Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/236

224 children we are permitted or required to handle words without associating any meaning with them. The same may be seen in the thoughtless singing of our Sabbath-schools. Thus words become the only things which we think of; and we lose the feelings which accompany clear comprehension, or the want of comprehension. Accustomed to a dull tool, we lose the consciousness that it is dull. But let us rarely have a dull one in our hands, and how intolerable it seems to work with it! Blunt our keen perceptions upon things which we do not or cannot penetrate, and we become insensible to the fact that our instrument is dull, and fails to perform its proper work. It is better, by all means, that the child should attach wrong ideas to all he reads, than that he should form the habit of reading without attaching any ideas. Let any friend of education look upon the stolidity of the average product of our schools, which comes from this mechanical, absolutely thoughtless reading, and he cannot but feel that we are producing a large amount of artificial stupidity. I do not say that pupils should never be required to read or learn what they do not comprehend; but I do say that such should never be the requisition so long as they are in danger of falling into the habit of which I speak, nor until they have the habit of reading with the distinct realization that they do comprehend or that they do not.

3. I have said that the power of expression is possible only after a proper development of the capacity to receive impressions. The power and the habit of conveying thought will follow as a consequence of, and in proportion to, the power and the habit of receiving thought. This plainly indicates the plan which should be adopted by any rational system of primary instruction in reading. As a matter of fact, however, the universal practice of teachers is in direct opposition to this principle. It is assumed on all hands that the practice of reading can have no other object than to impart elocutionary skill; to cultivate the power of oral expression. The great question which governs the method in this branch is not. Do we understand others? but, How to make others understand us. It is taken for granted that distinctness of articulation, correctness of inflection, etc., surely indicate the presence of the thought within. Pupils are drilled almost daily in reading from the time they are six until they are sixteen, and yet they cannot read. They pass over that which to them is intelligible and that which is not intelligible alike, without the least discrimination. Words, words merely, are their only currency. Professors of elocution, and teachers, of reading, do not impart the power we need. They teach us an accomplishment, but neglect our necessity. They make oral reading a high and important end, while it is simply a means, and should so be used. Our children are taught as though a large portion of their existence were to be spent in reading aloud; whereas, probably not one-fiftieth of all the reading done by people in ordinary circumstances is of that kind. For most of us, it is our intellectual