A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

by ANNA MARY WELLS

1

JUSTICE HOLMES’S mother taught him to read when he was three,”Mrs. Holmes read aloud from the newspaper. The identity of the names caused her to be interested in everything she read about Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes although she had never been able to trace any relationship. But this additional coincidence was almost too much for her.

“Bet his I.Q. wasn’t as high as John’s,”Mr. Holmes said.

Mr. Holmes was definitely and belligerently proud of his elder son. Mrs. Holmes, who did the liaison work with the public school, was more doubtful. She had learned a great deal about public schools since John had started kindergarten. Mr. and Mrs. Holmes believed in public schools. They lived near the state university in a middle-sized Far Western city, and about half of the children in the nearest public school were sons and daughters of faculty members. ‘The Holmeses felt smugly that the school combined all the advantages of a democratic educational system with the best features of a good private school. If Mrs. Holmes did not mention to the kindergarten teacher in September that John had already acquired the art of reading, it was modesty and not shame that kept her silent. Learning to read ahead of schedule was she supposed in her innocence, a mild aberration with which the school would be entirely competent to cope.

As it happened, the school year was well into the spring term before the kindergarten teacher found out. The matter never came up at all until one March day when the teacher found John reading a story from a book in which he was supposed to be looking at pictures. She sent for Mrs. Holmes.

“John really reads,”she said in the tone of one bravely admitting the worst while quite determined to make (he best of it. “Sumetimes they get to know stories by heart and they know by the pictures where to turn the page and they can fool you amazingly. But when you stop John on any word, he can tell you what it is.”

“Oh, yes, he reads,”Mrs. Holmes said. “It was quite a surprise to me. I was reading him The King of the Golden River for bedtime stories, in sections, you know, because it’s so long, and when it came time to read about Gluck trying the climb he said never mind — he’d wanted to know the end, so he finished it himself. It was a great relief, really, because my husband and I are both rather sick of bedt ime stories.”

The kindergarten leaeher was a charming young woman with a gentle manner that put all the children at their ease. Using all her tact now, she made clear to Mrs. Holmes what a dreadful abnormality John’s was.

“Of course we could teach children to read at five,” she said, “but why should we? You can force a rosebud, but it is so much sweeter when it unfolds naturally. And there is so much to learn in the kindergarten year about social adjustment and the world of nature that wo don’t feel we should bother with reading until the children are quite, quile ready for it. Preparation for reading is a very delicate and involved process. I have some books here I want to let you read.

Mrs. Holmes murmured agreement.

“You can teach a child to read before it’s ready, of course. We had a liltle girl once who could read when she was four. Her parents were very strange. I shouldn’t want to be harsh in my judgments, but some people said her father was a Communist. In any case they were people with very odd ideas. Well, she could read when she was only four; oh, yes, she could read all right, but on the playground she was like a little sick chicken.”

Mrs. Holmes struggled with an impulse to discuss Communism or to inquire about the future fate of the unhappy little girl. By an effort of will she kept herself to the subject in hand.

“Does John act like a sick chicken on the playground? ”

“No, he acts quite normal. I’d never have suspected anything out of the way about him,” the kindergarten teacher admitted generously.

When Mrs. Holmes went home she carried under her arm three books by Columbia Lniversity professors about Reading Readiness in the Preschool Child. She and her husband arranged forthwith for John to have horseback riding lessons to take his mind off literature, horses being his second great passion. They decided to let it go at that and not deprive him of his cherished library card.

Later in the spring a distinguished kindergarten teacher from the East came for a week’s demonstration teaching of John’s class. John’s own teacher evidently kept his dreadful secret, because when Mrs. Holmes met the stranger the latter smiled brighlly and said, “John’s mother? John is such a wholesome, normal little boy.” Mrs. Holmes accepted this highest accolade of the modern educator with gratitude marred only by a strong suspicion that the visitor was not quite sure which little boy was John.

2

WHEN the first-grade teacher sent for Mrs. Holmes she put off the interview as long as she dared. But when at last she went to school her reception was a surprise,

“I want you to tell me how you taught John to read,” the first-grade teacher said. “It’s perfectly amazing.”

Mrs. Holmes watched her warily, suspecting a trap. “We didn’t really teach him; he picked it up himself. The kindergarten teacher didn’t think it was a very good idea.”

The first-grade teacher laughed comfortably. “I’m afraid I’m old-fashioned.” She gestured toward a table at the side of the room where a set of alphabet blocks was arranged in its proper order. “We don’t leach the alphabet any more, you know. But this year the children voted for it, and I was very glad to let them have it.”

“They voted for the alphabet?”

“Yes. Each year every class votes on what it wants to study and then it studies that all year. They study China and India and the post office and things. This year someone said he’d like to learn the alphabet, and all the other children said so too, so I thought perhaps it would be all right to put it up there for them.” Mrs. Holmes looked hard at the first-grade teacher, but she was not smiling. “Do tell me about John learning to read,” she said.

“Well, when he was two he liked to play with anagrams,” Mrs. Holmes said, and launched happily into the story, all the way up to The King of the Golden River.

“They don’t believe in double promotions any more,” the first-grade teacher said, “but I have John helping a little boy who didn’t pass last year. We’re hoping to coach him along and get him into the second grade where he belongs.”

This state of affairs seemed altogether too good to last, and so it proved to be. Mr. Holmes’s profession involved a wandering life, and six weeks later a ukase from Washington sent the family to a vast Midwestern industrial city.

“I don’t know what they’ll do with John,” the first-grade teacher said, filling out his transfer card. “I’ve put down that he reads at second-grade level, because if I said third or fourth they wouldn’t, believe it. I don’t know whether they’ll put him ahead or not.”

The principal, who was very modern in her views, hoped not. “You’re going to one of the best public school systems in the nation,”she said.

The new school had a large and polyglot student body. Pushing her way through a crowded, noisy hall on a December morning, Mrs. Holmes looked anxiously at her son. John never rose to a crisis; he didn’t like crowds or confusion or strangers, and he was looking while. Mrs. Holmes hoped the formalities could be settled quickly and John established in the quiet backwater of a classroom. She gave the transfer card to one of the three secretaries in the principal’s outer office, who began at once to fill in an enormous sheet for the records. She hesitated momentarily oxer the discrepancy between John’s age and his guaranteed reading level and then compromised by assigning him to 1-A, halfway between the two extremes.

At that moment the principal came out of her office and stopped to be friendly with the little newcomer. She patted John on the head, and John made a low, snarling sound. The principal jumped as if she had been bitten.

“Doesn’t he want to come to school?” she demanded.

“I’m afraid he’s a little upset by all the strangeness,” Mrs. Holmes said.

“Where does he come from, where are you putting him, what are you doing that for?” the principal asked the secretary in an offended tone.

John’s scowl was growing more ominous and he was paler. The explanations between the secretary and the principal gave every evidence of being long-drawn-out. Mrs. Holmes took the assignment slip the secretary had laid on the counter and, with John in tow, walked quietly out with it. She would find the room herself, she thought, and come back to talk to the principal without him.

The teacher in room 12 accepted John and the slip without enthusiasm. “Can he write?” she asked.

“Only on the typewriter.”

The teacher sighed as if this were no more than she expected, and called a little boy to show John a locker and a seat. Mrs. Holmes walked back to the office.

“Where have you been?” the principal asked. “I just turned around and you were gone.”

“I thought I’d take John down to his classroom and get him settled.”

“But where did you take him?”

“Room 12 — where it said on the slip.”

“But that’s not right; that’s not where he belongs; he’s not six and a half; he’s six; why did you put him there?”

“He reads,” Mrs. Holmes said incautiously.

“He belongs in grade 1-B,” the principal said. “ We will go and get him at once.”

“It might be better to leave him where he is just for this morning,” Mrs. Holmes said timidly. “When he gets too badly upset he throws up.”

“Nothing could upset him worse than being in the wrong grade,” the principal said, and they went and got John and put him in 1-B.

When Mrs. Holmes went back for him at noon he wasn’t there. Halfway to the office to make inquiries she met the principal again.

“He can read,” the principal said. Mrs. Holmes swallowed hard and reminded herself that the public school is a great democratic institution. John was back in 1-A but a different 1-A. No one knew why. He cried when he saw his mother. “I don’t know where they put my coal and hat,” he said. Mrs. Holmes found the coat and hat and took him home. More, she brought him back in the afternoon.

“ I was in t hree classes and I went to see I he principal again,” John said. “As soon as they started to read in that class she sent me down to the principal and I read her The Three Little Pigs, but she wouldn’t let me finish.”

John never got E in reading. Since Mr. and Mrs. Holmes’s public school days, grading had been abandoned. The children’s cards were marked U for unsatisfactory, S for satisfactory, and E for excellent. In Mrs. Holmes’s elementary school days there had been E for excellent, G for good, F for fair, and P for poor. The children seemed to regard their U’s, E’s, and S’s in much the same way that she and her friends had regarded their grade’s. But there was a difference. In John’s school, children never got E lor things they did really well, because it was easy for them. John got E in spelling. One of his compositions read: —

Natcher is what amles, pepole, fish. Do every day. Like eating. And mother works and we play. What amles say and do. That is natcher.

And another: —

We our prod of are eournty. The flag stands for are cournty. We our Loile. Do not rape things up in the flag.

He got E sometimes, also, in art and music, although his drawing w as abominable and he couldn’t carry a tune. His reading was marked satisfactory.

He wasn’t very happy in the new school. “Worst of all I hate library,” he said.

“You hate library?” his mother echoed. “Why, John, you know you don’t.”

“Yes I do, Mother. All the bookcases are locked except the Easy Books when our class goes up, and I’ve read all the Easy Books over and over, and when you take one you have to keep it that whole class and it only takes about a minute to read.”

“Well, tell her you can read harder ones and she’ll let you.”

“Oh, no, she won’t.”

“John, of course she will. It’s silly to be so timid. If you won’t ask her, I will the next time I’m over there, but you’re very silly not to.”

But John didn’t, and Mrs. Holmes encountered the librarian in the hall one afternoon when she stopped at school to get him for the dent ist’s. “I’m ashamed of my child for being so timid,” she said, “but he won’t ask you — he can read pretty well, and he’d like to be allowed to read some of the other books in the library besides the Easy Bookcase, if you could let him.”

The librarian smiled. “I know he can read,” she said. “I’ve thought about letting him have some other books — but then it seemed to me he would be missing some charming things in the Easy Books. Charming. Science and things.”

“But he says he’s read them all,” Mrs. Holmes went on bravely, though considerably deflated.

“If we let him read the others, he’ll read all of those, and what will he do when he grows up?”

For John’s sake Mrs. Holmes took a deep breath and tried again. “We’re letting him read whatever he likes at home,” she said. “Just now it’s Gulliver’s Travels.”

“He may read it but he doesn’t understand it,” the librarian said.

“He said he didn’t like it.” Mrs. Holmes had decided it might be better for John if she were conciliating. As a matter of fact, what John had said was: “I don’t like ‘I books because they can only tell what the ‘I’ saw. I like stories that tell what everybody did and thought.”

On the bus to the dentist’s, four-year-old Henry said, “That sign says Rival Dog Food.”

Mrs. Holmes looked at him in undisguised horror. “Can you read it?”

“Of course not,” John said. “He knows by the picture.”

Mrs. I lolmes sighed and settled back in the seat. At least she didn’t have to face that just yet.