M More Books in the School By Gertrude Hartman Author of "The Child and His School" and "Home and Community Life" OST of us remember the time when a reader, a speller, an arithmetic, a geography, and a history constituted our entire equipment in books for the school year. At the beginning of the term the teacher did a little example in arithmetic, she counted up the number of pages in each textbook to be taken up during the year, divided it by the number of schooldays, and then gave out the lesson each day: "from the first paragraph on page so-and-so, to the last paragraph on page so-and-so." These lessons we committed to memory and recited upon, and thus, day by day, by the simple process of learning the contents of each book from cover to cover, we gradually "covered the ground" in each subject. No Longer Does the Child Watch the Teacher Work Much water has flowed under the educational bridge since those days. The changes in living conditions and the advances made in psychology resulting in a better understanding of child nature, have had their reflex upon educational methods. Life in school today is not nearly so simple, but infinitely more interesting than it was in the old days. Anyone who has not seen a school in operation in recent years would be amazed upon visiting a school of the modern type. Instead of finding the pupils seated passively in inattentive .rows watching the teacher work, he might see a group of children gathered around a sand-table, reproducing in miniature, by means of dolls, clay, and toys, a scene from life in some distant country, or he might come upon another group working out co-operatively an original play dealing with the Pilgrims, life in Ancient Rome, mediaeval life, or some other phase of history, and making the scenes and costumes for it. Still another group might be found seated around a table, discussing, under the leadership of one of their number, some problem geographical, civic, or historic. Each child in the group has previously made a study of some phase of the subject under discussion and reports on it. Maps and pictures are examined, reference books are consulted, and finally some conclusion 1S reached. Thruout all this activity the teacher is in the background, making herself as inconspicuous as possible, amiable and willing to help, but giving suggestions only when called upon to do so, or when she finds it necessary to direct the youthful investigators to some important aspect of the subject which in their inexperience they might overlook. This method is not mere child's play, as a casual inspection of the schoolroom might sometimes lead one to suppose. It has behind it the serious purpose of interpreting to the child, thru the utilization of his best-loved activities and natural means of expression, the world in which he lives and must play his part. Under the stimulus of these new educational aims the curriculum has been greatly broadened. Geography has become considerably more than the location of the principal cities and consideration of the physical features of a country, as it was in our day. The trend is along economic and social lines: how people live, how they secure food, clothing, shelter, and the other necessities of life, how all of this is facilitated or hindered by the natural resources of the land they live in. In history the bare chronicle of a nation's political achievements has given way to building up in children's imaginations vivid pictures of how people lived at various great periods of the past, and the contribution of each nation thru the centuries to the world's advancement. In science the homely occupations of cooking and cleaning are made to reveal themselves as fascinating scientific experiments. In the English work, as soon as the mechanics of reading are mastered, the school reader, with its bits of literature, is abandoned, and a taste for literature is fostered thru reading the masterpieces themselves, selected according to the comprehension and interest of the pupils. In every way an effort is made to relate learning to life, and thus impress the child with the sense of the value and reality of what he is doing in school. Supplementary Readers It can easily be seen that the development of this kind of work necessitates recourse to books at every turn, and demands a different type of book from the traditional textbook. In order to supply the demand, the school has had to leave the regulation textbook field and seek good books suited to children wherever it can find them. Many books that are not distinctively schoolbooks have therefore made their way to the schoolroom shelves. In studying about different peoples, good books of travel life, for instance, the Peeps at Many Lands Series are read, or books depicting home-life or child-life in various countries, like the well-loved Twin Series or the Little Cousin Series. These books are for the most part well illustrated, and give in story form a good deal of real information about life in various parts of the world. There are a host of books of the type of "How the World Is Fed," "How the World Is Housed," "The Farmer and His Friends," "The Story of a Piece of Coal," "A Day in a Ship Yard," tracing the course of the things in every day use from the raw materials to the finished article and showing how the work of the world is done. The story of those bold explorers who have pushed their way to the ends of the earth, and of the persevering inventors who have conquered almost unsurmountable obstacles, is made real and romantic to the children thru reading good biographies telling of their lives and struggles. Even the regulation textbooks have been greatly improved and enlarged thru making the text less didactic and more interesting in style and with the addition of many more pictures. All In schools doing this type of work the library has come to assume an important rôle. If there is not a special room devoted to the purpose with a trained librarian in charge, as there is in many of the larger and better equipped schools, each schoolroom is generously supplied with supplementary readers and books of like character required for conducting lessons in the modern manner. Many teachers make a practice of keeping a number of good books on their shelves which the children are permitted to read in their spare moments, or even to take home. the old favorites of the nursery that have withstood the test of time-"Mother Goose," "Peter Rabbit," the fairy and folk tales, many of them in editions with colored pictures by Caldecott, Crane, Leslie Brooke, and other well-known illustrators of children's books are now to be found in any up-to-date kindergarten. Classics for children, beginning with Andersen and Grimm, and including Stevenson, Scott, Kingsley, Cooper, and many others dear to our childhood days, are now published by nearly every firm dealing with schoolbooks. These are displayed in bindings designed to tempt the youthful reader to explore the treasure trove within. By this method the number of books read by each child during the school year is greatly increased. And a taste for an author gained in this way often leads the young reader to the shelves of the nearest public library where he may the more adequately satisfy his book needs. In many schools instruction in the use of the library, the looking up of reference books on given subjects, the use of the card catalog and so on is made a part of the course in English. Visits are made to the public library, and demonstrations given by the librarian in charge of the children's room. Many schools follow the custom of making out for the pupils lists of books which they would enjoy reading during the long summer vacation, and sometimes older girls and boys are asked to keep records of their reading and criticisms of the books read for discussion upon their return to school in the fall. Sometimes a friendly competition is set up by giving a prize for the best list of books read during the summer. Who knows but that the gift of a book or set of books as a prize may wake to life within the boy or girl who receives it a dormant desire to have a library of his very own? These are some of the methods adopted by schools for developing in growing girls and boys an intelligent understanding and appreciation of good books. In these ways the new education is proving itself a valuable ally of all those who have come to rely upon the wise guidance of the reading habits of the youth of today as the surest guarantee of an intelligent reading public for to-morrow. Edison Says College Men Are Not Trained to Think HOMAS A. EDISON told a Tribune re THOM porter recently that he has never been opposed to colleges nor disinclined to employ their graduates. If the contrary impression had got abroad, he said, it was because his attitude either had been misrepresented or misunderstood. "There is something wrong with the college system. I don't know what the trouble is; that's not my line. I can only judge by the results. But one thing is certain: the present system of education in the colleges does not train men to think. University presidents in criticizing my questionnaries said that the college doesn't try to fill up the student's mind with a lot of information, but teaches him where to find it. Yet when we tried my questionnaire at one college-not as I give it out here, but in the library with all the reference books available-even then the students couldn't pass it because they didn't know where to find what they wanted. They hadn't even learned that. "Culture is very nice, but it has nothing to do with the balance sheet. Most people seem to forget all their Latin as soon as they get out of school. Of course, lawyers can't get along without a college education. But manufacturers and heads of industrial plants should get their men from the technical schools, where students are taught to be accurate." "Reading Without Tears" By Jean Y. Ayer Educational Department, The Macmillan Company O those who agonize over defects in the present-day conduct of the education of children, I would offer two kindly suggestions. The first is: go on agonizing, if your agony is likely to express itself in constructive action or suggestion; the second, if you become unduly depressed, read the history of the teaching of reading in the public schools of America; if you are not cheered by what has been accomplished in the past quarter of a century, your trouble is not interest in education, but dyspepsia. Some years ago, in an article devoted to school readers of an earlier day, I came across a reference to one of these entitled "Reading without Tears." The implication of this title is a pathetic one and based upon fact. Learning to read, as it was accomplished by our forebears, can heardly have been a cheering process. Until comparatively recent years, certainly until well after the close of the Civil War, the small candidate for learning first memorized the alphabet-as a rule quite unrelated to anything else and was then informed that a-b spelled ab and, a little later, that c-a-t spelled cat. If a lack of ability to note any obvious relation between a-b and ab and c-a-t and cat, restrained the child from reproducing upon request the information that had been supplied, dermal stimulation (to quote Professor O'Shea) was considered all that was necessary to the development of more logical power on his part. Eventually-aided by Solomon's method-the child either became convinced that c-a-t spelled cat, or, if he remained unconvinced, was classified as a "dunce" and became a mark for his teacher's severity and his classmate's derision. There was little in the content of early primers to inspire a child's interest. The "New England Primer" was used almost exclusively in America from 1700 to 1800, and was used extensively until 1850. This primer was distinctly a church book. Its alphabet was accompanied by rhymes, beginning It contained prayers and moral injunctions and its most exciting feature was a picture of John Rogers being burned at the stake, the scene "witnessed by his wife and nine small children with one at the breast." The early readers were practically all devoted to religious or moral instruction, tho there was occasional inclusion of secular matter. J. J. Mahoney states that in a text pub lished in Hartford in 1798, and "calculated Will mamma give Charles some beer? Mr. Mahoney does not state whether Early in the nineteenth century, textbooks in reading began to be graded somewhat as to difficulty and gradually selections from literature took the place of pious admonition, tho the selections were for many years of a type distinctly mature in appeal. But the arb ab method of instruction quite generally persisted until, by degrees, after 1870 it was superseded by the "phonic" and "phonetic" methods. These were a marked improvement upon the alphabet method since, by their use, a child learned the various sounds of vowels and consonants and was thus enabled to see -not merely required to believe that c-a-t spells cat. The weaknesses in the early use of this method lay in its over-elaboration, its presentation of sounds before the pupil had learned to recognize any words to which to apply his knowledge of these sounds, and in the uninteresting reading matter that resulted from manufacturing sentences and lessons to fit the child's gradually developing knowledge of phonics. The last-mentioned weakness persists to-day in a number of primers. The "word-method," according to which the pupil memorized words from their visual form, had been tried with limited success; but, augmented by the phonic method, it became effective. The beginning with words. gave the child a foundation to which his knowledge of phonics enabled him to add. This method, too, justified the teacher in letting the child memorize, as "sight words," words that were not phonetic. The word method was unsatisfactory in that it influenced word-getting rather than thought-getting and in its tendency to limit the child's eye-span in reading. The "phrase method" and the "sentence method," which followed the word method, were based upon the theory that the thought unit and, therefore, the speech unit, was indicated by the word group rather than by the single word. In the sentence method, the sentences to be presented were "developed" for the class by the teacher, in conversation, and written on the blackboard. They were read repeatedly, then rearranged and read again until, thru the various rearrangements, the pupil came to recognize the words and word groups that were involved. Phonic drill was usually begun when some vocabulary had been acquired. This method was at first very stiff and formal-the initial conversation a stereotyped one supplied by a teacher's manual-but it has been modified by intelligent teachers so that it now provides an excellent and commonly used method for starting beginners in reading. The introductory conversation, as used at present, is informal and related to the pupil's interests; and the sentences on the blackboard are those that the child has supplied quite naturally as a result of the teacher's informal questioning. The best present-day tendency in teaching beginners to read is in favor of a method to which the rather awkward term "analyticsynthetic" is sometimes applied. The assumption here is that the child's interest is based on the content of what he reads, not on word, phrase, or sentence, as such. The teacher begins by telling an interesting story-usually the first story in the primer that is to be read. The children reproduce the story and dramatize it. Possibly, by labelling certain characters and articles used in the dramatization, they come to recognize names that will appear in the story when they read it. Presently the story is written on the blackboard, a few sentences at a time-these supplied by the pupils in answer to the teacher's questions. As the blackboard story is read, words and phrases are gradually recognized. As a result of this preliminary work, when the primers are given to the class, the pupils are able to read the first story and will have acquired from this, when it is finished, a sufficient vocabulary to enable them to begin the second. As the reading advances, words having similar phonic sounds are selected from the lessons and grouped. Drill upon these sounds enables the pupils to develop power to pronounce new words for themselves. The modern tendency in primary education is one opposed to the type of reading method which centers upon phonic instruction. The feeling seems to prevail that an elaborate phonic method takes the child's attention from that thought-getting which is the object of reading. A problem to which the recent makers of primary readers have given much consideration is that of content vocabulary. Of what should the essential reading vocabulary of a beginner consist? An examination, made within recent years, of many first grade reading books demonstrated a remarkable discrepancy in the opinions of the various authors as to what constitutes an essential reading vocabulary for the first grade. Everyone interested seemed to agree that a child should learn to read first the words most commonly used in ordinary reading matter; but, equally, everyone disagreed as to what many of those words should be. The "Teacher's Word Book" by E. L. Thorndike has practically solved this problem. It supplies a list, made as a result of extensive research, of the 10,000 words in the English language most commonly used in ordinary literature. The words in this list are graded as to frequency of use; so that it is possible to tell the first five hundred words most commonly used, the second five hundred, and so on. With the "Teacher's Word Book" as a means of checking, there is no reason why the author of any new primary reader cannot keep his content vocabulary within the limits of the vocabulary most practical for the grade for which his text is designed. One effect of the Thorndike list will probably be to push Mother Goose rhymes out of primers and into first or second read ers. The little student of the "New England Primer" (and of many a later primer), when he had finished it, read and re-read it until such time as the powers that were over him decided that he might read something else. "How many times," said an elderly woman in speaking of her school-days, "I counted, in my primer, those nine small children of John Rogers! It seemed to me, from the description, that there ought to be ten and I always hoped, somehow, to locate the tenth. I suppose," she added, "I was really trying to keep my mind occupied, like the prisoner in a dark cell who threw away one of his shirt buttons and then spent his time trying to find it." The modern child suffers no such mental weariness. Having finished his basal primer, he reads one new supplementary primer after another as rapidly as his growing ability will permit. All his basal readers are supplemented in this way and, if he is reasonably fortunate in his school, he has also a school library from which he may draw still other books. If he finds, as he frequently will, various school readers on the library shelves which are in addition to those in his classroom, he will draw these out willingly, often in preference to other juveniles. For, be it announced to all who do not know and more especially to those who agonize over modern school conditions: the child's reader of to-day is, in many instances, a thing of beauty, and is likely to be a joy for at least as long as eager, awkward, dirty little hands will let its stout binding hold it together. The really up-todate reader is beautifully illustrated, printed in type and on paper that win the oculist's approval, and has in its attractive pages something to tell what the child really desires to know. |