Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/235

Rh accurate comprehension of good English; and this ever underlies the defect of expression. Of all the young men of whom the complaint is so justly made, I do not believe there is one to be found who has the faculties well developed which are necessary to a good reader. The primary fault is not to be found in the instruction in composition, but in the instruction in reading, and this last includes every subject in which the pupil has a book to use. Show me a person who is a good reader in the real sense of the terra, one who has a strong power of attention, quick perception, active association, and other requisites to a fair mental reader, and I will show you a person who will not come far short of reasonable demands in his composition. The one follows the other naturally and invariably. This statement will be fully supported by any class after six months of faithful study of the English classics.

Of this want of comprehension there are several sources which are unwittingly fostered:

1. While children, we are compelled to study and read over and over again the same lessons. The mastery of words is made the end and the only end, in the view of both teacher and pupil, instead of remaining to each as a means only, a subordinate matter. Curiosity, at that age the natural governor of attention, is destroyed; and nine-tenths of our task-reading is performed with an indifference and weakness of thought which do not deserve the name of reading. This will continue so until the reading-matter put into our schools is greatly increased in variety and amount. Rarely, and only at long intervals, should a lesson be read more than once. The habit of seeming to read, of performing the physical part, while the mental faculties lie as dead, is easily formed. But it should be resisted. The problem before the primary teacher is this: To keep firmly fixed in the child's mind that the chief thing is the idea, while at the same time he is duly impressed with forms and words. Not only must the tongue utter, but the spirit must see what we read.

2. Also, in childhood we are allowed or required to read what we do not understand. A common illustration of one form of this evil occurred recently in the closing exercises of a first-class normal school. The pupil-teacher was to exhibit her power by means of a lesson in writing to a large class of bright boys about seven years of age. She had placed upon the black-board, as her copy, those four familiar lines—

"Work while you work,

Play while you play," etc.

The writing was certainly most admirable; but the inquiries of the lady-principal revealed the fact that the children had not the least conception of the first two lines. Most, indeed, seemed not to have thought any thing about the meaning. This is a sample, taken, however, from normal training, of the vast number of ways in which as