he must look in a book
for everything. The conscientious teacher who was now trying to separate
him from his notion may have been the very one who, perhaps unconsciously,
had instilled it; if so, her fault had thus returned to plague her.

The boy or girl who comes to attach a sacredness or a wizardry to the book
in itself will naturally believe, after a little, that whether he
understands what is in it matters little--and this is the malady of which
we have been complaining.

A college teacher of the differential calculus, in a time now happily long
past, when a pupil timidly inquired the reason for this or that, was wont
to fix the interrogator with his eye and say, "Sir; it is so because the
book says so!" Even in more recent days a well-known university teacher,
accustomed to use his own text-book, used to say when a student had
ventured to vary its classic phraseology, "It can not be expressed better
than in the words of the book!?" These instances, of course, are taken
from the dark ages of education, but even to-day I believe that a false
idea of the value of a printed page merely as print--not as the record of
a mind, ready to make contact with the mind of a reader--has impressed
itself too deeply on the brains of many children at an age when such
impressions are apt to be durable. Not that the schools are especially at
fault; we have all played our part in this unfortunate business. It might
all fade, at length; we all know that many good teachings of our childhood
do vanish; why should not the bad ones occasionally follow suit?

But now come in all the well-meaning instructors of the adult--the
Chautauquans, the educational extensionists, the lecturers, the
correspondence schools, the advisers of reading, the makers of booklists,
the devisers of "courses." They deepen the fleeting impression and
increase its capacity for harm, while varying slightly the mechanism that
produced it. As the child grows into a man, his childish idea that a book
will produce a certain effect independently of what it contains is apt to
yield a little to reason. The new influences, some of which I have named
above, do not attempt directly to combat this dawning intelligence; they
utilise it to complete the mental discomfiture of their victims. They
admit the necessity of comprehending the contents of the book, but they
persuade the reader that such comprehension is easier than it really is.
And they often administer specially concoc