Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/662

642 and long-hand, perhaps, than any boy of his age (eleven years) in the kingdom; and no one I dare say has had less to do with that absurdity of absurdities, the spelling-book! He is now at a first-rate school in Wiltshire, and in the half-year preceding Christmas he carried off the prize for orthography in a contest with boys, some of them his senior by years!"

Mrs. E. B. Burnz, of New York, says, in regard to her experience at Nashville, soon after the civil war: "The phonetic teaching in the Fisk School, as elsewhere, proved beyond all cavil that with phonetic books as much could be accomplished in four months in teaching to read as by a year with the common method. And, moreover, it showed that there is no difficulty experienced by children in passing from the phonetic to the ordinary printed books. After going through the phonetic primer and First and Second Reader, the children passed at once into the Second Reader in common print, and from the phonetic Gospel into the common New Testament." Successful experiments in common schools are on record in sufficient numbers to prove the practicability of the method.

Several phonetic primers have been published and are used in some American and English schools, for teaching English in the schools of Paris, and by missionaries among the Indians and other peoples. With one of these books, parents will find it a light task to teach their children to read at home in a few lessons. Since there are only twenty-six (or, counting œ and æ, twenty-eight) letters in our alphabet, while for phonetic printing means of representing forty sounds are needed, each of these books uses an extended form of the alphabet. Unfortunately, no one alphabet for the phonetic printing of English has yet been agreed upon; still, any of these systems can be adopted for the schools of a city or town, with the certainty of good results. The alphabet devised by the American Philological Association may be said to be the most authoritative; it has also the merit of employing only three new letters. I am not unaware of the efforts being made to replace the current spelling by a phonetic system for all purposes, but that is a matter quite distinct from the subject of this article; and all who believe that the orderly and vigorous development of the mental faculties should be the chief end in education, whether they favor or oppose the spelling reform, can work together for the spread of the phonetic method of teaching reading.