breaking
up an over-grouped top class has suggested itself as practicable, or
even as intrinsically desirable.

We owe it, then, to the reading-aloud fetich that in many of our
schools the children are compelled to spend the last two (or even
three) years of their school life--the most important years of all
from the point of view of their preparation for the battle of
life--in marking time, in staying where they were. It is to those
years of enforced stagnation that the reluctance of the ex-elementary
scholar to go on with his education is largely due; for no one can
keep on moving who is not already on the move, and the desire to
continue education is scarcely to be looked for in one who has been
given to understand that his education has come to an end. But there
is another and a shorter cut from the conventional reading lesson to
the early extinction of the child's educational career. The child who
leaves school without having learned how to use a book, will find
that the one door through which access is gained to most of the halls
of learning--the door of independent study--is for ever slammed in
his face. Not that he will seriously try to open it; for with the
ability to read the desire to read will have aborted. The distrust of
the child, on which Western education is based, is a bottomless gulf
in which educational effort, whatever form it may take or in whatever
quarter it may originate, is for the most part swallowed up and made
as though it had not been. The child who leaves school at the age of
fourteen will have attended some 2,000 or 3,000 reading lessons in
the course of his school life. From these, in far too many cases, he
will have carried nothing away but the ability to stumble with
tolerable correctness through printed matter of moderate difficulty.
He will not have carried away from them either the power or the
desire to read.

In the days of percentages, instruction in "_Writing_" below Standard
V was entirely confined to handwriting and spelling; and even in the
higher Standards the teacher thought more about handwriting and
spelling than any other aspect of this composite subject. Now
handwriting and spelling are merely means to an end,--the end of
making clear to the reader the words that have been committed to
paper by the writer. But it is the choice rather than the setting
out of words that really matters, and the name that we give to the
choosing of words is Composition. The excessive reg