en may be
attributed to the fact that they have read aloud to their teachers
for many years, and that during the whole of that time a very low
standard of distinctness has been accepted as satisfactory.

Or is it in order that the teacher may help his pupils to understand
what they are reading? This may be one of his reasons for hearing
them read aloud; but so far as the higher classes are concerned it is
a bad reason, for the older the child the more imperative is it that
he should try to make out for himself the meaning of what he reads;
and the teacher who spoon-feeds his pupils during the reading lesson
is doing his best to make them incapable of digesting the contents of
books for themselves.

No, there are two chief reasons why the teacher makes children of
eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen years of age read aloud to him
as if they were children of six or seven. The first reason is that
the unemancipated teacher instinctively does to-day what he did
twenty years ago, and that twenty years ago, when children were
examined in reading from their own books, the teacher heard them read
aloud, day after day in order that he might make sure that they knew
their books well enough to pass the inspector's test. The second
reason, which is wider than the first, and may be said to include and
account for it, is that the reading-aloud lesson fits in with the
whole system of Western education, being the outcome and expression
of that complete distrust of the child which is, and always has been,
characteristic of the popular religion and philosophy of the West. If
you ask the teacher why the children, even in the highest classes,
are never allowed to work at such subjects as history and geography
by themselves, he will tell you frankly that he cannot trust them to
do so, that they do not know how to use a book. And he cannot see
that in giving this excuse he is condemning himself, and making open
confession of the worthlessness of the training that he has given to
his pupils.

Whatever else the reading-aloud lesson may be, it is a dismal waste
of time. Child after child stands up, reads for a minute or so, and
then sits down, remaining idle and inert (except when an occasional
question is addressed to him) for the rest of the time occupied
by the so-called lesson. In this, as in most oral lessons, the
elementary school child passes much of his time in a state which is
neither activity nor rest,--a state of enforced inert