Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/224

210 which we attained in reading during the last part of the time.

How many times has it happened to us to witness the perplexity of visitors to our school, who wished in the course of two hours to learn our method of instruction—when we had none at all! and, moreover, in the course of those two hours insisted on telling us their method! How many times have we not heard these visitors advising us to introduce the very method which, unknown to them, was employed under their very eyes in the school, but only not in the form of a despotic law imposed on all!

as we have said, mechanical reading and graded reading in reality blend in one, for us these two methods are always distinguishable by their purposes: it seems to us that the purpose of the former is the art of fluently forming words out of certain signs; the object of the latter is the knowledge of the literary language. A method of learning the literary language naturally presented itself to us, seemingly very simple, but in reality most difficult. It seemed to us that after the reading of phrases written on their slates by the scholars themselves, it was the proper thing to give them the stories of Khudyakof and Afanasief, then something more difficult and in a more complicated style, then something still more difficult, and so on till they should reach Karamzin, Pushkin, and the Code. But this, like the most of our suppositions and like suppositions in general, was not realized.

From the language written by the scholars themselves on their slates or blackboards, I succeeded in bringing them to the language of tales; but to bring them from the language of tales to a higher standard, the "something" that should be the intermediate step was lacking