Children and Their Books | Page 3

they happen to be moral or religious realities. It is the abstract, preceptive, and barren form, and the presumptuous manner in which these are presented that they detest. How, then, at this critical age to present the most vital of all the elements of education, is a supremely important problem. It is my conviction that you can only do so through literature; and the New Testament itself might well be read simply as literature. The words, the phrases, the ideals which literature offers so lavishly, unconsciously stir the mind to lofty motives and the true perception of the meaning of life. We must not, of course, commit the fatal blunder of making a didactic lesson out of what is read. We take care that it is understood and illustrated, and then leave it to have its own effect."
Children behave better when their minds are occupied; an interest in literature has proved in numerous instances to be an aid to discipline in the schoolroom. It is sad to think how little that is refining and elevating comes into the lives of many children. The attitude of the average school boy toward life is shown by the fact that he refers to any stranger as a "guy". The rough horse play of the movies fills such a boy with exquisite delight. To see on the screen a man have a lot of dough slapped in his face is the highest form of humor. His mind is active but it has no suitable nourishment. What is needed is to direct it. President Angell has told us how boys were inspired by that great teacher Alice Freeman Palmer:
"I attended a class in English Literature which she was teaching. The class was composed of boys from fifteen to eighteen years of age, in whom one would perhaps hardly expect much enthusiasm for the great masters of English Literature. But it was soon apparent that she had those boys completely under her control and largely filled with her own enthusiasm. They showed that at their homes they had been carefully and lovingly reading some of the great masterpieces and were ready to discuss them with intelligence and zest."
"Mind grows," says Carlyle, "like a spirit--thought kindling itself at the fire of living thought."
To keep the heart open to elevating influences, to enjoy really beautiful things, to take a dignified and noble view of life, these are the results that must follow association with the best thoughts of the best minds, which is literature. And it is one of the wonders of literature that some of the best of it is adapted to every order of intelligence. When one gets older his mental field widens, he cannot then read all the best, he must choose; but the classic books for children are not so numerous that the child may not read and reread them.
Cultivation of the literary taste of the child may begin as soon as he can talk. He will early take an interest in simple stories and poems and sooner than many suppose, he may be taught to read those which he has already learned by heart. From the beginning reading should be easy and interesting. The child should look forward to it with pleasure. He loves stories, let him see that the best of them are in books told by better story tellers than he can find elsewhere. Help the child to appreciate the book, to take an intelligent interest in it, and gradually lead him up to that love of the best which is the foundation of culture. Do not think that he can see all there is to enjoy at the first reading; a book is classic because it may be read over and over and always show something that was not seen before. There is a distinction which teachers and parents do not always recognize between books, which are beyond the child merely because of the hard words in which the idea is clothed and those in which the thought itself is above his comprehension. "Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high in imagination or feeling so long as it is simple likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex that bewilder them," said Hawthorne, and because of his knowledge of this fact he wrote his exquisite classics for children. The phraseology of books is frequently different from that to which the child is accustomed. He must be taught to understand thought as expressed in printed words, his vocabulary is limited; in reading aloud he will often pronounce words correctly without any idea of what they mean and far more frequently than you imagine he will receive a wrong impression by confusing words like zeal and seal of similar sound and totally different meaning. A teacher accidentally