copy till we get our
line. The things to be chiefly sought in composition-writing
are freshness, originality, and boldness, far rather than finish, as
should also be the rule in drawing. Children who write really
good themes, expressing freely and happily their personality,
are quite often ashamed of it at first. Self-consciousness is
excited because spontaneity culminates in production. Only
those catch the literary passion of giving more direct, full,
accurate expression to forms of their mental and moral life, who
have felt the glow of finding them reflected in their stated
reading.
Till children take pleasure in the silent, passive, cursory
reading of good literature, touching but not pressing the keys,
learning the great task of catching the meanings of others’
minds undistorted, the responsibility of the school does not
entirely cease. To do this latter healthfully is, in a sense, an
index of the capacity for culture. Some minds are too self-
occupied to read, or even to be in any way much impressed
with the thoughts of others. Many boys enter college who
have never read a book through except cheap novels. On
the other hand, no one commends a bookish child. But worse
than either is the child whose brain is saturated with low or
cheap reading, and is altogether illiterate for all in print that
makes the ability to read desirable. In the selection of school
reading the children's votes should be carefully taken, though
sº


















3O HOW TO TEACH READING,
not always as final. Of one hundred and twenty-four Boston
schoolboys of thirteen years old, who were asked what book
first fascinated them, Robinson Crusoe, Mother Goose, Jack the
Giant-Killer, were mentioned in that order of preference by the
great majority, and might probably more readily be allowed
young children than most others named. Cinderella, Jack and
the Bean-Stalk, Tom Thumb, Gulliver, Æsop, Red Riding-
Hood, Arabian Nights, which came next, are unexceptionable,
and should be told every child who has not heard them before
coming to school. The books in which these boys professed
chief interest at present were, in order of most common pref-
erence: Ivanhoe, Cooper's tales, Oliver Optic, Jules Verne, and
Dickens, who received an equal number of votes; travel, his-
tory, adventure, Lady of the Lake, Horatio Alger's tales, Shakes-
peare, biography, Tom Brown, Dumas, Peck's Bad Boy, Monte
Cristo, Michael Strogoff, Longfellow, Cudjo's Cave, etc., -
a list which, as a whole, might certainly be improved upon.
In Europe, Lange has written stories from Herodotus in the
vernacular for children; Goldschmidt, tales from Livy, Kolrauch
Bible stories; Church in England, and Willmann in Germany,
have told Homer for children; and Xenophon, Plutarch, the
Niebelungen, Beowulf, Dante, Shakespeare, Don Quixote, The
Spectator, Bunyan, Andersen, Grimm, Scott, and many others,
have been worked over for school use with various degrees o
success. Even the Bible has been sifted, paraphrased, and
wrought over for School use in many ways. As good a
gradation of this sort as any, prepared for German schools in
which one or two set exercises per week, under a teacher spe-
cially selected for that work alone, may be described here.
For the lowest primary class comes first five stories from the
oldest times in Genesis, and five of the childhood of Jesus, with
songs, hymns, and table prayers. Next come tales of the
patriarchs and the miracles of Christ, described as great and
arduous works performed from kind-heartedness to help others,














AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 3 I
nd the Ten Commandments, with no comment or explanation.
hen come stories of Moses and the Judges, and the parables
in the New Testament. Next, stories of the Hebrew kings,
memorization of Proverbs, and the accounts of the Crucifixion
and Resurrection. Fifth, the times of the captivity and proph-
ets, recitation of psalms, and the Lutheran doctrine of Christ.
In the sixth grade the books of the Old Testament are charac-
terized, along with the external history of the Jews, the cate-
chism is begun, and the teachings of Christ are presented in
simple form. Then come select Bible readings, and the
history of the Christian Church in outline, and the Sacraments.
This is followed by the history of the Persian, Egyptian, Baby-
lonian, and post-apostolic age. Last come the doctrine and
history of the Lutheran Church. After all this, and often inci-
dental to confirmation, comes more or less personal application
of what has been taught to character and conduct. How
vastly more pedagogic and effective this is in giving children a
good knowledge of Bible-lore than most American Sunday-
school methods is evident in the results, and is readily sug-
gested even by so well considered a plan. Although in this
country Scripture cannot be taught in common with school
reading or school work of any kind, and although it should or
at least need not be made stataric in the school sense of being
the basis for grammatical and rhetorical drill, it should, even on
the secular ground of containing the best of all literature, most
classic in form as well as in substance, be rescued from the
pedagogic degradation to which present unworthy methods of
teaching it to children have brought it.
Herbart thought that at the age of about nine or ten to twelve
or thirteen, boys were better fitted to understand and appre-
ciate the substance of Homer than at any other age. Tales
from Shakespeare, not like those of Lamb, but told with more
Spirit, more phrases from the original, and especially with quo-
tations of taking passages; much of Dante, if adapted from a
}











32 . HOW TO TEACH READING,
standpoint like that of Rosetti's “Shadow of Dante,” and s
on through much of the most important literature of the world
can be intelligently and lastingly impressed on the minds o
children before the average age of leaving our high and even
our grammar schools. What is chiefly needed here is true child
editions, made not by literary men, not even by well-read and
successful teachers or superintendents, but by special teachers
of reading, who would patiently test many children and classes
with the work by piecemeal, and cut and adapt the material
till it really and closely fitted the minds and hearts of the chil-
dren. These we shall have as reading becomes a specialty in
pedagogy, as it ought and is sure to do. The danger now is
that badly made editions will make us sceptical of the true
way. As a rule, the younger the age for which such material is
adapted, the surer it will be to be relished by all. Reading
made up thus of juvenile adaptations of standard literature, o
careful and brief elaborations of great story roots, which should
be sampled and led up to by the stated reading-books, and, on
the other hand, should introduce children to the companion-
ship of good books, should be limited. Widely read young
people are almost always feebly educated. A single great work
read till its flavor is really caught, raises the level of the whol
mental and moral character. The various objects of the reading
book problem constitute, we believe, the most important of al
present methodic questions of pedagogy, and it can only b
rightly settled when quality instead of quantity, as current fashion
demands, shall become the ideal of a truly well-read man or
WOIT) all] .
One of the earliest certain dates in history, Semitic scholars
now tell us, is that of a Chaldean king who lived perhaps as
early as 38oo B.C., who sent out scribes from a priestly college
to collect old texts and traditions. These seem to have been
studied, classified, edited with grammar and vocabularies so
effectively, that diverse bloods and religions were forged into
|

























AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 33
one in part by their means. How many old literary products
gave up their message to these editors and were lost, and how
much of their material has found its way into the Hebrew Pen-
tateuch, we do not know. Moses perhaps was, as Confucius
claimed to be, more editor than author. The prophets in their
schools brought together and wrought over the old material.
The Hebrews were in a peculiar sense the people of the book,
and after the captivity their schools were called houses of the
book. To recur to its teaching was, from the time of Ezra on,
a revival of religion in one of the best senses of that word. By
its own inherent merit, it slowly came to be regarded as sacred.
It was probably the only text-book Jesus studied, and served
him no doubt both as a Source of inspiration and a basis of de-
parture. So, again, his own teachings passed through decades
of oral tradition, and it was general consent which determined
the canon, and a growing sense of its authority which made it
the reading-book of old and young during later centuries. Mat-
thew Arnold conceives Superstition to be due to a negligent or
uneducated way or habit of reading Bibles, and true criticism as
an honest and competent effort to know the best, in reading, art,
etc., and to make it prevail, or facilitating the process of the
natural selection of the fittest in these fields. A race with an epos
has in it a precious possibility of culture in general, as well as of
a literature which may or may not be developed. Old ancestral
material, worked over and over into higher and higher forms
by superior light, gives a sense of the value of one's country's
culture, which is probably one of the strongest and deepest of
all the many psychological roots of patriotism. The effort of
Herder and Grimm to revive old German literature at a time
when classicism was so deeply rooted that one of its representa-
tives is said to have preferred Homer's catalogue of ships to any
Teutonic literary product; the attempt of Wagner to produce a
German rival of Jesus in German heroology, which, as the “Par-
cifal” has it, should “save the Saviour”; the slow, partial dis-
34 HOW TO TEACH READING,
placement of Greek by German now taking place in the gymna-
sia of that country, - all this illustrates both the tenacity and
the culture-power of indigenous material. Only with such mate-
rial, pedagogically read, is it true that we are what we read.
That this is mainly lacking to us in this country is one reason
why we have adopted with so much less reserve and so much
more alacrity the Scriptures as Öur Bible. It is because it is
felt to be so sacred to the deepest human interests that the
worst of pedagogic methods, to the care of which it is left, so
often produce at the worst only a passionate kind of Sceptical
negation, which, in fact, only expresses a vague need of a deeper
certainty. This kind of ethnic material, if kept wrought over
in the focus of the best contemporary light which can be
brought to bear upon it, gives a unity and continuity to national
culture which it cannot otherwise have. It suggests the proper
solution of the problem of general as opposed to special cul-
ture, of liberal, humanistic education, of required versus eclec-
tic studies, and of the proper and economic educational utiliza-
tion of the vast reserves of inherited innateness, where amidst
acuminated specialties so much force is now lost to the general
world of culture. Here are recorded the ethical lessons of the
world, which need but a touch of pedagogic genius to reani-
mate and transfuse with new life our sleepy, required college
courses in ethics and philosophy, in our land at least the centre
of the humanities, because the most practical for the moral
hygiene of youth.
But this now aside, much national material we do possess,
and religious material it is impracticable to use in our schools
for reasons which few would now question. Among the most
serious of the pedagogic problems of the present are therefore,
I believe, first, the selection in the focus of the best intelligence,
of the best reading material for children and youth ; secondly,
the experimental gradations and often transforming adaptation
of it, each to fit age and grade ; and thirdly, the elaboration of
AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 35
the most effective ways of teaching it with all energy and force.
As for selection, while the consensus that made certain authors
classic, and the still broader and deeper consent that determined
biblical canonicity, are more often questioned, books devoted to
designating the best books, discussions like that lately started
by Sir John Lubbock, or essays like those F. W. Harrison, etc.,
on select reading-tests of all sorts, seem like efforts toward a new
modern consensus. The authority which schoolmen and acade-
mies gave to the works of which they became the organized body.
of curators is, of course, impossible again. Still less can we
expect a new Church organized about a new Bible. The latter,
as opposed to the former, exerted its influence largely in transla-
tion, by virtue of its content and independently of its form.
Even other great books have been very imperfect in a literary
and artistic sense, as, e.g., Kant, whose system Max Müller has
characterized as the last word of Aryan man. Much is said and
many courses are organized to the end of teaching the correct
use of the English language, a matter of which it is almost impos-
sible to overestimate the importance. But this is taught best not
by formal drill on enforced and uninteresting written theses, or
treatises on style, but by first securing subject-matter that so
deeply interests that style is left to form itself unconsciously in
reaction upon content. This can secure what no amount of for-
mal tuition can, – a good, strong, idiomatic use of English.
Again, in the long struggle between classical, or pagan, and sacred
authorities for the first place in schools, Sturm and the teachers
of the Renaissance in general failed to distinguish between the
literary and moral point of view. The end in selecting stated
school reading should be first and chiefly a moral one. By
this is not, of course, meant that direct exhortation or even moral
precepts should find place here, but the best sentiments of the
best writers, the great and heroic acts in history and in fiction,
indirect teaching in terms of example and of action, which ex-
cites the muscles and does not bring a reaction of sedentary










































36 HOW TO TEACH READING,
languor. Patriotism, reverence, self-respect, honesty, industry
contentment, — these I hold to be the great ethical teachings
which should be primarily sought by these selections. The
more literary and other merits that can be secured along with
these, of course, the better. That authorship in this country is
so largely devoted to juvenile literature and to school and col-
lege text-books, in which in many respects we excel other na-
tions, indicates a sense of the needs of childhood and youth
in this respect that is at least hopeful.
The other two problems, viz., of gradation and teaching the
proper reading-matter, may be spoken of together. First, it
must be constantly borne in mind that, though it by no means
holds as an universal rule in education that there is no profit
if there is no pleasure, yet pleasure always enhances the profit.
Again, not accuracy, but general knowledge of Content, should
as a rule precede. There is much—proverbs, odes, and literary
gems, etc., - where sense and form fit so well that they should
not be discussed but memorized. This is, in fact, the chief
and almost the only material which should be taught to the
memory, and far more of it than at present. But the teachers
of reading should remember that most writers have written too
much or too voluminously ; that there is much in Some of the
great writers hardly worth reading now at all; that books may
be cut and resuméd, and recast in new forms by a good teacher
and story-teller with great gain. I have often freshened up
some of Grimms' tales, or portions of Dante, plays of Shakes-
peare, Indic stories, etc., and gone into various grades of
grammar schools and told them to different classes in different
ways with all the very small art I could command ; and though
it was very easy to see, word by word, what was understood
and felt, and what not, I have sometimes called for oral or writ-
ten reproductions to aid me in seeing just what were the effective
parts. The care and rapidity with which most children grasp
matter gradually wrought over thus into forms adapted to them






















AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 37
and sympathetically told, teaches one the highest esteem for the
force of childish spontaneity, unimpeded as it is by critical or
philosophical checks. We are often reminded that down almost
to the age of Pericles, poets were the mental leaders of man-
kind, and that the prose of Cicero or Petrarch, or some other
masters, is the best on which to pattern style, and this is no
doubt true. Yet even most poetic diction seems unnatural to
children, and though geography, history, etc., may have been
taught in this form, but few men deny that the time for this has
passed, while those who still urge that children and youth should
read for style, surely forget that it must and is sure to be cast off
again like the regulation school handwriting as soon as any de-
gree of individuality is attained. Thus sometimes the teacher
must work from content down to form, and sometimes, con-
versely, from form to content, all according to the material used,
and the comprehension of her class. Here as elsewhere no
absolute rules can be given, but the repertory of methods must
be as varied as the individuality of the pupils, and there must
be far less reverence for one infallible, invariable method always
followed with all.
Thus, in a word, we are far from the goal in the matter of
stated reading in School, and have a great deal of painstaking
work to do before the best that is practicable can be at-
tained. To my mind, the kind of labor that is needed is
perfectly clear and definite, and a small group of well-bred and
sympathetic students and teachers could, by serious and well-
directed experimental labor on the problem, accomplish results
that would greatly improve the mental and moral efficiency of
our schools.
Quite different is the question of more cursory or supple-
mentary reading. Here much has been done and written of
late, and much progress made in many places. The public
library is no longer regarded as a rival or foe of the schools,
where pupils have no right to be, as Mr. Winsor has well said,

38 HOW TO TEACH READING,
but as a table spread each day for all. A single text-book
gives a narrow, individual view of a subject at the best. In
geography, e.g., a dozen or two books on the Country studied
are shown the pupils in School and circulated among them.
They are perhaps stimulated to read a chapter of travels here,
or a section on natural history or physical geography there,
and report it in school. Perhaps a card catalogue of the best
books on the various topics is kept in School, arranged in the
order of topics treated in the text-book or lectures; pupils are
perhaps sent to the library to run down a reference or to work
up a topic. So, too, in history, the teacher has, passes around,
and describes, or demonstrates books as he would specimens
in natural history, or exhibits sets of pictures bearing on the
topics under consideration. Perhaps occasionally classes meet
in the library, which should be provided with a consultation-
room for the purpose, or the teacher may take a group of pupils
into the alcoves. Thus pupils learn to handle books, how to
taste and smell them, how to skip, to take time to select, and
that half of education consists in learning where and how to
get information. They acquire the habit of going to the best
books on any and every topic of interest, and the importance
of doing so promptly before interest fades. The librarian is
willing to purchase books bearing on the School curriculum,
and often duplicates of the best books for class use. He posts
a bibliography on every topic of current interest, and does s
promptly. If an instructor describes a new or important book
it is without doubt a point gained if he can even hold up the
book to his class, and several additional points in favor of goo
and against bad reading are gained if a well-chosen sentence is
read, or a word is said about the author, or individuals are
induced to take the book in hand and glance at the index or an
illustration or two as they would look at a microscopic section in
the hand. Every young person should, before leaving school,
have experienced the charm of freely ranging through a library















AND WHAT TO READ IN SCHOOL. 39
of solid, substantial books, and where school libraries are practi-
cable, its use should not only be as unrestricted as possible, but
plenty of school time should be devoted to the utilization of all
its resources. Children will not voluntarily dull their wits by
struggling with books too far above them, and are not harmed
by what is not understood, but often tumble rapidly through
great books, picking out with strange facility what is of use to
them, and what no one would ever have dreamed of suggesting
to them. A boy's constant quest for something new is a very
different thing from the morbid craving for the latest news or
novel or Sunday paper of the growing number of those whose
mind is so out of condition that they cannot hold the attention
for any length of time to any really intellectual effort, and who
never read a serious book. Many children are encouraged to
make clippings, keep scrap-books or a note-book for quotations,
titles, abstracts, etc., and even to gather Small libraries of their
own of select reading-matter that really interests them, and
this, when practicable, tends to stimulate literary interest, the
great danger being that these will become ends in themselves.
The reading of good books should be a part of regular school
work. Children should not leave school without knowing what
good books are, and without having their imagination, which is
the great power with children at a certain age, so awakened
and directed as to insure at least some degree of interest and
culture broader than the education that is limited to their busi-
ness expectations, and tending to ground Conduct on general
principles rather than on impulse.
In writing compositions or theses, which is so closely related
to reading, the first object, again, should be to secure a real
subject-matter, one appreciated, felt, or understood, or else the
net educational result, even in the command of good English,
will be small and formal. The dozens of theses, topics, or loci
of the kind Laas recommends to impress what has been read,
are admirable if the course of gymnarial reading on which it is
based rouses real interest, as it certainly did as he taught it.
4O HOW TO TEACH READING.
2
The following list of topics for college compositions, which have
been furnished me by teachers of English, especially by one of
eminence and long experience, Selected from longer lists as
those preferred by students, is most suggestive. I give a few
quite at random ; ceremonial mourning ; fastidiousness a bad
sign in a young man ; the objections to large Schools; physical
exposure versus protection ; noblesse oblige, or superior oppor-
tunities bind men to larger generosity; nil admirari, or college
indifference; the best way to spend next vacation ; nothing but
good of the dead; legitimate means of seeking office ; select a
recluse, a humorist, and a pedant ; public Confession of private
faults; the free use of a large library; my favorite virtue,
whether I feel the want of it, delight in practising it, or admire
it in others; advantages of living in calamitous times; college
fallacies; “We tolerate everything because we doubt”;
“Happy as a king”; should the crew of a sinking ship prefer
their own safety to that of the ship P how far may a lawyer de-
fend a cause he feels to be wrong? “He has every quality
which interests, but none which commands respect”; motives,
hopes, and joys of a good monk; ideas of Elysium ; the idea of
a Christian soldier ; rare virtues in the time of Marcus Aure-
lius ; Stoic versus Epicurean ; early lessons in falsehood; truth
zersus edification; what is it to be wise? we are not made to
be happy, but good and heroic ; College recreations; an inci-
dent in my life; how far is Plato's republic realizable? com-
pare the two tragic Iphigenias; write a child's story; extreme
views are easiest ; Dr. PangloS ; Statesman versus politician;
dum rideſ, philosophatur; etc. These favorite topics are largely
ethical, and by preliminary talks and references by the in-
structor, are opened up into the life of young men as well as
into the library. The mental habits of those who can be taught
to write and really think, are superior even to the habits of
those who learn to read only what is worth reading, and to aid
in forming such habits is about as near the development of
moral character as Schools can get.
*
A DUCA 7/ON.
“Thou that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?”
|For American Schools and American Scholarship there is no
more healthful sign than the newly-awakened interest of teach-
rs in all that pertains to successful work and personal culture. At
the outset of this great and wide-spread movement in favor of better
ethods and worthier results, it was but natural that the practical side
f education should be treated out of all proportion, while its theoreti-
* and historical aspects should be somewhat overlooked. But if
education is to become a science and teaching to be practised as an
art, one means to this end is to gather and examine what has been
done by those who have been engaged therein, and whose position and
success have given them a right to be heard. Another and not less
otent means is, to gain a clear comprehension of the psychological
basis of the teacher's work, and a familiar acquaintance with the
mhethods which rest upon correct psychological principles. As con-
ibutions of inestimable value to the history, the philosophy, and the
Hºractice of education, we take pleasure in calling the attention of
eachers to our books on Education, mentioned in the following pages.
t is our purpose to add from time to time such books as have con-
tributed or may contribute so much toward the Solution of educational
problems as to make them indispensable to every true teacher's library.
The following good words, and tulso the opinions quoted
wavder the several volumes, are an earnest of the appre-
ciation in which the enterprise is held : —
Dr. Wm. T. Harris, Concord, Mass.:
I do not think that you have ever printed
a book on education that is not worthy
to go on any teacher's reading-list, and
the best list. (March 26, 1886.)
J. W. Stearns, Prof. of the Science
and Art of Teaching, Univ. of Wis. :
Allow me to say that the list of books
which you are nublishing for the use of
teachers seems to me of exceptional ex-
cellence. I have watched the growth of
the list with increasing pleasure, and I
feel that you have done a service of great
value to teachers. (May 26, 1886.)
Nicholas Murray Butler, Acting
Prof. of Phil., E/hics, and Psychology,
Columbia College, N.Y.. I am greatly
interested in your series of pedagogical





110
AºA) UCA 7TWOAV.
publications, and am only too glad to aid
the cause of scientific education by in-
creasing their circulation by every means
in my power.
S. A. Ellis, Superintendent of Schools,
Rochester, W.Y.: I most heartily com-
mend the enterprise you have entered
upon. These books may well be re-
garded as indispensable to the outfit of
every earnest teacher who would win
success in the profession. In bringing
them within the reach of every teacher
of the land, you are doing a service
that will entitle you to the gratitude of all
who are interested in the work of educa-
tion. Personally I wish you all the suc-
cess you deserve. (Oct. 23, 1885.)
W. F. Phelps, Secretary St. Paul
Chamber of Commerce, Minn. : No
greater service could well be performed
for the schools and the educators of this
country than issuing these valuable and
timely publications. They will leave the
great body of teachers without an excuse
for professional ignorance, and, with the
facilities now offered through the read-
ing circles and institutes, there will be
no good reason why these books should
not reach the great mass of the three
hundred thousand teachers in the United
States. (june 25, 1886.)
J. J. Mills, Earlham College, Rich-
mond, Ind... I have looked over the dif-
ferent volumes with much interest. You
deserve great praise for your enterprise
in putting the best pedagogical literature
before the teachers of the country.
have your Leonard and Gertrude, arid
Emile, and prize them highly.
(jan. 4, 1886.)
W. M. West, Sup/. of Schools, Farº-
&azz//, /l/izzyz.: You may count upon the
will of our reading-circle board to rec
ognize your publications, and personally
I am in favor of substituting at once
Sheldon's Studies in General History
and Compayré's History of Education
for corresponding books on our list.
(June 28, 1886.)
A. W. Mell, Bowling Green, Ky.
Your firm is far in advance of any othe
in the publication of teachers' libraries,
and deserves hearty recognition.
(June 28, 1886.) -
Schoolmaster, London : The Amerſ-
ican house of D. C. Heath & Co. iś
doing good service to teachers by theft
publication of their series of educational;
classics. We commend the Émile top
every one interested in the education
the young. -
Critic, New York : Messrs. D.
Heath & Co. are the publishers of a new
and important series of works for teach
ers. In contributing further means fo
the enlightenment of our teaching world,
the editors and translators engaged in
this series are doing a work which can-
not fail of recognition and utility.
A History of Pedagogy.
Translated from GABRIEL COMPAYR£’s Histoire de la Pédagogie, by W. H.
PAYNE, Professor of the Science and the Art of Teaching in the University
of Michigan, who adds an Introduction, Notes, References, and an Index.
5% by 7% inches. Cloth.
troduction price, $1.60.
xxvi + 592 pages.
Price by mail, $1.75; In-
This book is confidently recommended to teachers and to students
of Pedagogy, because, –
1. It is comprehensive without being tedious.
It covers the whole













A ZO UCA 7TWOAV. 111
historic period, exhibits the progress made from age to age in the
theory and art of education, and makes known the manner in which
the greater nations and thinkers have understood the educational prob-
lem. By this treatment of the subject, the teacher may become “the
spectator of all time and all existence,” in whatever pertains to his
vocation. There is no other book which is so well adapted to broaden
and liberalize the teaching profession.
2. It is clear and interesting. M. Compayré has not only the genius
of selection, but also of clear and interesting presentation. The whole
treatise is a series of clearly cut pictures, each having its own individu-
ality, and impressing its own special lesson. For the most part, the
Successive sketches are typical; duplicates are purposely and wisely
omitted. Only the highest literary art can combine comprehensiveness
and clearness; but these effects are realized in this History of Pedagogy.
3. It is critical and instructive. Historical facts, in order to be
instructive and helpful, must be interpreted ; and such interpretation
must come through critical insight.
inla pre-eminent degree.
suggestive and entertaining guide.
| • . y- 7)
losophy teaching by example.
|
M. Compayré has this endowment
In him the reader finds a safe as well as a
In this case history is truly “Phi-
| WHAT LEADING EDUCATORS THINK OF I.T.
Gabriel Compayré, Chambre des
Dépºttés, Paris : Votre traduction me
paraſit excellente, et je vous remercie des
Soins que vous y avez mis. J'ai grand
plaiśir à me relire dans, votre langue,
d'aultant que vous n'avez rien négligé
ºpóur l'impression matérielle. Combien
vos éditions Américaines sont Supérieures
aux nôtres | (Io Avril, 1886.)
Dr. W. T. Harris, Concord, Mass. :
Professor Payne has done a real service to
education in translating M. Compayré's
History of Pedagogy. The work has
great merits. Indeed, it is indispensable
among histories of education, for the rea-
son that it shows us the subject from the
standpoint of a Frenchman of broad and
sound culture. The history of education
has not been hitherto well represented
in English educational literature, and yet
it is the most important branch for the
teacher. I congratulate you, therefore,
upon the accession of Professor Payne's
work to your list. (April 2, 1886.)
G. Stanley Hall, Prof. of Pedagogy
and Psychology, Johns Hopkins Univ.:
It is the best and most comprehensive
universal history of education in English.
The translator has added valuable notes.
Mrs. Horace Mann, Boston ... I con-
sider anything of his not only authentic
but invaluable, because of his candid
mind and thorough interest in the sub-
ject, which enables him to give exhaus-
tive treatises upon all points.
Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody, Bos-
£on, A/ass... If Compayré's History of
Pedagogy had nothing else in it but
A.DUCA TYOAV.
119
Pennsylvania, School Journal,
Barrisburg. This ought to be a welcome
book. For a reliable and comprehen-
sive history of pedagogics we know not
better where to turn than to the volume
so well translated and so intelligently
edited by Professor Payne.
(June, 1886.)
Education, Boston : Our great desid-
eratum has been an artistic and critical
treatment of the history of education and
of educational doctrines, within moder-
ate limits, – a work that at the same time
might sustain interest and be a safe
guide to our teachers in their efforts at
self-culture. To be thus, – brief but not
scrappy, entertaining but not frivolous,
Gi//'s Systems of Æducation.
comprehensive and suggestive but not
verbose, critical without loss of judicial
fairness, and, withal, to sketch with the
animation and symmetry of the artist, —
requires the broadest culture, the clear-
est insight of the problems involved, and
the devotion of an enthusiast. All these
high qualities Monsieur Compayré has
brought to the production of his unique
“History of Pedagogy.” This book sup-
plies in a large measure our especial
need. Professor Payne's timely compke-
*.
tion of his task has now placed the lucid
and inspiring thought of the brilliant
French educator within the reach of all.
He has thereby done a special service to
American teachers, which we predict
they will not be slow to appreciate.
A history and criticism of the principles, methods, organization, and
moral discipline advocated by eminent educationists.
Professor of Education, Normal College, Cheltenham, England.
viii + 312 pp.
6% inches. Cloth.
price, $1.O.O.
By JOHN GII.L,
g g 4% by
Price by mail, $1. Io; Introduction
\
CHOOL education has to become a science. One means to this
end is to gather and examine what has been done by those who
have been engaged therein, and whose position or success has given
them a right to be heard.
i
Professor Gill's book includes in its treatment the systems repre-
sented by: — `
The Pioneers; Roger Ascham; Comenius; John Milton; John
Locke; Vicesimus Knox; The Edgeworths; Pestalozzi; Oberlin:
Wilderspin; Mayos; Home and Colonial School Society; Froebel:
Dr. Andrew Bell; Joseph Lancaster; The Intellectual System; Storr's
Training System; Brougham; Thomas Wyse; Horace Grant and the
Educative Department in Present Existence.
Much valuable and entertaining biographical matter is presented in
connection with what the author has to say of the founder of each
system. The Lancaster and Bell systems especially receive a fulness
of treatment never met in French or German works on the History of
Education. The various chapters of this book were first presented as
120
A./O UCA 7TWOAV.
been received : —
W. H. Payne, Prof. of the Science
and Art of Teaching, Univ. of Michi-
gazz. I have a high opinion of Gill's
Systems of Education, and can heartily
Hºcommend it to those who wish to make
#a study of the more celebrated English
Éteachers and their systems of education
*and instruction. I know of no other
ºbook where such information can be
ºo conveniently found. (May 3, 1886.)
§ Wm. T. Harris, Concord, Mass.: I
ºan say truly that I think it eminently
§orthy of a place on the Chautauqua
Reading List, because it treats so ably
the Lancaster and Bell Movement in
Education, — a very important phase.
E. H. Russell, Prin. State Normal
- School, Worcester, Mass.: It will prove
* a most valuable help in studying the his-
ºtory of education, and from its conven-
#ient size will be preferred by many to
#he bulkier and more ambitious treatises
#on the same subject. Though brief, it is
•. You have put it in very
: comely attire, and I hope it will have a
; good Sale.
* I shall adopt it in this school as one
l, of our regular books in the history of
education. It will conflict with nothing
now in use; it is well written : it deals
ably with the phases of instruction and
training that have held sway in England;
its size and cheapness make it possible
to use it as a supplementary book where
others have possession of the field.
§
Nicholas Murray Butler, Acting
Prof. of Philosophy, Ethics, and Psychol-
ogy, Columbia Coll., AWew York : Gill
lectures to students in English training colleges; and the author has
given them this permanent form in the hope that they may stimulate
those just starting in their profession, ever to work, with the purpose
of placing their art on a scientific basis.
The following commendations of this book, have already
emphasizes some features in English
pedagogy; for instance, the work of
Bell, of Lancaster, and of the Edge-
worths, that are seldom mentioned in
the French and German histories of edu-
cation. I knew of the announcement of
the book, but did not expect it to be
published so soon. Had I known that
it was ready, it should certainly have had
a place in the course of reading. If a
new issue is necessary, as seems proba-
ble, I will add it to the list.
Education, Bostoyz. Aside from the
historical merit of the book, the criticism
contained in it is temperate and judi-
cious. We deem it worthy a place in
every teacher's library.
Prof. Bain, Aberdeen, Scot... A valua-
ble little book on the Systems of Educa-
tion.
Schoolmaster, London : We recom-
mend it to all whose duty or pleasure it
is to aid in the great work of education.
School Guardian, London. We wel-
come Mr. Gill's book as a valuable con-
tribution to the literature of the art of
teaching.
School Board Chronicle, London :
The book is clearly, forcibly, and pleas-
antly written.
Educational Times, Londoz. Will
doubtless be read with interest.
Saturday Review, London : A very
clear and intelligent account of the dif-
ferent systems of education.













A /O UCA 7'/OAV. 121
Acosm???’s Meſſ/hod in Aducation.
Translated from the Italian of ANTONIO ROSMINI SERBATI by Mrs.
WILLIAM GREY, whose name has been widely known in England for
many years past as a leader in the movement for the higher education
of women. 5% by 7% inches. Cloth. About 400 pp. Price by mail,
$1.75; Introduction price, $1.60.
HIS is a work of singular interest for the educational world, and
especially for all those who desire to place education on a scientific
basis.
development; and the disciples of Froebel will find in it not only .
perfectly independent confirmation, but the true psychological estimat:
of the principles of Froebel's kindergarten system. We believe thai.
this translation of the work of the great Italian thinker will provº.
a boon to all English-speaking lovers of true education on both side º
of the Atlantic. [Zeady 27, Octobe:
Mr. Thomas Davidson, Orange, are among its valuable qualities; while tº
N.J. : It is one of the most careful works one that has undertaken Siciliani or Ros-
of the ablest and most comprehensive mini will deny its depth and solidity. To
thinker of the nineteenth century, a man an American Schoolman it is a wholesome
of whom friend and foe alike speak with lesson to survey the foreign pedagogic
reverence as of a Saint, and who, indeed, field and to learn that the great question's
was a Saint. (Feb. 20, 1886.) which press for solution at home are the
e - - questions among other peoples also.”
The University, Cºcº - Any where they may often be seen in morº
American student of Pedagogy, Who, advanced stages of development, or eve.;
after working in the German literature already settled. By no means do wº
of the subject, has found relief by turn- lead the world in education. We are :
ing to the French writers, will *P* vigorous younger child in the grea’
the same pleasant impression on becom- family of cultured nations, becoming :
ing acquainted with the educational liter- now old enough to respect our elders. §
ature of Italy. Lightness and clearness
/Lectures to Kinde/gar/mers.
BY ELIZABETH P. PEABODY. Published at the urgency of a large
number of Kindergartners, inasmuch as Miss Peabody is no longer able
to speak viva voce. 5% by 7% inches. Cloth. viii + 225 pages. Price by
mail, $1. IO; Introduction price, $1.OO. A
A | ‘HE first of these lectures introduced and interested the Boston
public in Kindergarten education. The seven others are those
which, for nine or ten successive years, Miss Peabody addressed to













122 A./O UCA 7TWOAV.
the training classes for Kindergartners, in Boston and other cities.
They unfold the idea which, though as old as Plato and Aristotle, and
set forth more or less practically from Comenius to Pestalozzi, was
for the first time made into an adequate system by Froebel. The
lectures begin with the natural exemplification of this idea in the nursery,
followed by two lectures on how the nursery opens up into the Kinder-
garten through the proper use of language and conversation with
children, finally developing into equipoise the child's relations to
his fellows, to nature, and to God. Miss Peabody draws many
i. llustrations from her own psychological observations of child-life.
i
"Habit and its /m/ortance in AEducation.
An Essay in Pedagogical Psychology. Translated from the German of
* DR. PAUL RADESTOCK by F. A. CASPARI, Teacher of German, Girls' High
* School, Baltimore; with an Introduction by DR. G. STANLEY HALL, Pro-
fessor of Psychology and Pedagogy, Johns Hopkins University. 5% by 7%
* inches. Cloth. ix + II 7 pages. Price by mail, 65 cents; Introduction
price, 60 cents.
.*
*DROFESSOR RADESTOCK has devoted some of the best years
* of his life to practical teaching and a research into the principles
"t the base of most habits. His book contains an able and practical
Hºussion of: —
* I. Value and Limits of Education; Force and Value of Habit;
tºvarious Definitions of Habit. II. Relations between Psychology and
# Physiology; Cause and Effect of Sensorial Impressions; Various Ways
of extending Impressions. III. Relations of Concepts to each other.
IV. Properly associated Habits; Habit and Habitude; Principle of
Associated Practice; Repetition; Habit in the Organic World; Re-
sults of Habit; Negative and Positive Use of Power; Division and
Concentration of Power; Aim of Human Education; Object Lessons.
V. The Intellect; Memory and Imagination; Process of Logical
Thinking; Conception Series; Laws of the Association of Ideas;
Talents resulting from a Combination of the Imagination and the
Intellectual Faculties. VI. The Will; Influence of Habit on the
Entire Psychological Life; Value of Associates and Environment;
Habitude of Personal Action; Advantage of School versus Home
Education. VII. Special Habits; Cleanliness; Punctuality; Neat-
ness; Endurance; Self-Control; Obedience; Politeness; Attention;





AºA) UCA 7TWOAV. 123
Diligence; Unselfishness; Exercise; Study. VIII. Moral Habits.
IX. Extreme Habituation, Ill Effects of; Three Theories concerning
the Emotions; Necessity of Change in Instruction; Punishments;
Higher Æsthetic Feelings; Prejudice; Pedantry; Law of Relativeness;
X. Habit and Free Will; Genius; Insanity. XI. An Appendix.
Bacon says: “Since custom is the principal magistrate of man's
life, let men, by all means, endeavor to obtain good customs.
Cer-
tainly, custom is most perfect when it beginneth in young years; this .
i.
we call education, which is in effect but early custom.”
The translator has done her work admirably, and has given us.
entire the little book in which Dr.
service to education.
The subjoined eactracts from letters and reviews will
aid teachers, normal-school classes,
psychology generatlly, to for??? some idea of the estimat
placed upon the book by competent judges : — -
John Dewey, Instructor in Philoso-
phy, Ann Arbor Univ., Mich. : Radestock
has been for some time favorably known
by means of his psychological mono-
graphs, of which this upon Habit is no
doubt the best, as it is also without doubt
the most suggestive and fruitful of all
monographs upon this most important
of educational subjects. Personally I
have been greatly interested in the wide
range of psychological knowledge shown,
and in the command of the best methods
and results of the newer and more exper-
imental psychology. In the hands of a
competent teacher, it would make an
excellent introduction to the later methods
of looking at all kinds of psychological
subjects. (May 7, 1886.)
Nicholas Murray Butler, Acting
Proſ. of Æthics and Psychology, Columbia
Coll., AW. Y. : Radestock's book is a most
engaging little work, and I trust that
teachers may be led to read its words
and reflect on its precepts. I knew of
its announcement, but did not know that
it was ready; otherwise it should cer-
**
*
Radestock has rendered his chief.
and students o
tainly have had a place in our “Course
of Reading.” (April 30, 1886.5
J. W. Stearns, Prof. of Science an
Art of Teaching, Univ. of Wis., Madi
son . It is a very interesting and valuable
study for those who care about jº.
the psychological basis of teaching. You"
have certainly conferred a great favori
upon teachers by placing so admirable
a treatise within their reach, and I hope
it may become widely known.
(May 26, 1886.)
S. N. Fellows, Chair of Mental and
Moral Philosophy and Didactics, State
Univ. of Ja... I have read it with great
interest, and regard it as a valuable con-
tribution to pedagogical literature. It
should find a place in every teacher's
library. It may certainly be affirmed
that good habits are next in importance
to good principles, if not of equal impor-
tance. And this book is full of valuable
suggestions to the educator who would
aid his pupils in forming right habits.
(May 25, 1886.)






126
AºA) UCA 7TWOM.
Popular Educator : The subject is
certainly a very important one, and the
author is an eminent psychologist. The
book is well printed, tastefully and
strongly bound, moderate in price, and,
as Dr. Hall observes in his preface, both
translator and publisher “merit the
thanks of those American teachers who
are interested in the psychological basis
of their vocation.” (%une, 1886.)
Intelligence, Chicago : The impor-
tance of right habits as a product of
school training is receiving more and
more attention. In this line of thought
and practice every reflective teacher will
find this essay of great value. It is the
product of a master who has the skill
and power of presenting deep scientific
principles in a very clear and simple
Inha]] (1621". (Şune 15, 1886.)
Central School Journal: Dr. Paul
Radestock, who has attained to a wide
degree of eminence as the author of sev-
eral brilliant psychological monographs,
has presented here a most admirable
and comprehensive brochure upon the
subject of “Habit in Education.” Dr.
G. Stanley Hall, of Johns Hopkins, has
edited the work, and the publishers,
Messrs. D. C. Heath & Co., whose mark
is a synonym of high excellence, have
dressed the book with taste and neat-
In CSS. (Şuly, 1886.)
The Christian Register: The im-
portance of habit in education is a trite
maxim of teachers and moralists; but
the subject has not received the full state-
ment that it has needed from a psycho-
logical standpoint. This work is an im-
portant one, and demands the earnest
study of teachers.
Ax{racts from Kousseau's Émile.
Containing the Principal Elements of Pedagogy. With an Introduction
and Notes by JULES STEEG, Paris, Député de la Gironde.
Translated by
ELEANOR WORTHINGTON, recently of the Cook County Normal School,
Ill. 5% by 7% inches. Cloth.
duction price, 80 cts.
I57 pp. Price by mail, 85 cts.; Intro-
“There are fifty pages of the Emile that should be bound in velvet and gold.”
— Voltai RE.
N these pages will be found the germ of all that is useful in present
systems of education, as well as most of the ever-recurring mistakes
of well-meaning zealots.
The book has been called “AWature's Airst Gospel on AEducation.”
Among its pregnant texts, are: The Object of Education; The New-
born Child; The Earliest Education; Maxims to keep us True to
Nature; The Cultivation of Language; Childhood to be loved;
Neither Slaves nor Tyrants; Reasoning should not begin too soon;
Well-Regulated Liberty; The Idea of Property; Falsehood; The Force
of Example; Negative or Temporizing Education; The Memory; The
Study of Words; Physical Training; Clothing; Sleep; Training the
Senses; Drawing; Geometry; The Voice; The Age of Study; Curi-
A ZO UCA 77OAZ 127
osity as an Incentive; Things rather than Symbols; A Taste for
Science; Experimental Physics; Nothing to be taken upon Authority;
Learning from Necessity; The Forest of Montmorency; Robinson
Crusoe; The Pupil at the Age of Fifteen; Results.
The eighteenth century translations of this wonderful book have the
disadvantage of an English style long disused. This new translation
has the merit of being in the dialect of the nineteenth century, and will
thus be enjoyed by a wider circle of readers.
In Zducational Theories, Oscar Browning says concerning this
book: Probably no work on the subject of education has produced
so much effect as the “Amile.”
The following eactracts from letters and reviews serve
to show with what cordiality this ºve?0 edition has been
Q’eceived : —
G. Stanley Hall, Prof. of Pedagogy,
Johns Hopkins Univ.: I have examined
your convenient edition of the “Emile,"
and shall recommend it to my educational
classes.
W. H. Payne, Prof. of Pedagogics,
University of Michigan : I have spent
considerable time in reading the “Emile”
and in comparing certain parts of the
translation with the original. Miss Wor-
thington has made a version of real
merit; Rousseau's thought has been
transferred to English with great accu-
racy, and much of the original grace of
style has been preserved. The teachers
of the country are indebted to you for
this invaluable contribution to the litera-
ture of the profession. (Dec. 15, 1884.)
J. W. Dickinson, Sec. of Mass.
Board of Education : It should be in the
hands of every teacher in the State.
Francis W. Parker, Priz. Cooſé Co.
Mormal School : Teachers need to go
back to the man who gave such an im-
mense impulse to reform in education.
R. H. Quick, in “Balucational Re-
formers": Perhaps the most influential
book ever written on the subject of edu-
cation.
London Journal of Education:
The amazing originality and boldness of
the book, its endless suggestiveness, are
too often ignored by English critics, who
forget that nearly all our brand-new
theories are to be found in “Emile.”
School Bulletin, N. Y. & The
“Emile ” is far the most influential of all
the historically great books in pedagogy.
Philadelphia, Press: There is no
need to praise it. The present translation
ought to be in the hands of every teacher
and parent.
Boston Advertiser: Such a book
as this ought to be read by every one
who claims to be interested in any way
in the cause of education.
Normal Echo, Zevington, W.C. :
This little book contains many gems
that have shone through the rubbish of
more than a century. Though so old,
they are elemental truths, and carry with
them the freshness of youth. The book
should be read by all teachers.
AºA) UCA 7T/OAV.
129
cators of the young who could not profit
by its wise Suggestions.
Pilot, Boston : The present version
is in good English, and will no doubt
find many readers who would have been
repelled by the proportions of the origi-
nal, and by the antiquated translations.
The School Herald : “ Emile” is
one of the educational classics of the
world. The three-volume novel, however,
which, at its first publication a century ago,
produced such a sensation among bish-
ops and dons, would be too wearisome a
work for modern readers. This version
is in a style altogether commendable for
-clearness and simplicity, and should be
widely read by teachers who would know
the thoughts of one of the most brilliant
of philosophers on education.
(Dec. I5, 1886.)
Journal of Speculative Philoso-
phy: No single book ever made so
much noise in the world. It was the
gospel of the latter half of the eighteenth
century. Condemned by church and
state, its principles were accepted and
practised in private, especially in Ger-
many and Switzerland. Three cele-
brated educators were inspired by it—
Basedow, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. This
will be enough to recommend it to the
attention of all those who are at present
discussing the kindergarten, and the en-
largement of the scope of education,
from the nursery to the university.
(October, 1885.)
Schoolmaster, London : We com-
mend the “Emile” to every one inter-
ested in the education of the young.
The Teacher, Philadelphia : From
the day of the appearance of “Emile"
to the present, Rousseau's best theories
have been promulgated by a continuous
line of disciples; and they are reflected
in all the recent improvements made in
courses of instruction for young children.
A perusal of this work will show some
of our “advanced thinkers” how old all
that is best in the “New Education " is.
The Pennsylvania, Journal of
Education : The “Emile" effected a
genuine and needed reformation in the
home and school education of children,
and indeed of their treatment in general.
The abridgment before us is far more
useful than the original would be. It
gives all that is essential, and even more,
of the French philosopher's educa-
tional theories; all the gems of his work,
and they are many and of the finest lus-
tre, with none, or at least very little of the
dross.
Pesſa/ozzi's Zeonard and Gertz'zāde.
Translated and abridged by Eva CHANNING.
With an Introduction by
G. STANLEY HALL, Professor of Pedagogy in Johns Hopkins University.
5% by 7% inches. Cloth.
price, 80 cts.
I93 pp. Price by mail, 85 cts. ; Introduction
HIS is a carefully abridged translation, in which the gist of five
large volumes is compressed into a book of less than two hundred
pages, which, while retaining much of the quaint simplicity of the
original, avoids its repellant prolixity and converts the reader's task
into a pleasure.
130 A2/D UCA 7T/OAV.
It is a book which all teachers should read with care, for it com-
prises within modest limits the whole substance of the Pestalozzian
theory of education.
In this charming, instructive, and suggestive union of a capital story
and a pedagogical treatise, Pestalozzi sets forth his radical, far-reaching
views of the true scope and end of education as well as of the true
method of attaining that end.
Under its wit and wisdom, its humor and pathos, he inculcates the
strongest moral lessons or the most helpful doctrines of politica),
social, and personal education. \
Every mother should read the book, for, as Oscar Browning says in
his “Educational Theories,” “a mother who follows the principles incul-
cated in this book can educate her children as if she were the posses-
sor of all the sciences.”
This volume and the “Emile” gave rise to a revolution in educa-
tional matters, and they will be found to contain the best, because
the original and simplest, statement of the great principles that must
guide every successful teacher.
It is this book on which Pestalozzi's fame as an author mainly rests,
and this book was dictated by an earnest desire to lift up the lower
classes of Switzerland—to found a Republic of thought, of capabilities,
of work.
R. H. Quick, in “Educational Re-
formers": No wonder that the Berne
Agricultural Society sent the author a
gold medal, with a letter of thanks; and
that the book excited vast interest, both
in its native country and throughout
Germany. It is only strange that “Leon-
ard and Gertrude " has not become a
favorite, by means of translations, in other
countries.
The Nation: Its effect, not only in
Germany, but throughout Europe, was
great and immediate. Every teacher will
be stimulated and instructed by reading
this quaint and thrilling educational ro-
mance, quite apart from its great histori-
cal importance.
The New York Independent : As
a story it is effective and interesting. As
a theory of education it is ideal, with a
strong touch of Rousseau Utopianism in
it — a Utopianism, however, which con-
sists very largely in the attempt to con-
struct human society on the basis of the
Sermon on the Mount.
Harvard Advocate : Pestalozzi's
style is vividly realistic; the characters
of the book are strongly drawn. The
work of abridgment was a difficult one;
Miss Channing has, however, been suc-
cessful, and the story loses nothing in
force and interest under her hands.
Ann Arbor University : It not
only has the merit of being educational,
but charmingly portrays German peasant
life in the eighteenth century. It can be
heartily recommended to all, its very
blemishes being wholesome.
A.DUCATIOAV. I33
Zevana, or, Ž/he Doc/zine of Æducation.
A Translation from JEAN PAUL FREDERICH RICHTER. 5 by 7% inches.
Cloth. xliv + 413 pages. Price by mail, $1.35; Introduction price, $1.25.
E add this volume to our series of “Educational Classics” in
the belief that it will tend to ameliorate that department of
education which is most neglected and yet needs most care, — home
training.
Among other topics, it treats of: —
The Importance of Education. Development of the Desire for Intel-
The Spirit and Principle of Education. lectual Progress.
To Discover and to Appreciate the Speech and Writing.
Individuality of the Ideal Man. Attention and the Power of Adaptive
Religious Education. Combination.
The Beginning of Education. Development of Wit.
The Joyousness of Children. Development of Reflection.
Games of Children. Abstraction and Self-Knowledge, to-
Music. gether with an extra paragraph on
Commands, Prohibitions, Punish- the Powers of Action and Business.
ments. On the Education of the Recollection
Physical Education. — not of the Memory.
Female Education. Development of the Sense of Beauty.
The Moral Education of Boys. Classical Education.
A Descriptive Bió/iogra//hy of Æducation.
Arranged by topics. By G. STANLEY HALL, Professor of Psychology and
Pedagogy, Johns Hopkins University, and JOHN M. MANSFIELD. 5% by
7% inches. Cloth. xv+ 309 pages. Price by mail, $1.75. Introduction
price, $1.60. Interleaved edition, $2.00.
IN his preface to this book, Dr. Hall says: —
“In the field of more strictly pedagogic literature, which is rela-
tively limited, the material is yet far too great to be mastered in a life-
time of the most diligent reading, and the reading time of most
teachers is quite limited. Hence they cannot be too select in their
choice of books. . . . The habit of reading what is beneath one's
level, whether fostered by a sense of duty, or, worst of all, by a false
sense of the authority of things printed, is belittling, and the exact
inverse of educational.
“Teachers who will be as select in their reading as we should all
be in the society we keep, and who will vigorously reject the second
134 - -ED UCA 7TWOAV.
best, — to say nothing of the tenth or twentieth best, and making all
reasonable reservations, – may, I believe, in the time at their disposal,
and now squandered on print unworthy of them, reasonably hope to
master most of the best, if they confine themselves to one language
and one department.
“To do this, however, not only is some hardihood of self-denial, but
also some knowledge of the good and evil in pedagogic print, needed,
and just this is what American teachers are at present seeking with
more interest and in more ways, as I believe, than ever before. In
seeking the best there is much to mislead and little to guide teachers.
In the great work of designating and grouping the best, the present
volume is only a hint, a first suggestion. It is, in the phrase of an
educational leader to whom its writer has been chiefly indebted for
suggestions during its preparation, only a foot-path roughly blazed,
and by no means a finished highway, though the latter may eventually
follow about this course. . . .
“In the general reading of every teacher, of whatever grade, should
be included some work on the history of education, and some psycho-
logical and some hygienic literature. Every teacher should also select
some department or topic, connected in many cases probably with the
teaching they prefer, about which the reading should centre. In this
field they would in time come to know the best that had been done or
said, and themselves become more or less an authoritative centre of
information for others about them, and perhaps make contributions
that would render many their debtors, not only by positive additions
to their knowledge, but in guiding their reading, which is one of the
greatest aids one person can render another. As teachers thus gradu-
ally become specialists in some such limited sense, their influence will
do more than has yet been accomplished to realize the ideal of making
their work professional in a way in some degree worthy that high term,
and they will be able gradually to effect a greatly needed reform in the
present character of text-books, and all who would lead in public school
education will slowly come to see the need of thorough and extended
professional study.”
N. E. Jour. of Education : Prof. | We know of no man who is better
G. Stanley Hall's Bibliography of Educa- equipped for such service; and he has
tional Literature promises to be the taken the time and been given all the
most valuable teacher's aid in home assistance necessary for the perfection of
study ever issued. the enterprise. - - * - -
A’EAD/WG.
—()—
Keading for Home and School.
A series of volumes to be edited by Professor CHARLEs ELIOT Norton, of Harvard University.
THIS series will comprise an ample selection of the literature which
is the common inheritance of the whole English-speaking race.
It is to be composed mainly of the reading which has been familiar to
past generations, and which has become part of the intellectual life of
the race. Beginning with old childish rhymes and jingles, with simple
saws and proverbs, with the most widely known fables and the most
popular poems of childhood, it will embrace in the later volumes the
stories that have long been favorites, the minor poems that are univer-
sally accepted as permanent treasures of the language, and character-
istic essays and extracts from the works of the best writers of the past
three centuries.
The series is intended to give to every child some knowledge of the
best contents of the noble treasury of English literature, to make him
a sharer in the thought and memories of his race, and to cultivate his
imagination as well as his intelligence. [In preparation.
American History A'eaders.
Edited by Edward CHANNING, Ph.D., Instructor in History in Harvard University.
IT is intended to issue these readers in four parts. Part I. will con-
sist of short stories, illustrating the lives of those who have made
American history, and giving vivid conceptions of the most important
events in that wonderful story. These stories will be told in simple,
straightforward, but not childish language. The aim will be to arouse
the interest of the young and to give them a desire to know more
about their native land. At the same time no effort will be spared to
make the narrative as strictly accurate as the investigations of our best
historical students will permit. -
Part II. will trace the lives of the leading explorers and men of that
time, and explain the main events of our colonial history. These brief
periods will be illustrated by extracts from the best writers both of
prose and of verse. Especial attention will be paid to the history of
the people as distinguished from mere political history. Part III. will
be taken up with the affairs of the revolutionary epoch, the design
being to familiarize the young with the important events of the con-
2 A&AEAZO/AVG.
test, and, above all, with the careers of the men to whom we of the
present owe so much. In Part IV. the later development of the United
States will be described, due prominence being given to the lives of
the great inventors and statesmen of all sections. In this way, it is
thought that the youth may become acquainted with the leading events
of our history, leaving the unimportant details and connecting links to
be gathered later from more formal treatises.
The books will be supplied with maps and pictures which will aid
the reader to form his own idea as to the men and the times described.
[/n preparation.
Suggestive Zessons in Zanguage and Reading.
A Manual for Primary Teachers. By ANNA B. BADLAM, of the Rice Training School,
Boston, Mass.
HESE Lessons are plain and practical, being a transcript of work
that has been successfully done in the schoolroom. They are
intended to be given to children from five to eight years of age, the
plan being so elastic that it may be used in any of the primary grades.
The first half of the book will be devoted to Outline Zessons for Oral
Work, and aims to suggest to teachers simple and interesting methods
of increasing the child's vocabulary, and to lead him to appreciate the
value of the words he is constantly hearing and speaking.
The second part of the book will be devoted to Suggestive Zessons
for Blackboard Reading and Word Building. The plan embraces the
best known features of the various methods of teaching reading. The
main feature of this plan is, however, to teach the child to apply his
knowledge of the sounds or powers of the letters, and make it his guide
in finding out new words without the teacher's help. Diacritical marks
are used only where the natural guides to pronunciation are lacking.
The Lessons are illustrated by pictures in outline, so simple that the
teacher will be able to reproduce them on the blackboard when teach-
ing the text of a lesson. This Manual for Teachers will be supple-
mented by a Primer for Children, in which the same plan of work will
be followed. [Ready in AVovember.
A Primer and Æ/emzemżazy Reader.
By ANNA B. BADLAM, of the Rice Training School, Boston.
TH IS little work is intended to supplement the Board Reading Zes-
sons of the Manual. Its main features are: —
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
|
DD NOT REMOVE
0R
MUTILATE GARD
23-520-002

… .sº º, º 3 s is ºr a sº ºf tº as tº
C: &g d tº k tº 3 ſº h 1'. S. 9 S F 2 W.
ºr ºr ; , , . . . . n w = k is ºr -º º
3 tº tº ºr ; a 5 ºf a ti 8 tº $ 8 º'
E- . Yº -- º “
w º e S R is tº Kº (; & sº tº
º & ©
& Cº. w w x * x º
aſ ºr ſº º is a º 4 tº aſ º ºs º-
º, a * * * * * * * * * * *
* - sº ºn tº $ tº re tº “
&L ºr * * * *
sº ºr a tº
ºf a
* * tº º
3 tº sº dº º ſº.
:Fºº º sº º º
ºr. º tº 5 sº tº is
sº º . . .
* 2: a ; : A
pa ºr ºf is ºw
: * * *. § 3 ; ; K S 'º º ſº
J is ºf 3 s is tº
jººse tº #8 ºn tº $ if
3 ºf a lºt 3 & # , º, ºft
sº a tip i. 8 da t is a f * tº * * *
in u º sº
º: º, . . .
# * :
#; ; ;
§ºtº #3; # º ºs.
º tº 5 #
º:
* *
º
ſº
i
sº
C
a 5 tº ſº a sº as
| S. s a . . . . . , ,
& Q &
[…]
Fº
º
º
º
º
gº
º
rº
- º -
gº ºf itin sº, tº us:
ſº I ºf it sº tº a - 2 º'
º
ſº.
º
i
:
;:
sº º r
• a ... is
* ::
:
ºn
º
º
º
|
:
i
º
&
iſſists iſ sº
º
fewtº
of A * iſ a tº a Bºº &# º $º
§3 ºf tº ####6 in 3 2 × tº a 2: .
as tº sº a tº c s > * : * * ~ * * *
a s : : º
§§§ ºr t t = 2
.* : * : * > 2 v 3 s a tº P : * º
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
a sºft & a 3 ºf º 'º .
º S > * *
Ak.º.º. tº a lºt º
º
º:
- 3 & 8 sº
ºt.
º
i
º
*
-;:ºº
;
º:
A * * * * * * * * * *
3 * : * * * * * * * *
. . . . . . tº u tº A H B W, 8.
ºº:: * * * * * *
7 g : A & 2 º' sº
ºft# 8: ; #
*:::: * * *
ºf sº is .
tº R B K St.
ºn tº S S R be ti
sº
3A
s
º
s
*
º
Cº.
ºf 98; sº
ºs tº tº
º
:
º
|
i
Sº
i
:
Tº
f
:
|
-
[.
;
#####
* * * tº 3
ºf
# 8 º'.
* †.9.
* * *
º º ºs
gº tº ºn J. W. & Su
ºw tº 4 tº
º
* * * * * * *
º
º
3% ºf
a. *, *.
:
i
º
sº
º
:
º
* & W.
º
#:
º
3 *
ºf r:
J
G
º
sº
#
:
t
º
sº
º
º
:
:
&
:
||
:
i
:
:
§:
:
i
º
;
º
i
º
:
ſ
W
º
ſº
º
i
-
:
:
w
i --
|
º
:
º:
;
º
tº;ſ:
º
|
y
º
i
|
;
i
ſº
º
- * sº º
º
:º
. º
|
:
#.
sº
*
E
º
º
:
º
:i
:
:
º
º
|
:
º-
i|: tº;:fº
º
f
:
i:;
º:
ºr.
º
;
º
i
:
º
º
º
º
£º
º
º
-
f
:
º
i
i
:
ſº
|
º
º
:
§:
:
º
º
2.
º
:
:-
:ºº
T
º
º
º
.
*
:
º
i
i
3.
|
i
E.
wº
|
tº t. As A is sº
* R & º w . , s: c
3 & 4 & 5 g : « »
* 8. § { * * * *
:
i
i
C
:
º
i
i
E.
:
º
M.
i
º
º
i
-:
º
º
º
:
º
:
i
:
:
º
ºf;
º -
:
:
:
:
;
::f
º
º
:
i
tº e º ºst
:#
:
:
;º
|;
* a
* : * * * * * : * , p + , , ; ; ;
:
: ; ; ; a tº 8 & 3 &
º
º
º
i
:
:-
:|s
i
H
2
tº & Sº a tº º # 6 º $ tº - * *
ºr ºf º G & R Y " a tº . A 3.
ſº tº, º a us r, tº $ 3 × ſº tº w w tº ºr
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *º
º
º
º
§
;
:
º
|
tº
l
i
:
:
# * : *
tº 6 sº
jići is stić sº
& as ºr kwº i t . to
; : * : * * * **ś , ; ;
is #gº 5 ####8 & 3
tº sº a wº Kiš º ºs & we tº 2 ºn
ºù tº 38: 84 & 8
º
sº
A & at g is a tº ºr ºn sº * * * * * *
EA ºf 3 ſ. tº ."
as a 4 ºr we º
tº. 3. *
º o ºg & so a 5 tº as tº S + y y ſº tº tº , º tº
* * * * * * : * * w -
§ 3 ; tº it is t 2 as at n - a tº .s sº a 4 x * : * * * * *
sº a te
º
tº tº . . . . . g º y º g : * 9 tº is a ti -
# * is t < * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
sº * * * g : y : 5 & sº sº tº v 3 ; ;
Yº ſº * * * * ºt º
Sº
º
º
* - - º sº r < . . . * * * * º
º gº & Bººk tº #88 ºf .
# * * * *::::::: ; #36 ºf .
§ ºf 3 3: $ºbi tºº &# # 3.
3 & #4 Sºft sººt ºf .
º ºg a scº tº a tº a 3 x 3 tº
Sº, s- a - n : i = x . . ; : . . . 2 Jº Pº
:
E.
wº
PA ºf
tº 3 dº º a 4 + 8 - 5 § 3;
:
i
º
:
º
º
º, tº 3 tº ºn 6 tº 8 ºr t a tº
9 * * * * º-
:
Cºl.
*** * * * * * $:
3 * * * * * *
* , a sº a
* † 2 º
:
#
t
º
s
ſº
§
:
i
º
:
|
i
:
:
º
º
ſº
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * a gº
# 3 p. 8 diº &
:
º
J
i
º
D
It r * * * if
* * * : *, *, * >
. . * } ... tº ºt - * .
tº 5 &#45; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;&
# * : * * * * : * * * * * * * * :
tº a zºº &#x ºr 6 tº gº ºf
§ 3 ;ººk tº sº in 3 :
3 ºf 8 tº sº tº nº.
* * * * * * * * *
sº º
:
i
:
E.
º
E.- . . . . . . . . . . .
ºº & d ºf ºt nt a * * * * * * *
tº A. & 2. * * * * * * * * * * * * *
& ſº ºf A * : * * * * * * * * * * * *
- a : ; ; ; ; ; , ; , , . . "
3 * * * * * * * * * * * *
tº º tº a r > v ::, rºw
ºs as tº 8 º' it
* * ,
tº ºr
[]
º
:
|
º:
|