1 001 
 D3 
 
THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE 
 OF READING 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN COTTON DANA 
 
 Newark, New Jersey 
 
 • 
 
 Reprinted from the Pedagogical Seminary 
 March, 1913, Vol. XX, pp. 17-22 
 

THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF READING 
 
 By John Cotton Dana, Newark, New Jersey 
 
 Men's brains have probably not improved in size and quality 
 in the past 5,000 years. The social, economic, political, scien- 
 tific and artistic life of the civilizations of Egypt, Assyria, 
 Greece, and Rome, seem to have been as complex, broad, and 
 full, in all essential matters, as our own. Individual men 
 played their parts in those civilizations as readily, as easily 
 and as completely as they do in ours to-day. 
 
 Before history disclosed this fact, the study of the method 
 of human development had indicated that history must in 
 due course bring it to light. It had shown that improvement 
 of the brain, the physical basis of mind, has always been 
 dependent on the continuance of physical and intellectual con- 
 flict, hand-to-hand and brain-to-brain conflict, between man 
 and man ; and that when that conflict ceased to be continuous, 
 tense and to the bitter end, then the stronger brains, housed 
 in the stronger bodies, were no longer the brains which sur- 
 vived, and improvement ceased. 
 
 The average man, then, has been of the same mental ca- 
 pacity since before the days of the pyramids. Exceptional 
 conditions, as in the palmy days of Athens, have bred a few 
 exceptional men. But always nature has soon again estab- 
 lished the ancient average, her golden mean of mediocrity. 
 
 The men of Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome, each group 
 with the same intellectual powers, each, that is, with mechan- 
 ical and chemical instruments of thought of almost identical 
 efficiency, faced in due course their respective periods of 
 national dominance and prosperity, and, also in due course, 
 showed themselves to be all alike incapable of acquiring suf- 
 ficient social efficiency to carry them successfully through the 
 complex life which their brief day of dominion and wealth 
 thrust upon them. 
 
 Shall we fail in the same way and for the same reason? 
 or is there, in this our civilization, any factor not found in 
 its predecessors, which may enable us to meet successfully 
 the tremendous problems and temptations which dominance 
 and accompanying wealth always bring to a people? And, if 
 there is such a factor, is it the printing press? 
 
 When I name the printing press as a factor in civilization 
 I mean, of course, the habit of reading ; and when I say habit 
 
l8 THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF READING 
 
 of reading, I mean the habit which is quite steadily growing 
 in all civilized countries of using print to gain acquaintance 
 with the great mass of human thought, experience, study and 
 imagination. 
 
 This mass of what for the sake of brevity we group under 
 the one word knowledge, has become very great and mounts 
 up with marvelous rapidity. That it has become thus large 
 and accumulates thus rapidly is chiefly due to the existence 
 of the printing press. 
 
 Under oral tradition, when things were handed down by 
 memory and speech only, the sum of knowledge was small. 
 The invention of writing increased this sum very consider- 
 ably. The invention of printing, however, increased it so 
 greatly and so greatly accelerated its rate of increase that 
 both the mass already on hand and the yearly, even hourly, 
 additions to it can hardly be placed in the same class with 
 the knowledge and the growth of knowledge before Guten- 
 berg's day. 
 
 Out of this fact, out of the presence in this our own civiliza- 
 tion of what has been aptly called an encyclopaedic evolution, 
 arises another question. 
 
 Evolution, with its survival of the more fit and the resulting 
 improvement of the species, seems to have ceased to operate 
 on the human race, so far at least as increase of intellectual 
 power is concerned, before history began. We have been at 
 our best for full 200 generations. During this long period 
 we have failed again and again to cope successfully with the 
 evils national success has brought in its train. We have never 
 had to aid us in one of these crises the habit of reading ; 
 and here, perhaps, lies our salvation in the next struggle of 
 civilization for permanence. 
 
 But, we now discover that the same invention which brought 
 us the habit of reading has aroused to more active operation 
 an encyclopaedic evolution, an accumulation of knowledge, 
 vast beyond all the conceptions of our predecessors. Will it, 
 with its marvelous rapidity of growth, soon be so vast that 
 the race which created it will be submerged by it? Is the 
 printing press, with the monstrous body of knowledge it has 
 permitted us to gather and now compels us daily enormously 
 to enlarge, is this to be our Frankenstein? 
 
 It is perhaps not absurd to say, in reply, that print will 
 overwhelm us, — unless we learn to master it. That is, our 
 civilization faces a possible shipwreck on the sea of learning. 
 The suggestion is not without some foundation. Whatever 
 basis of fact it may possess supplements and augments the 
 force of a truth too familiar to need more than merest men- 
 
THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF READING 19 
 
 tion, — the increasing value to men in every walk in life of the 
 ability to take from the printed page those facts, arguments, 
 theories and imaginings that can help him in his calling. 
 The farmer, the bricklayer, the student of the remotest 
 specialty in medicine and the merchant of coals or of fresh 
 figs, all can gather from print that which will help them to 
 find, to be and to do. 
 
 Now, it is of the essence of society's progress that its units 
 become more efficient each in its way. No one thing can 
 to-day contribute so much to the efficiency of each unit as 
 can the habit of using print to learn what others have learned. 
 Other things may contribute somewhat to this efficiency ; read- 
 ing can contribute most. All advocates of education have 
 made that statement the very foundation of their faith. It 
 means that books are the prime tools of learning; that a 
 library is the most important of all laboratories, and that high 
 reading power in our native tongue is the most valuable of 
 all the acquisitions that the schools can give. 
 
 Do we need the sciences? Yes, but the mother tongue and 
 power to read it first, for it is our language that makes us 
 human, and to increase our skill in this is to broaden us first 
 into citizens of our country and finally into citizens of the 
 world. 
 
 Do we need manual, industrial, technical, vocational train- 
 ing? Yes; but reading first, for reading opens windows 
 through which we can see life and learn of good and evil 
 and become fitted for social needs. 
 
 Do we need other languages ? Yes ; but first our own ; and 
 the others chiefly that they may strengthen our grasp on our 
 own. Opponents of the classics are continually forgetting 
 that, while the arts and the sciences they advocate as the 
 tools of training have to do with what they call tangible, 
 practical things, the classics, rightly taught, strengthen our 
 hold on that fundamental thing, language, by which alone 
 thought, reason, generalization, and perhaps even conscious- 
 ness itself, are made possible. 
 
 Returning to our argument. Another familiar fact that 
 helps to make the habit of reading of supreme importance 
 should be noted. Two things seem to be essential to the 
 continuance of what, for lack of better words we call civiliza- 
 tion or progress, — plasticity and peace. Of all the factors that 
 make for plasticity with us none is as potent as the printed 
 page. He who reads knows — and he who knows neither fears 
 nor hates the new in manners, morals or invention ; and 
 neither hates nor fears the stranger however wonderful his 
 features or however barbarous his customs. And communion 
 
 
20 THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF READING 
 
 with the printed page gives us more than anything else can 
 give of those knowledges which bring other peoples to our 
 very doors, teaches us to know them and then to sympathize 
 with them, and so makes it impossible for us to hate them or 
 fight them. Print has done many harmful things ; but when 
 we condemn the weak novel, the nickel library and the yellow 
 journal, we may well remember that they are continually 
 bringing letters to Caliban; that in the long run print is for- 
 ever promoting that learning which is the foster-mother of 
 peace. 
 
 We probably read more than any other nation ; but we read 
 very little. By reading is here meant not simply reading 
 with understanding things which call for some thought; but 
 just reading of words, however simple, and about things how- 
 ever trivial. The casual skimming of our lightest dailies, 
 even this is done by a much smaller proportion of our popu- 
 lation than is commonly supposed. The most popular of our 
 weeklies and monthlies have each a circulation of less than a 
 million and a half. A few thousand read books of wisdom ; 
 a few hundred thousand read books and journals of learn- 
 ing ; a few millions out of our ninety millions read books and 
 journals of minor information and of meagre imagination ; 
 and of the remaining many millions only a few read even the 
 headlines of the most trifling journals. 
 
 Scarcely one in fifty of all the 50,000,000 possible readers 
 of the country ever bought a copy of the most popular novel ; 
 not more than three or four in fifty ever looked at a copy of 
 the most widely read of recent novels. Proceed to books of 
 some importance, such as Eliot's " More Money for the Public 
 Schools," and James's " Pragmatism," and you find that only 
 a few thousand out of the fifty million ever read them and 
 scarcely a hundred thousand ever looked at them. Yet these 
 are books of the kind which, in the conceit of our universal 
 culture, we suppose every person of intelligence to be familiar 
 with. All the readers of the very few first rate literary jour- 
 nals we support probably number less than 100,000. 
 
 A consideration of the history of reading and of the char- 
 acter of the human brain shows us why the art is acquired 
 so slowly, and in practice is so laborious that most people, 
 even a majority of school-taught people, try to avoid it. 
 
 Reading is a new art. It was acquired by very few up 
 to the invention of printing. A hundred years ago it was 
 practiced by a very small proportion of civilized men. Speech, 
 on the other hand, is a very ancient art, going back to the 
 days when daily conflict to the death was selecting for sur- 
 vival the physical and mental superiors and permitting them 
 
THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF READING 21 
 
 only to propagate. Speech, not silence, was then golden. It 
 was a weapon by which success was won. The inevitable hap- 
 pened. As ages went by those in whose brains speech centers 
 were best developed lived to hand on to offspring that 
 peculiar excellence. Skill in hearing and interpreting speech 
 went with skill in speaking. As a result we find that to-day 
 every normal human being is born with well-defined and 
 cunningly related centers for speech and hearing in his brain. 
 These centers are native to us ; they are part of our humanity. 
 
 And now, after countless centuries of practice in the use 
 of these centers and of the organs to which they relate, we 
 invent the art of printing, and ask our brains to take in 
 through the eye the symbols of sounds. The sounds them- 
 selves our mental machinery, after ages of practice, can 
 handle readily with an apparatus which inheritance gives us. 
 The visual symbols of sounds, these nature has never provided 
 us with cerebral tools to handle. 
 
 The result is that when we read, our eyes transmit the 
 printed words to a visual center in the brain ; thence they 
 pass to the hearing center ; there they are transmuted into the 
 sounds they stand for, and at last are understood. The word- 
 seeing tract is not native to us as is the word-hearing tract; 
 we must, each new generation of us, develop it anew by long 
 practice. The path from the word-seeing to the word-hearing 
 center is not given us by nature, and we must compel the 
 visual symbols of sound to travel it countless times before 
 they travel it with ease ! A few, we find, have a divine gift 
 for reading; a few others, without the gift, have the wish 
 and the will to persist in practice until they read with ease 
 and pleasure. The rest of mankind never acquire the art save 
 in a crude and halting way ; and of them all only a few ever 
 have power and patience to learn to read other than simple 
 and trivial things. This line of argument is familiar enough 
 and is cited only to justify the conclusion that we are not a 
 nation of readers ! 
 
 Several interesting phenomena strengthen the line of rea- 
 soning just given. Children, when learning to read, pronounce 
 the words they see that the sounds of them may reach the 
 word-hearing center directly, through the ear, instead of by 
 the new and difficult route in the brain, from the word-seeing 
 center to the word-hearing center. Poor readers mumble the 
 words they are reading, that the speaking center may help its 
 ancient ally the hearing center to transmute the visual symbols 
 of words into sounds of words. All readers, perhaps without 
 exception, find if they observe themselves closely that as they 
 read silently they pronounce in their minds the words they 
 
22 THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF READING 
 
 see. This silent pronunciation takes time, demands a certain 
 effort, and only after long practice ceases to be a burden. 
 The long practice is what the schools should induce and 
 lamentably fail to induce. 
 
 One or two other familiar facts are worth citing. The 
 political spell-binder finds to his delight that the people who 
 read with difficulty can listen with ease and pleasure. They 
 take in without trouble, and without permitting thought to 
 disturb the pleasure of absorption, the flapdoodle of his ora- 
 tory ; they read with effort and reluctantly, if at all, the care- 
 ful arguments of the student and the philosopher. Hence the 
 royal oratorical progress across our country of our highest 
 public servants. 
 
 Even the more intelligent often prefer the spoken to the 
 written word. Among all the methods of acquiring knowl- 
 edge of things worth while, listening to the formal lecture is 
 probably the poorest. If one takes note of those among whom 
 this method of learning is most popular one finds they are 
 almost invariably non-readers. 
 
 The advocates of story-telling and instruction by lecture cite 
 the facts just mentioned to prove the admitted fact that the 
 ear is the natural gateway to the mind and especially to the 
 seat of reason ; and then conclude that much instruction 
 should be given through the ears. This conclusion is confuted 
 by the very facts they cite, for if nature developed in us a 
 good word-hearing mechanism thousands of years ago, why 
 waste time now in giving it needless practice? Moreover, 
 if skill in reading daily increases in importance through the 
 swift growth of our overwhelming mass of knowledge, and 
 if that knowledge can be mastered a hundred fold more 
 rapidly by reading than by hearing, it is far more imperative 
 that the art of silent reading be taught than the art of 
 listening. 
 
 To sum. up: we have no more mental power than our 
 predecessors had who built civilizations and then let them fall 
 into ruins. Print may be the new factor which will save our 
 civilization. Print is so rapidly promoting encyclopaedic evo- 
 lution that our learning may overpass our powers of gen- 
 eralization and application. To prevent this we must become 
 a race of skillful print-users. It is of supreme importance, 
 therefore, that we learn to read. At present we read little 
 because the art is one for which our brains do not inherit the 
 apparatus. 
 
ITNIV 1 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed. 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 Ujj 
 
 1956 
 
 LD 21-95m-ll.'50(2877sl6)476 
 
i?£ 72 
 
 .:. 
 
 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY