Children and Their Books | Page 2

far as all knowledge in it being of a fragmentary and piecemeal description, nothing complete. It may well happen that an intelligent boy shall be unable to understand a seemingly simple thing, because some bit of knowledge which his instructor takes it for granted he possesses, and probably thinks instinctive, is wanting to fill up the whole."
To impart the desire for knowledge and the power of getting it is next to character-building the most important work of the school. Encourage self-activity to the fullest extent. When the child asks a question be careful not to put him off or discourage him, but if it is possible to show him how to find the answer for himself do so, even at the expense of considerable time and trouble. Aid that quenches curiosity retards mental growth. Many children ask questions merely for the sake of talking, and forget the question before they have heard the answer. As the child gradually becomes able to use them show him how to employ books as tools. Keep reference books on low shelves or tables in convenient places, where it is easy to get at them. Show the child that the dictionary, the atlas, and the encyclopaedia contain stores of knowledge accumulated by the work of many scholars for many years and laboriously classified and arranged for the benefit of seekers after information. Show him how to investigate a subject under several different titles and how to get what he needs from a book by the use of the table of contents, index, and running head lines, and how to use card catalogues and Poole's Index. Help him to look up on the map the places he reads about. Explain the scale of miles and teach him to use his imagination in making the map real; show him that the dots represent towns and cities with churches, parks, and trolley cars, and that the waving lines are rivers on which are steam boats carrying the productions of one section to another.
As he grows older teach him to draw his own conclusions from conflicting statements and to preserve the happy medium between respect for the authority of books and confidence in his own observation. Most boys and girls do not observe and they do not think; they have no opinions except those made for them by others. We are too apt to cultivate the memory and to neglect observation, imagination, and judgment. The result is a wooden type of mind which has too great respect for printed matter and little initiative in accurate observation and in using the imagination and the judgment in making what has been observed and read practically useful.
Encourage the child to talk about what he reads in a natural way, but do not allow him to become a prig by saying what he supposes you would like to have him rather than what he really thinks.
Do not be too eager to stamp your individuality upon the child; he has a right to his own. Find out what his tastes and inclinations are and develop him through them. Ascertain what he is really interested in; very often it is something quite different from what you suppose. His point of view is different from yours. Translate what you wish him to be interested in into terms of his own life and experience. Success in education comes to a great extent from skill in establishing relations between what the child already knows and that which you wish him to acquire.
No part of education has more to do with character-building than the inculcating of a love of good literature. S. S. Laurie calls literature "the most potent of all instruments in the hands of the educator, whether we have regard to intellectual growth or to the moral and religious life". "It is easy," he says, "if only you set about it in the right way, to engage the heart of a child, up to the age of eleven or twelve, on the side of kindliness, generosity, self-sacrifice; and to fill him, if not with ideals of greatness and goodness, at least with the feelings or emotions which enter into these ideals. You thus lay a basis in feeling and emotion on which may be built a truly manly character at a later period--without such a basis you can accomplish nothing ethical, now or at any future time. But when the recipient stage is past, and boys begin to assert themselves, they have a tendency to resist, if not to resent, professedly moral and religious teaching; and this chiefly because it then comes to them or is presented to them in the shape of abstract precept and authoritative dogma. Now, the growing mind of youth is keen after realities, and has no native antagonism to realities merely because