e, he may be taught to read those which he
has already learned by heart. From the beginning reading should be
easy and interesting. The child should look forward to it with
pleasure. He loves stories, let him see that the best of them are in
books told by better story tellers than he can find elsewhere. Help
the child to appreciate the book, to take an intelligent interest in
it, and gradually lead him up to that love of the best which is the
foundation of culture. Do not think that he can see all there is to
enjoy at the first reading; a book is classic because it may be read
over and over and always show something that was not seen before.
There is a distinction which teachers and parents do not always
recognize between books, which are beyond the child merely because of
the hard words in which the idea is clothed and those in which the
thought itself is above his comprehension. "Children possess an
unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high in imagination or
feeling so long as it is simple likewise. It is only the artificial
and the complex that bewilder them," said Hawthorne, and because of
his knowledge of this fact he wrote his exquisite classics for
children. The phraseology of books is frequently different from that
to which the child is accustomed. He must be taught to understand
thought as expressed in printed words, his vocabulary is limited; in
reading aloud he will often pronounce words correctly without any idea
of what they mean and far more frequently than you imagine he will
receive a wrong impression by confusing words like _zeal_ and _seal_
of similar sound and totally different meaning. A teacher accidentally
found out that her class supposed that the "kid" which railed at the
wolf in Aesop's fable was a little boy, and I have had a child tell me
that he saw at Rouen the place, where Noah's ark was burned, of course
he meant Jeanne d'Arc. "The mastery of words," says Miss Arnold, "is an
essential element in learning to read. Our common mistake is, not that
we do such work too well, but that we make it the final aim of the
reading lesson, and lead the children to feel that they can read when
they are merely able to pronounce the words." "Observation has
convinced me," wrote Melvill Dewey, "that the reason why so many people
are not habitual readers is, in most cases, that they have never
really learned to read; and, startling as this may seem, tests will
show that many a man who would resent t