What the Schools Teach and Might Teach | Page 5

to adults. No longer should the central educational purpose be the development of expressive oral reading. It should be rapid and effective silent reading for the sake of the thought read.
To train an adult generation to read for the thought, schools must give children full practice in reading for the thought in the ways in which later as adults they should read. After the primary teachers have taught the elements, the work should be mainly voluminous reading for the sake of entering into as much of the world's thought and experience as possible. The work ought to be rather more extensive than intensive. The chief end should be the development of that wide social vision and understanding which is so much needed in this complicated cosmopolitan age. While works of literary art should constitute a considerable portion of the reading program, they should not monopolize the program, nor indeed should they be regarded as the most important part of it. It is history, travel, current news, biography, advance in the world of industry and applied science, discussions of social relations, political adjustments, etc., which adults need mostly to read; and it is by the reading of these things that children form desirable and valuable reading habits.
The reading curriculum needs to be looked after in two important ways. First, social standards of judgment should determine the nature of the reading. The texts beyond the primary grades are now for the most part selections of literary art. Very little of it has any conscious relation, immediate or remote, to present-day problems and conditions or with their historical background. Probably children should read many more selections of literary art than are found in the textbooks and the supplementary sets now owned by the schools. But certainly such cultural literary experience ought not to crowd out kinds of reading that are of much greater practical value. Illumination of the things of serious importance in the everyday world of human affairs should have a large place in reading work of every school.
It is true that the supplementary sets of books have been chosen chiefly for their content value. Many are historical, biographical, geographical, scientific, civic, etc., in character. On the side of content, they have advanced much farther than the textbooks toward what should constitute a proper reading course. Unfortunately, the schools are very incompletely supplied with these sets. If we consider all the sets of supplementary readers found in 10 or more schools, we find that few of those assigned for fourth-grade reading are found in one-quarter of the buildings and none are in half of them. The same is true of the books for use in the fifth and seventh grades. Some of the books for the sixth and eighth grades are found in more than half of the buildings, but there is none that is found in as many as three-quarters of them.
The second thing greatly needed to improve the reading course is more reading practice. One learns to do a thing easily, rapidly, and effectively by practice. The course of study in reading should therefore provide the opportunity for much practice. At present the reading texts used aggregate for the eight grades some 2100 pages. A third-grade child ought to read matter suitable for its intelligence at 20 pages per hour, and a grammar-grade child at 30 to 40 pages per hour. Since rapidity of reading is one of the desired ends, the practice reading should be rapid. At the moderate rates mentioned, the entire series of reading texts ought to be read in some 80 hours. This is 10 hours' practice for each of the eight school years, an altogether insufficient amount of rapid reading practice. Of course the texts can be read twice, or let us say three times, aggregating 30 hours of practice per year. But even this is not more than could easily be accomplished in two or three weeks of each of the years--always presuming that the reading materials are rightly adapted to the mental maturity of the pupils. This leaves 35 weeks of the year unprovided for. To make good this deficit, the buildings are furnished with supplementary books in sets sufficiently large to supply entire classes. The average number of such sets per building is shown in the following table:
TABLE 2.--SETS OF SUPPLEMENTARY READING BOOKS PER BUILDING
Grade Average number of sets 1 10.0 2 6.3 3 5.1 4 5.5 5 6.3 6 5.3 7 5.5 8 6.0
A fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth-grade student ought to be able to read all the materials supplied his grade, both reading texts and all kinds of supplementary reading, in 40 or 50 hours. He ought to do it easily in six weeks' work, without encroaching on recitation time. He can read all of it twice in 10 weeks;