What the Schools Teach and Might Teach | Page 5

reading be easy and rapid, and that one gather in all the ideas as one
reads. Because of the fact that oral reading is slower, more laborious
for both reader and listener, and because of the present easy
accessibility of printed matter, oral reading is becoming of steadily
diminishing importance 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,