ion is not appealed to; they
have learned nothing, except probably some new words, which are learned
as signs. Often children have only one book even of this sort, at which
they are kept until they learn it through by heart, and they have been
heard to "read" it with the book bottom side up or shut! All these books
cultivate inattention and intellectual vacancy. They are--the best of
them--only reading exercises; and reading is not perceived to have any
sort of value. The child is not taught to think, and not a step is taken
in informing him of his relation to the world about him. His education is
not begun.

Now it happens that children go on with this sort of reading and the
ordinary text-books through the grades of the district school into the
high school, and come to the ages of seventeen and eighteen without the
least conception of literature, or of art, or of the continuity of the
relations of history; are ignorant of the great names which illuminate
the ages; have never heard of Socrates, or of Phidias, or of Titian; do
not know whether Franklin was an Englishman or an American; would be
puzzled to say whether it was Ben Franklin or Ben Jonson who invented
lightning--think it was Ben Somebody; cannot tell whether they lived
before or after Christ, and indeed never have thought that anything
happened before the time of Christ; do not know who was on the throne of
Spain when Columbus discovered America--and so on. These are not imagined
instances. The children referred to are in good circumstances and have
had fairly intelligent associations, but their education has been
intrusted to the schools. They know nothing except their text-books, and
they know these simply for the purpose of examination. Such pupils come
to the age of eighteen with not only no taste for the best reading, for
the reading of books, but without the ability to be interested even in
fiction of the first class, because it is full of allusions that convey
nothing to their minds. The stories they read, if they read at all--the
novels, so called, that they have been brought up on--are the diluted and
feeble fictions that flood the country, and that scarcely rise above the
intellectual level of Jimmy and the absorbed pig.

It has been demonstrated by experiment that it is as easy to begin with
good literature as with the sort of reading described. It makes little
difference where the beginning is made. Any good book, any real book, is
an open door