The Novel and the Common School | Page 5

of tender age can be as readily interested and permanently interested in
good literature as in the dreary feebleness of the juvenile reader. The
mind of the ordinary child should not be judged by the mind that
produces stuff of this sort: "Little Jimmy had a little white pig." "Did
the little pig know Jimmy?" "Yes, the little pig knew Jimmy, and would
come when he called." "How did little Jimmy know his pig from the
other little pigs?" "By the twist in his tail." ("Children," asks the teacher,
"what is the meaning of 'twist'?") "Jimmy liked to stride the little pig's
back." "Would the little pig let him?" "Yes, when he was absorbed
eating his dinner." ("Children, what is the meaning of 'absorbed'?")
And so on.
This intellectual exercise is, perhaps, read to children who have not got
far enough in "word-building" to read themselves about little Jimmy
and his absorbed pig. It may be continued, together with word-learning,
until the children are able to say (is it reading?) the entire volume of
this precious stuff. To what end? The children are only languidly
interested; their minds are not awakened; the imagination is not
appealed to; they have learned nothing, except probably some new
words, which are learned as signs. Often children have only one book
even of this sort, at which they are kept until they learn it through by
heart, and they have been heard to "read" it with the book bottom side
up or shut! All these books cultivate inattention and intellectual
vacancy. They are--the best of them--only reading exercises; and

reading is not perceived to have any sort of value. The child is not
taught to think, and not a step is taken in informing him of his relation
to the world about him. His education is not begun.
Now it happens that children go on with this sort of reading and the
ordinary text-books through the grades of the district school into the
high school, and come to the ages of seventeen and eighteen without
the least conception of literature, or of art, or of the continuity of the
relations of history; are ignorant of the great names which illuminate
the ages; have never heard of Socrates, or of Phidias, or of Titian; do
not know whether Franklin was an Englishman or an American; would
be puzzled to say whether it was Ben Franklin or Ben Jonson who
invented lightning--think it was Ben Somebody; cannot tell whether
they lived before or after Christ, and indeed never have thought that
anything happened before the time of Christ; do not know who was on
the throne of Spain when Columbus discovered America--and so on.
These are not imagined instances. The children referred to are in good
circumstances and have had fairly intelligent associations, but their
education has been intrusted to the schools. They know nothing except
their text-books, and they know these simply for the purpose of
examination. Such pupils come to the age of eighteen with not only no
taste for the best reading, for the reading of books, but without the
ability to be interested even in fiction of the first class, because it is full
of allusions that convey nothing to their minds. The stories they read, if
they read at all--the novels, so called, that they have been brought up
on--are the diluted and feeble fictions that flood the country, and that
scarcely rise above the intellectual level of Jimmy and the absorbed
pig.
It has been demonstrated by experiment that it is as easy to begin with
good literature as with the sort of reading described. It makes little
difference where the beginning is made. Any good book, any real book,
is an open door into the wide field of literature; that is to say, of
history--that is to say, of interest in the entire human race. Read to
children of tender years, the same day, the story of Jimmy and a Greek
myth, or an episode from the "Odyssey," or any genuine bit of human
nature and life; and ask the children next day which they wish to hear

again. Almost all of them will call for the repetition of the real thing,
the verity of which they recognize, and which has appealed to their
imaginations. But this is not all. If the subject is a Greek myth, they
speedily come to comprehend its meaning, and by the aid of the teacher
to trace its development elsewhere, to understand its historic
significance, to have the mind filled with images of beauty, and wonder.
Is it the Homeric story of Nausicaa? What a picture! How speedily
Greek history opens to the mind! How readily the children acquire
knowledge of the great historic names, and see how their deeds and
their thoughts are related