The Junior Classics, vol 1 | Page 4

boy or girl who becomes familiar with the charming tales and
poems in this collection will have gained a knowledge of literature and
history that will be of high value in other school and home work. Here
are the real elements of imaginative narration, poetry, and ethics, which
should enter into the education of every English-speaking child.
This collection, carefully used by parents and teachers with due
reference to individual tastes and needs, will make many children enjoy
good literature. It will inspire them with a love of good reading, which
is the best possible result of any elementary education. The child
himself should be encouraged to make his own selections from this
large and varied collection, the child's enjoyment being the object in
view. A real and lasting interest in literature or in scholarship is only to
be developed through the individual's enjoyment of his mental
occupations.

The most important change which has been made in American schools
and colleges within my memory is the substitution of leading for
driving, of inspiration for drill, of personal interest and love of work for
compulsion and fear. The schools are learning to use methods and
materials which interest and attract the children themselves. The Junior
Classics will put into the home the means of using this happy method.
Committing to memory beautiful pieces of literature, either prose or
poetry, for recitation before a friendly audience, acting charades or
plays, and reading aloud with vivacity and sympathetic emotion, are
good means of instruction at home or at school This collection contains
numerous admirable pieces of literature for such use. In teaching
English and English literature we should place more reliance upon
processes and acts which awaken emotion, stimulate interest, prove to
be enjoyable for the actors, and result in giving children the power of
entertaining people, of blessing others with noble pleasures which the
children create and share.
>From the home training during childhood there should result in the
child a taste for interesting and improving reading which will direct and
inspire its subsequent intellectual life. The training which results in this
taste for good reading, however unsystematic or eccentric it may have
been, has achieved one principal aim of education; and any school or
home training which does not result in implanting this permanent taste
has failed in a very important respect. Guided and animated by this
impulse to acquire knowledge and exercise the imagination through
good reading, the adult will continue to educate him all through life.
The story of the human race through all its slow development should be
gradually conveyed to the child's mind from the time he begins to read,
or to listen to his mother reading; and with description of facts and
actual events should be mingled charming and uplifting products of the
imagination. To try to feed the minds of children upon facts alone is
undesirable and unwise. The immense product of the imagination in art
and literature is a concrete fact with which every educated human being
should be made somewhat familiar, that product being a very real part
of every individual's actual environment.

The right selection of reading matter for children is obviously of high
importance. Some of the mythologies, Old Testament stories, fairy tales,
and historical romances, on which earlier generations were accustomed
to feed the childish mind, contain a great deal that is barbarous,
perverse, or cruel; and to this infiltration into children's minds,
generation after generation, of immoral, cruel, or foolish ideas is
probably to be attributed in part the slow ethical progress of the race.
The commonest justification of this thoughtless practice is that children
do not apprehend the evil in the bad mental pictures with which we
foolishly supply them; but what should we think of a mother who gave
her children dirty milk or porridge, on the theory that the children
would not assimilate the dirt? Should we be less careful about mental
and moral food materials? The Junior Classics have been selected with
this principle in mind, without losing sight of the fact that every
developing human being needs to have a vision of the rough and thorny
road over which the human race has been slowly advancing during
thousands of years.
Whoever has committed to memory in childhood such Bible extracts as
Genesis i, the Ten Commandments, Psalm xxiii, Matthew v, 8-12, The
Lord's Prayer, and I Corinthians xiii, such English prose as Lincoln's
Gettysburg speech, Bacon's "Essay on Truth," and such poems as
Bryant's "Waterfowl," Addison's "Divine Ode," Milton's Sonnet on his
Blindness, Wotton's "How happy is he born or taught," Emerson's
"Rhodora," Holmes's "Chambered Nautilus," and Gray's Elegy, and has
stamped them on his brain by frequent repetition, will have set up in his
mind high standards of noble thought and feeling, true patriotism, and