not even be scientific, in the larger sense, except as,
in its own time and in its own way, it selects itself in due time in a
boy's life, buds out, and is allowed to branch out, from his own inner
personal reading.

As the first and most important and most far-reaching of the arts of
reading is the Art of Reading as One Likes, the principles,
inspirations, and difficulties of reading as one likes are the first to
be considered in the following chapters.

The fact that the art of reading as one likes is the most difficult,
perhaps the most impossible, of all the arts in modern times,
constitutes one of those serio-comic problems of civilisation--a problem
which civilisation itself, with all its swagger of science, its literary
braggadocio, its Library Cure, with all its Board Schools, Commissioners
of Education and specialists, and bishops and newsboys, all hard at work
upon it, is only beginning to realise.

The Second Interference: The Disgrace of the Imagination

I

On Wondering Why One Was Born

The real trouble with most of the attempts that teachers and parents
make, to teach children a vital relation to books, is that they do not
believe in the books and that they do not believe in the children.

It is almost impossible to find a child who, in one direction or
another, the first few years of his life, is not creative. It is almost
impossible to find a parent or a teacher who does not discourage this
creativeness. The discouragement begins in a small way, at first, in the
average family, but as the more creative a child becomes the more
inconvenient he is, as a general rule, every time a boy is caught being
creative, something has to be done to him about it.

It is a part of the nature of creativeness that it involves being
creative a large part of the time in the wrong direction. Half-proud and
half-stupefied parents, failing to see that the mischief in a boy is the
entire basis of his education, the mainspring of his life, not being
able to break the mainspring themselves, frequently hire teachers to
help them. The teacher who can break a mainspring first and keep it from
getting mended, is often the most esteemed in the community. Those who
have broken the most, "secure results." The spectacle of the mechanical,
barren, conventional society so common in the present day to all who
love their kind is a sign there is no withstanding. It is a spectacle we
can only stand and watch--some of us,--the