What the Schools Teach and Might Teach | Page 6

and three times in 14 weeks. After reading everything three times over, there still remain 24 weeks of each year unprovided for.
The reply of teachers is that the work is so difficult that it has to be slowed down enough to consume these 24 weeks. But is not this to admit that the hill is too steep, that there is too much dead pull, and that the materials are ill-chosen for practice in habits of rapid intelligent reading? It is not by going slow that one learns to go fast. Quite the reverse. Too often the school runs on low speed gear when it ought to be running on high. The low may be necessary for the starting, but not for the running. It may be necessary in the primary grades, but not thereafter for those who have had a normal start. Reading practice should certainly make for increased speed in effective reading.
The actual work in the grades is very different from the plan suggested. In taking up any selection for reading, the plan in most schools is about as follows:
1. A list of the unusual words met with is written on the blackboard.
2. Teacher and pupils discuss the meaning of these words; but unfortunately words out of the context often carry no meaning.
3. The words are marked diacritically, and pronounced.
4. Pupils "use the words in sentences." The pupil frequently has nothing to say that involves the word. It is only given an imitation of a real use by being put into an artificial sentence.
5. The oral reading is begun. One pupil reads a paragraph.
6. With the book removed, the meaning of the paragraph is then reproduced either by the reader or some other pupil. This work is necessarily perfunctory because the pupil knows he is not giving information to anybody. Everybody within hearing already has the meaning fresh in mind from the previous reading. The normal child cannot work up enthusiasm for oral reproduction under such conditions.
7. The paragraph is analyzed into its various elements, and these in turn are discussed in detail.
Such work is not reading. It is analysis. A selection is not read, it is analyzed. The purpose of real reading is to enter into the thought and emotional experience of the writer; not to study the methods by which the author expressed himself. The net result when the work is done as described is to develop a critical consciousness of methods, without helping the children to enter normally and rightly into the experience of the writer. The children of Cleveland need this genuine training in reading.
Reading in the high schools needs very much the same sort of modernization. There are more kinds of literature than classical belles-lettres, and perhaps more important kinds. We would not advocate a reduction of the amount of aesthetic literature. Indeed, the young people of Cleveland need to enter into a far wider range of such literature than is the case at present. But the reading courses in high schools should be built out in ways already recommended for elementary schools.
The training, however, should be mainly in reading and not in analysis. The former is of surpassing importance to all people; the latter is important only to certain specialists. And, what is more, fullness of reading and right ways of reading will accomplish incidentally most of the things aimed at in the analysis.
The following table of the reading outline of the High School of Commerce is a fair sample of what the city is doing. Note how much time is given to the reading and analysis of the few selections covered in four years.
TABLE 3.--WEEKS GIVEN TO READING OF DIFFERENT BOOKS IN HIGH SCHOOL OF COMMERCE
Weeks to read First Year Ashmun's Prose Selections 9 Cricket on the Hearth 5 Sohrab and Rustum 3 Midsummer Night's Dream 6 Ivanhoe 11
Second Year Autobiography of Franklin 7 Idylls of the King 10 Treasure Island 7 Sketch Book 7 Vision of Sir Launfal 3
Third Year Silas Marner 7 Iliad (Bryant's--4 books) 5 Washington's Farewell Address 5 First Bunker Hill Oration 6 Emerson's Compensation 5 Roosevelt Book 6
Fourth Year Markham's The Man with the Hoe 2 Tale of Two Cities 10 Public Duty of the Educated Man 4 Macbeth 11 Self-Reliance 6
When a short play of a hundred pages like Macbeth requires nearly three months for reading, when almost two months are given to Treasure Island and nearly three months to Ivanhoe, clearly it is something other than reading that is being attempted. It is perfectly obvious that the high schools are attending principally to the mechanics of expression and not to the content of the expression. The relative emphasis should be reversed.
The amount of reading in the high schools should be greatly increased. Those who object that rapid work is superficial believe that work must be