Fortunately, children like to read many times the things they enjoy, and should always be encouraged to do so. But they are likely to read stories over and over again, for the plot only, and to become so fascinated by it as never to notice the more valuable and intrinsically more interesting things the narrative contains.
Yet every person who reads or tells stories to young children has without doubt often noticed how insistent they are upon verbal accuracy. The story must be told the third time just as it was the first and second times. This means that they are sensitive to the thing as a perfect whole, and feel that any change mars the beauty of the story as a scratch mars the face of a favorite doll, or a broken seat spoils the toy buggy.
There comes a time when, if you give a boy a mechanical toy, he is more interested in how it is made than in the running of it. He wants to “take to pieces” everything he has. Then he will enjoy analytical work on a story if he is led to it intelligently. Then the old stories come in for new readings, “to see how they are made,” to find something in them that he never found before.
The style of reading which a child does when he is “looking for something” is very different from his reading when he is absorbed in the story. Suppose he is trying to find out what kind of a man is James, in Rab and His Friends. He forgets for a time the story, and reads rapidly along, merely running his eye over the pages, watching intently for the word James, or the word carrier. When either of the words appears he stops to read carefully. He may have to go back a few words, perhaps to the beginning of a paragraph, all the time with his attention fixed exclusively upon what is said about James. When he has read it on the first page, he skims along to the next one and stops again. This is reading intelligently for a purpose, and is really one of the most valuable kinds of reading, the kind he will use most frequently when he is a man, the one that will save time for him when in later years he most needs it. It is the style of reading, too, that is much neglected in the schools.
To analyze the character of the hero of a story is as practical a lesson in life as any child can gain. In trying to discern the springs of action, in seeing how words and acts show character, and how dress and appearance indicate what a person really is, he is learning to understand his acquaintances and to judge whether they merit his trust and confidence, or are to be regarded with suspicion and disdain. This is the practical wisdom without which many a man has found himself the victim of misplaced confidence, or allowed himself to be led into temptations he could not resist by those who professed friendship for him.
Again, when studying the scenes, a child is learning to picture vividly and exactly, and is training his mind to close discrimination. He is training himself to avoid the mistakes that the careless reader makes. Many a man has found himself paying for careless reading, because he did not see a thing exactly as it was described to him.
At the risk of repetition we have argued again for the reading of stories in the different ways and for the different purposes suggested, for we know that the parent who will follow these plans will interest his children, will see them improve, and will find them growing nearer to him, while he will be more of a companion, less of a ruler. In so doing he may forget some of the cares of the day and find himself growing younger, more contented and happier as his family reaches the age when it can take care of itself. Then, later, when the long years of old age have come, it may be that the parents will discover that while they read and worked with their children they taught themselves to find in reading a solace for their loneliness.
It is scarcely necessary to say that many of these latter comments and suggestions are as applicable to reading other kinds of literature as they are to the reading of stories, but stories form so large a part of a child’s reading that it has seemed best to place them in this connection. Many essays contain something of narration, and not infrequently an incident forms the basis of a beautiful lyric. In print these studies may appear formal and forbidding, but where they are presented in a conversational manner, they become attractive and inspiring.