A WIDER CIRCLE AND PURPOSE, GROWING OUT OF THE CHILD’S LIFE AND NEEDS.
The possession of a wide acquaintance with the standard subject matter of child literature before serious attempts at learning to read are made, will subordinate the acquisition of a reading vocabulary as means to an end desired on the part of the child. There will be purpose in it for him. The learning to read will be seen as a step necessary to a fuller expression of activities already going on, and difficulties will be overcome because their mastery is a means in a wider circle of purpose growing out of the child’s own life and needs. If, in early years, the emphasis is removed from the form to the content side of instruction, if his native hunger for folklore and nature-material is satisfied, the learning to read will be lifted out of drudgery and will be accomplished with self-effort, and with a rapidity truly surprising.
The early forcing of technique is not a real gain in the child’s education, however much may be apparently accomplished. Immediate results are not a safe guide for instruction in the primary grades. They are, many times, a positive loss in time, and are gained at the expense of dwarfing the mental and physical powers. There is no real need of forcing the process of learning to read if the teacher is ready with a subject matter which the child is already going out to meet.
The time of the first year of school life would conduce far more to the child’s progress if spent with learning to read and write as a secondary consideration, and the giving of a real body of culture, ethical, and nature material as a main purpose. Subsequent progress would be all the more rapid and instruction be all the more educative because a wider range of interest would call forth self-active participation of all the powers. The widening of experience and the formation of interpretative concepts would allow further instruction to be grasped with sufficient avidity to carry it over into actual assimilation into the self.