The Educational Law of Reading and Writing

IN his comedy of Much Ado About Nothing Shakespeare makes the doughty constable Dogberry deliver himself to the watch of much inverted wisdom, and the choicest bit is in the words, “ To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.”The world has ever since laughed over this delicious bit of irony. It remembers the tears it shed in mastering even the rudiments of writing and reading; and perhaps there is no other character in the great populace of Shakespeare’s world so exquisitely wrong-headed, to common thinking, as this dull constable, with his unfailing dignity, his confused judgment. “ To write and read comes by nature" ! To Dogberry, doubtless, looking out of his blurred eyes upon neighbor Seacole with his gift of writing and reading, it seemed that nowise could one possess this magic art unless nature had endowed him with it. For himself, fortune had made him a well-favored man, — there can be no doubt of that; but nature, in her caprice, had seen fit to leave writing and reading out of his make-up, no blame to him.

I wonder if this prince of blunderers did not stumble upon a truth, and narrowly graze a most profound maxim ? The world has gone on repeating, good humoredly, Dogberry’s saying, and all the while, I suspect, has bad a secret misgiving that be was not far out of the way. Why all this labor over pen and book ? Why pass the great steam-roller of compulsory education over all the boys and girls in the land, when we know that in a few years, after the pressure has been taken off, the greater number will write crabbedly, spell by guesswork, and stumble over the words they find in the newspaper ? The few who take to books naturally will learn to read anyway ; those who have a gift for writing will find some outlet for expression. It would really be worth while if we could find out the process of nature which results in writing and reading.

In Björnstjerne Björnson’s charming story of A Happy Boy, the little hero, Öyvind, is shown first as at home in the world of nature about him. His playmate is a goat, but in a pretty passage he surrenders it to a little girl from whom it had been taken. Then the story goes on : —

“ His mother came out, and sat down by his side. He wanted to hear stories about what was far away. So she told him how once everything could talk : the mountain talked to the stream, and the stream to the river, the river to the sea, and the sea to the sky. But then he asked if the sky did not talk to any one. And the sky talked to the clouds, the clouds to the trees, the trees to the grass, the grass to the flies, the flies to the animals, the animals to the children, the children to the grown-up people ; and so it went on, until it had gone round, and no one could tell where it had begun. Öyvind looked at the mountain, the trees, the sky, and had never really seen them before.” And so, Björnson goes on, his mother, with her little songs, interpreted to him the speech of the cat, the cock with all the hens, the little birds; “and she told him what they all said, down to the ant who crawled in the moss, and the worm who worked in the bark.

“ That same summer his mother began to teach him to read. He had owned books a long time, and often wondered how it would seem when they also began to talk. Now the letters turned into animals, birds and everything else. But soon they began to walk together, two and two : a stood and vested under a tree, which was called b ; then came c and did the same; but when three or four came together, it seemed as if they were angry with each other, for it would not go right. And the farther along he came, the more he forgot what they were. He remembered longest a, which he liked best; it was a little black lamb, and was friends with everybody; but soon he forgot a also : the book had no more stories, nothing but lessons.”

Björnson, with that insight into the child’s mind which seems to be a special gift to Scandinavian writers, brings to light here the imaginative force which expends itself even upon such mere symbols of ideas as the letters of the alphabet ; but he also hints delicately at that transition in a childish experience from the free exercise of his imagination to the hard-and-fast practice of his understanding in the tasks imposed on him in the schoolroom. I am not one of those who flatter themselves that a child may be wafted into the field of knowledge on flowery beds of ease. One of the most humane as well as wise functions of the teacher is to harden the bone and toughen the muscle of the intellect by the exercise of a judicious mental discipline. But it is well for us to take note of characteristics of childhood and build upon these ; to study how we may guide and avail ourselves of qualities which may be more active than they are in ourselves; in a word, to follow nature and be obedient to her laws. Happy the child who, like Öyvind, has led so healthy a life out of doors, and been under such loving home care, that the world is alive to him, —— so alive that he passes to books and finds in them, too, living voices, responsive notes. Yet even under less favoring conditions, childhood, unhardened by that adjustment to things visible and tangible which marks the mind of the grown man, is significantly the realm for the play of the forces of imagination, and it depends largely upon the training which it receives in school, in companionship, and in nature whether those forces shall he cultivated into reasonable activity, thereby enriching the whole life, or whether they shall be stunted, stifled by discouragement, warped into ugly growth, even crushed out of existence.

Now, the ingenuity of our modern methods has substituted for the slow, puzzling acquaintance with the alphabet, which turned little Öyvind’s plays into lessons, quicker, more sympathetic familiarity with words and sentences. The child not only recognizes a word as a whole, but is taught to reproduce it on the board or on his slate. There can be little doubt that we have made a great advance in our method of giving the child an entrance into the mechanism of reading and writing. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that, in devising and dwelling upon these improved methods, we have become so enamored of our skill as to leave out of sight the real thing; that we have expended our thought on our tools without sufficiently considering what the tools are to execute. Be this as it may, it is of very great consequence that we have perfected our system of teaching the elements of the arts of writing and reading; for in this necessary discipline the movement lias been so rapid as to leave us with the child’s fresh mind and active imagination still plastic, not yet dulled by the wearisome iteration of a parrot-like task. If we have been wise, moreover, we have kept alive the child’s spirit by many exercises of ingenuity, and by the practice, greatly to be commended, of reading aloud from the poets.

Having shaped the tool, then, to the child’s hand, we should be more eager to set him upon using it than to improve and refine it. His own use will do that most effectively. The main thing is to find worthy material and to look to worthy ends. In Björnson’s story, the mother is the interpreter to the child of those forms and voices of the sky, the green grass, and all animate nature which his outward eye and ear perceive, and whose inward meaning his imagination is ready to accept. The office of the imagination is to make real that which is apparent only ; and as the mother’s hand guides the child in his first steps upon this solid earth, so in this tale, and often in real life, her love and trained imagination help him to shape these real things, until his own powers have been educated to construct, to create. When we pass over from the converse between two living beings like mother and child to that converse which takes place in silence between the child’s mind and the printed page, we are changing the mode, not the relation. The mother leads her boy to the school. The teacher takes the mother’s place with the speaking voice, but she also brings in to her aid a great company of invisible spirits, interpreters to her as well as to the child of the sure things of heaven and earth. Öyvind, we are told, “ had owned books a long time, and often wondered how it would seem when they also began to talk.”

This is, in my judgment, the crisis of our educational system. Here is the test to be applied to our methods. The law we have been elucidating is the law of imaginative development. Will our system recognize this law, or will it at this point turn aside and follow its own lower ends ? In every system, we say, with profound truth, that it is the teacher who makes or mars ; but let us remember that we have now put the child into the hands of teachers whom no man may number; that in making it possible for him to read books we have added enormously to the power of the teacher ; and that, of all times in the child’s life when this company of invisible spirits may be called in as interpreters, there is none more significant, more impressive, than this, when, standing on the threshold, wondering, listening, his imagination sensitive to the finer influences, he waits to hear what his books shall say to him when they begin to talk.

The supreme endowment of human nature is this gift of imagination, for it is nothing less than the capacity for creation. In the exercise of it man mounts into the likeness of his Creator. He takes the formless and the void, the chaos of ideas and notions, and shapes and fashions that which is very good. The man of science, scrutinizing the facts of the outward universe, might go on forever making heaps of unrelated things, did not his imagination, kindling with his thought, use the conception of those great laws which reveal to us the mind of God. The historian would see nothing but a bewildering ant-heap of the world of humanity, if his imagination, seizing upon the hidden movements of the mind of man, were not tracing an orderly procedure. The statesman would be lost in a maze of precedents and conflicting passions, did not his imagination give him the power to rise above this level, and see from the heights of human reason the divine law of national progress. And the poet, the dramatist, the novelist, from the substance of things seen reflected in the depths of things unseen, reconstructs by the power of his imagination a world of beauty, of order, and of law.

Now, to the child in his earliest years the most direct appeal to the imagination comes from the clear-sighted dweller in the ideal world. Not yet has experience filled him with troubled questions, with doubt, with perplexity of mind. He is prone to believe, not to disbelieve, and to him should be brought the truth-tellers ; those, that is, who themselves believe, whose eyes are open to the things of faith. Deepen in his mind the familiarity with what lies beyond the visual organ. He has not yet learned to believe only what he sees. Fortify in him that power of seeing with the eye of faith, which is so soon to be assailed by hard contact with things visible and tangible. I am not pleading for an idle chase of phantoms and vagaries, but I ask, is there not a body of literature — not the cheap production of indifferent writers, but the rich deposit of centuries — which, by its simplicity, its reliance upon elemental truths of the soul, its homely instincts, its free spirit of wonder and belief, appeals directly, surely, to the imagination of the child?

Hearing at once these stories from his books, the child recognizes no change in his habit of mind other than an expansion of his powers. There has been no break in his natural development, but literature has come in to deepen one great channel of his being. Not only so, but the growth of this supreme faculty of the imagination is not at the expense of his other powers, the powers of understanding, of reasoning, and of practical sense ; it is highly stimulating to the development of these powers. They are still latent, for the most part, awaiting their turn in the order of nature. But throughout life they will owe much of their vitality to the existence of a cultivated imagination, and the training of this habit early in life will serve to keep them in their proper relation to it.

It would be a mistake to suppose that this great faculty of imagination is fostered only by literature, or even by the literature of imagination chiefly. Just as it is exercised by the mature in all the activities of life and mental excursions, so it is fed by countless influences. The boy may not be kindled in his imagination by Homer, yet have his pulses quickened by reading of Thermopylæ. The microscope and the telescope may do for him what Wordsworth or Milton fails to do. He may be indifferent to Hiawatha, yet have his brain set on fire by Custer’s expedition ; and the disappointment which one might feel when one failed to waken a response by the recital of some favorite poem should not blind us to the truth that the avenues to a child’s imagination and love of beauty are more in number than our experience can count.

Only, in the economy of our educational forces, we shall be wise if we make use of that which time has shown to be generally of the highest potency.

There is a concentration of the imagination in works of literary art which renders these most highly charged with the power of feeding the imaginative soul. I am asking attention to what I hold to be a great law of nature in the development of her children, namely, that in early childhood the normal condition of life is a sensitive imagination, curious, wondering, reaching out to the unknown, building busily fabrics, often of strange form, out of the material cast in its way ; and our inquiry is, how should this great fact be recognized in our formal educational system ? Our highest success is to be found in following patiently in nature’s footsteps, not in seeking to correct and transform life into agreement with an a priori logic. And as I am confining myself to a consideration of so much of our educational system as relates to reading and writing, I say deliberately that the educational law of reading is summed up in this: Give to the child, as soon as he has mastered the rudiments of reading, some form of great imaginative literature, and continue year after year to set large works before him, until he has completed his school course. For note that in school parlance reading is the term applied to an exercise which is an end in itself. A child reads his geography or his history, his book of travel or his problem in arithmetic ; but this is not what we mean primarily by reading, for in each case the reading is merely a means toward the acquirement of some further knowledge. I note this, because it is a significant fact that many persons, perceiving clearly what a fearful waste there has been in our educational methods, when year after year has been expended on reading-lessons which result in the end in nothing but a trivial gain in elocution, have maintained that all these reading-lessons should be turned into exercises for some definite end, the reading being subsidiary to the acquisition of information. So we have had geographical readers and nature readers and historical readers, and I have even heard a claim set up for the advantage to be gained in making supplementary reading-books out of arithmetics.

Now, all this confusion of means and ends may be traced, I think, to the almost entire diversion of reading-books as a class from having in view the great end of setting before the readers noble literature to promoting the lesser end of skill in vocal expression. No wonder that sensible people have become impatient over the paltry results obtained by years of wearisome devotion to graded reading-books. But the remedy is not in the substitution of information readers for so-called literary readers. It is in the recognition of the great, the supreme end which the art of reading should have in view. We have only to ask ourselves what we mean by reading in our own habit of life. We mean reading for pleasure, for the satisfaction of some appetite for reading. And this reading for pleasure is what we recognize universally as the great explanation of literature. It is the delight of the poet to sing, of the novelist to tell his story ; it is the delight of the listener to hear and read.

So, then, as reading is a part of our school curriculum, entirely independent of geography, or history, or science, in all of which it has its lower uses, I repeat that the educational law of reading lies in a steady presentation to the growing mind of those works of art in literature which are the glory of the nation, of the race, and have an undying power to feed the imagination. Give reading no less time than is now given to it under existing methods, but exalt it to a higher place by resolutely excluding all that is indifferent and ignoble ; by choosing with reverent enthusiasm whatsoever is pure, noble, and inspiring. Open the gates wider and wider into that great kingdom of the ideal where the greatest of all ages sit benignly on their thrones judging the tribes of men. Let the literature thus flooding the young lives with sunshine bring its own glorious lessons of national honor, of loyalty to truth and justice, of righteousness and heavenly beauty.

Bearing in mind this supreme purpose of literature, I would guard well both teacher and scholar against a peril which too much education of a certain sort makes liable. I have heard persons contend that such a system as I have outlined tends to give young people a distaste for literature by turning it into lessons ; that it associates great names with wearisome tasks. I suspect the ground of this charge lies in the perversion of the use of literature ; for, upon examination, it will appear that those who deprecate this course have reference to what, in homely phrase, may be summed up as “ parsing Paradise Lost.” This lets in a flood of light, and brings me to what I shall call a bylaw to our educational law of reading, namely, that throughout the school course, up to the final stage, reading is to be unaccompanied by analysis. Let there he such brief notes and explanations as will serve to clear some obscurities ; let there be some talk, if you will, leading to the enjoyment of what is read ; but never for a moment let us lose sight of this great truth, that reading is for delight, for the enrichment of the soul, and that whatever enters in to disturb this, as criticism, analysis, especially anything which tends to make what is read a corpse to be dissected instead of a living thing of light to he admired and rejoiced in, is in direct violation of a great educational law. The imagination is still increasing its power ; the time for criticism, for analysis, is not yet. We should make no mistake here, but see to it that through all the years of their school life children think of reading as the great, the supreme joy of their days indoors.

Consider, moreover, in support of this position, the far-reaching consequence of such obedience to our great educational law. When we are teaching children the rules of arithmetic, we are helping specifically to qualify them for the business of life ; lessons in geography will enable them to read the newspaper more intelligently ; when we teach them history and civil government, we are laying foundations for an intelligent apprehension of citizenship. We say, and with reason, that all the work in school is for the development of the whole child, but we see readily that there is a further and distinct relation between certain lines of study and certain spheres of activity in subsequent life. Now, reading, under our law, is a great and fundamental contribution to the intellectual and spiritual growth of the person; but what a path of light we might trace from a child’s reading in school under these conditions through the whole of his after career ! In the impressionable years of youth we shall have built those eternal standards of excellence by which the man will ever after test the creations of literature set before him. Far more than this, we shall have made familiar to him delights which, wanting such introduction, he might never know. We shall have given him friends who never will desert him. We shall have enriched his life with treasures which lose none of their brilliancy whensoever they are brought again to light. There can be no manner of question that between the ages of six and sixteen a large part of the best literature of the world may be read, if taken up systematically in school, and that the man or woman who fails to become acquainted with great literature in some form during that time is little likely to have a taste formed later.

When I consider those precious years freighted with golden opportunity, and see so many ingenuous minds doomed by our dull understanding to a listless, humdrum recitation of lifeless prose and verse, while the apples of Hesperides hang for them outside the schoolhouse doors, if they only knew it, I am filled with concern for the future. The greatness of a country is in the greatness of its ideas, and the youth of a country, shut out from participation in the visions of its poets and seers, will harden into an age skeptical if there be such things as visions.

But there is too much vitality in great literature, too pervasive an influence in its spirit, to permit us much doubt of the issue, and all about we see signs of a great reform in our educational system, by which the indifferent, fragmentary commonplace of our reading-books is giving way to genuine literature ; where the largeness of the poetic spirit, moreover, is shown by wholes, and not by meagre specimens. Assuming, then, that our proposition is sustained, and the educational law of reading requires that throughout the common course great literature, and only great literature, shall be read, and that it shall be read for delight, and not as an exercise in grammar, history, biography, criticism, or for any of the minor ends which constantly thrust themselves forward in place of this human joy in great and beautiful things, let us go on to consider that other side of our subject, which in nature as in practice is in so intimate connection. What is the educational law of writing, and how do writing and reading stand related to each other?

Going back, then, to the child whose nature we desire to read that we may have a basis for our educational system, we note that, whatever flights of imagination the child may have, the expression is not through words, but through play. While the child is using speech sparingly, and using it chiefly for the expression of its mere understanding, it is finding through pantomime and histrionic language some outlet for its imagination and fancy. The little dramas which it enacts, its make-believes, its copies in miniature of human life, are not dependent on language, and receive little assistance from rhetorical speech. Yet speech it has ; a limited vocabulary, to be sure, in which a few words are made to do duty over and over, but still the same instrument in kind as that upon which the mighty notes of great literature are played, — only, be it observed, not yet used by the child for the expression of its imagination. This is a point worth noticing, for many make the mistake of denying the child force of imagination because it does not give voice to its images. Yet the revelations of childhood by men and women, whose consciousness has been continuous, abound in instances where the child has lived in a world of dreams utterly shut out from the perception of those about him.

It is, however, upon this slight basis of limited speech that we have to build in our educational system, and our practice begins at once, before the child learns to write. We train him to talk by means of those familiar exercises in which the blackboard and objects and pictures are brought into requisition. The transition to writing on the board, or on slate or paper, is simple and easily made; and in the early stages, while the child is mastering the rudiments of reading, he is mastering also the rudiments of writing. At the point where he stands on the threshold of books, his advance on both lines has been nearly equal. He can spell out the printed page, and he can write simple sentences. But how vast is now the gulf between the child’s power of appropriation through reading and his power of expression through speech and writing ! By what leaps and bounds he passes on through the whole course of school life into the region where Shakespeare dwells, and by what slow steps he trudges on to a position where he can express himself in language which can give any pleasure to others !

Now, as we based our educational law of reading upon the existence in the child of a responsive faculty of imagination, upon what fact in nature shall we base our law of writing ? We have caught a glimpse of it in the description already given of the process by which the early stages are passed. There is a naïve story, told by Herodotus, of the experiment made by King Psammitichos to discover who were the primitive folk. He placed two children who had not yet learned to speak in a cave, away from the sound of human voice. For nourishment he gave them into the care of goats. And in due time, with all the gravity of a modern scientific experimenter, the Egyptian presented himself before the children, to listen to what they might say. The infants lifted up their voices and cried, “Bekkos ! ” and as “bekkos ” was the Phrygian for “ bread,” King Psammitichos, with the courage of a scientist, declared the Phrygians to antedate the Egyptians. We know the commonsense interpretation. The only voice the children had heard was the inarticulate cry of their four-footed companions, and that they had learned. It merely needed the acuteness of a scientist to translate their imitation into an articulate word to be found in a Phrygian dictionary.

The story proved nothing regarding the antiquity of man, but it illustrates well our position. The first speech of children is imitative ; we recognize the fact in all our attempts to teach them to talk. Whether we say sentences over to them, or they overhear the speech about them, it is all one ; they form their own words and sentences upon the model that is presented. When the child comes to school, we continue the process ; we set it examples to copy, we form its oral and written expression upon our own, but we know perfectly well that the child’s expression is also formed upon the models which are or are not deliberately placed before it. Every teacher knows that in correcting faulty sentences, mispronunciations, inelegances of words and phrases, she is contending with all the defective speech of the neighborhood. It is a commonplace of education that nothing more quickly discloses the child’s home than its form of speech, and it is the despair of teachers that they are called upon, in the formal, brief lessons of the schoolroom, to overcome the influences which are in the very air the child breathes all the rest of the day.

Accepting, then, this great fact of imitation as the basis upon which to build our educational law of writing, see to what it leads us instantly. It is clear that we are to give the child, from the beginning to the close of its school course, the best and purest models. In our own speech we are to be clear, accurate, and, if we can, beautiful; but what a mighty reinforcement we bring when, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we permit the boy and girl freely to listen to the masters of English speech ! They are too uncritical as yet to distinguish in rhetorical terms between imperfect and correct English, but they are not insensible to the difference between the liquid English of Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Whittier and tire uncouth speech of their fellows : little by little they will perceive, though they may not put it into language, the difference between the unsullied English of great writers and the ungainly, uncultivated English of the ordinary newspaper. This sensitiveness to the charm of style is indeed most evident when one listens to pure English from the lips of one whose nature is refined to expression, and whose voice is a tuneful instrument; but under less favorable conditions, when for instance one is reading a work of fine prose poorly printed upon coarse paper, the charm of style will hold one. But the capacity thus to be affected by great literature is largely a cultivated one, and therefore I say that the pupil who for ten years, say from six to sixteen, has read steadily in the writings of those who use the English tongue with grace and strength has had an immense advantage in acquiring not only a taste for good literature, but a power also of expressing himself iu honest English. I set the highest value on this aid in writing and speech, because — and I think teachers of experience will agree with me — it seems almost impossible, in our school years, to do more in the formal exercise of writing than to teach the avoidance of glaring error, and the acquisition of an expression which is negatively good. For the rest, the fine choice of words, the forcible structure of sentences, the regard for all the delicate shades of: expression, — that is out of the question. It is all out of the question so far as formal training is concerned, and we may as well not attempt it; but these graces come to one here and one there who is gifted with a penetrating ear, a sense of harmony, and they will be immensely stimulated by constant converse with the flutists, the violinists, the organists, of our great English speech. Not only so, but I am convinced that the great rank and file of our schoolchildren would gain in the power of language which comes from the unconscious imitation of well-bred masters of language.

We have seen how, when the child has reached the point of familiarity with the rudiments of reading and writing, knowing both equally well, there comes at once a wide gulf between the two, and for the next ten years he is reading literature, but writing only feeble, stammering English. The fact is one we need to note again for its bearing upon our educational law. The power of appreciation, of appropriation, indeed, is strongest in these growing years ; the power of expression, of reproduction, is in its infancy, and its growth is far slower. The terms of expression are, as I have said, largely imitative ; but what is the thing to be expressed ? One has only to consider that the great writers whom the boy and girl are rapidly learning to love and appreciate were not producers, did not themselves find great expression, until after this period of most active appropriation. So, not only would it be idle to look for a parallel course of reading and writing in our youth ; it would be an educational mistake to carry our law of imitation into the field of reproduction. That is to say, we may set the highest possible value on the influence which these great writers will have on the expression of boys and girls, but we must not make the mistake of supposing that we can train our pupils into an imitation of their genius. It is a blunder, I am convinced, to set a child to reading Hawthorne’s Wonder Book, for instance, and then to direct him to tell the stories over again in his own language. One may do this to great profit where a child has been reading an historic fact or a biographical sketch; but where a piece of literature is a piece of art, the thought, the fancy, and the language in which it is couched are inseparable. Far better may we set the child to copying, carefully and patiently, the whole story or poem, that we may impress upon him the integrity of the production.

For what are all these works of genius but the expression of the men arid women who stand behind them ? And what are we to expect in the attempts of the young but the expression of their natures with all their limitations ? In cultivating, therefore, in them the power of expression, how reasonable it is to ask them, at different stages, to write of the things that concern them most, — their sports, their excursions, their little adventures! Now and then, some one, stirred by what he has read, will essay a production imitative of the material, venturing forth thus into a field which may some day be his own ; but we should not ask for this. The main thing is that it be spontaneous, and our task is only to correct its grammatical blundersConsider how, in the whole course of a pupil’s writing exercises, a teacher will find but an occasional glimmer of originality, and one perceives that this is not something to be looked for, to be aimed at. During the period when the boy and girl are opening wide their minds to the reception of great works of imagination, they are giving forth little in the way of written expression. While, therefore, our law of reading requires abundance, richness, continuous delight, our law of writing calls only for the guidance of the pen, the practice in the manipulation of simple forms, the attainment of accuracy, intelligibility, and directness.

An analogy may be found in the two exercises of reading aloud and bandwriting. As the child goes forward with his reading, entering steadily upon broader paths and making higher flights, the progress should be marked in his reading aloud by a steady gain away from idiosyncrasies, peculiarities of voice and manner, to that noble interpretation of great literature which makes the bearer forget the reader in his admiration for that which is read. This marks the diminution of the reader’s personality in the presence of the poet’s, the romancer’s personality. The converse is to be said of handwriting. At first the effort is made to conform the child’s style to that of a flawless model. Every departure from that model is criticised, every effort made to keep the bandwriting true to the copy. But by and by a change begins to come. The personality of the child is becoming more marked; the assertion of self, of an independent mind, seeks an outlet, and the handwriting gradually fixes itself in certain movements of constraint or freedom which subtly manifest the individuality. What was at first mere imitation now develops into expression.

This, then, is the result which we have reached. The imagination, that crowning spiritual faculty of man, is an endowment of childhood, to be cultivated sedulously through its whole school course by giving it, for its growth and enlargement, the noblest of literature on which to feed with delight. But the creative faculty, which is the constructive side of imagination, we leave for nature to do with what she will, assured that we can add little or nothing to it by training directly. Meanwhile, we can and may train the growing child in the power of right expression of that which has attained its growth. Thus, the body, during school years, is rapidly approaching its fullest development, and, if we are wise, we attend most carefully to the bodily expression. All the powers of observation, also, are active and alert; we train them in expression through speech and writing, seeking to fit to each child’s capacity that splendid instrument, the English language. The powers of reasoning, of discrimination, grow more slowly ; but these also we seek to train in expression, not only through mathematical formula, but through the choice of words and the logical structure of sentences. In the order of nature, we have been accumulating for the child the facts, the experience, the objects, upon which he is to exercise that latest power, the guide of his life, the power of an educated reason. At last, if our work has been thorough the two great exponents of life. Divine Imagination and Human Reason, stand revealed: the one nurtured on great emotions and thoughts from childhood up, the other trained by constant effort to guide the child in the expression of bis growing powers.

There is now one final educational task in the development of the interaction of the imagination and the reason, a task which is indeed beyond the scope of the common school, and reserved for the college and university ; yet it has so intimate a relation to the law we have been elucidating that I cannot forbear to touch upon it ever so lightly.

I have laid great stress upon the absolute necessity of preserving the reading during school years free from the intrusion of analogies or criticism; that it should be accompanied only by the briefest explanatory comment for the removal of obstacles; that the pupil should he left free to enjoy to the full what was set before him, and should dissociate the idea of a lesson from it. Supposing such a plan pursued year after year, until the student has reached that point to which our minds have been drawn, when his powers of observation, of careful expression, of discrimination, of logic, have been trained in an exercise upon those objects that meet the eye, those facts which come through history, those adventures which are personal. Now, then, his mind is ripe for the exercise of his reason upon this great accumulation of the works of imagination. The hour comes when that analysis which once was an intrusion is a necessity of his nature; when the delight he has known in the reading of great literature is enhanced by the new delight he may have in the study of great literature. Here at last we find the right time for that kind of work which we insisted should not be done. It is the order of nature : first the familiarity with the great art of letters in the glow of generous youth ; then the turning of the matured powers of reasoning upon this accumulation for the purpose of ascertaining the sources of beauty ; so that at last the student stands side by side with the creator of literature, and enters into his consciousness, the last and finest result of the critical faculty, when it blends with the creative, and scarcely can be distinguished from it.

The years of school life are hardly enough to bring the student to this point, yet I think it highly probable that a course in the high school might be laid out which should be in effect a review of the literature thus far read, with reference to initiating the student into that inquiry as to the nature of works of genius which might well be the delight of maturing years. But such a course would be futile unless, year after year, the students taking it had been acquiring a friendly, even affectionate acquaintance with the literature upon which they were now to expend their powers of reasoning. The student must make this literature his own before he can hope to use it for purposes of criticism. Consider how wonderful would be the work of a teacher who, undertaking to set forth systematically the great laws of harmonyin the composition of works of literary art, should be able to draw from the memories of the class example after example taken from the literature which their school life had made as household words to them.

I have attempted thus to inquire into the educational law of reading and writing, but I have not been solicitous to present it at last in some quotable formula.

Rather, I have been desirous that we should explore those foundations in nature and human reason which may disclose the principles of orderly procedure. We may find it convenient to systematize our knowledge and to reduce it to compact statement, yet in our larger experience we are constantly driven or led into the recognition of the great truth : that nature is the expression of the divine law working under the immanence of the divine love ; and that if we would be wise in our training of the young, whether in reading, in writing, or in any other art, science, or philosophy, our first and never ceasing inquiry should be, what is the nature of this child, and how can I best work in sympathy with his laws ?

Horace E. Scudder.