Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/121

 the scenes of which were made more vivid to her from the fact that she had been born in northern England, had visited Edinburgh as a girl, and knew very well, because her own youthful feet had trodden it, the road which Jeanie Deans had taken from Edinburgh to London when she went to plead for her sister's life. Her early reading was the source of hourly pleasure to her, and made quite bearable an existence which might otherwise have been wretched even to contemplate.

No one has so much time at his disposal to learn to read as the young person before he enters high school and during his high school course. More than this, youth is the habit-forming time, as I have said, more than once. If one does not learn the habit of reading then, he is not likely ever to acquire it. It would seem easy to prove that with all the opportunities furnished the boy for reading while he is in the elementary school, and after he enters high school, with the great variety of reading he is required to do, and with the wide range of books from which he may choose, he would learn to like something, he would cultivate his interest, and would continue his acquaintance with books during vacation and after he had graduated from high school. The number of boys, however, who regularly and of their own choice read books while they are in the high school and after they get out is small, and the class of books in which they find interest is often very poor. The training in English in our schools does not develop the