R. W. Bullock[14] classified and tabulated 2,000 returns from school-children from the third to the twelfth grade, both inclusive, concerning their reading. From this it appeared that the average boy of the third grade "read 4.9 books in six months; that the average falls to 3.6 in the fourth and fifth grades and rises to a maximum of 6.5 at the seventh grade, then drops quite regularly to 3 in the twelfth grade at the end of the high school course." The independent tabulation of returns from other cities showed little variation. "Grade for grade, the girls read more than the boys, and as a rule they reach their maximum a year sooner, and from a general maximum of 5.9 books there is a drop to 3.3 at the end of the course." The age of reading may be postponed or accelerated perhaps nearly a year by the absence or presence of library facilities. Tabulating the short stories read per week, it was found that these averaged 2.1 in the third grade, rose to 7.7 per week in the seventh grade, and in the twelfth had fallen to 2.3, showing the same general tendency.
The percentage tables for boys' preference for eight classes of stories are here only suggestive. "War stories seem popular with third grade boys, and that liking seems well marked through the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Stories of adventure are popular all through the heroic period, reaching their maximum in the eighth and ninth grades. The liking for biography and travel or exploration grows gradually to a climax in the ninth grade, and remains well up through the course. The tender sentiment has little charm for the average grade boy, and only in the high school course does he acknowledge any considerable use of love stories. In the sixth grade he is fond of detective stories, but they lose their charm for him as he grows older." For girls, "stories of adventure are popular in the sixth grade, and stories of travel are always enjoyed. The girl likes biography, but in the high school, true to her sex, she prefers stories of great women rather than great men, but because she can not get them reads those of men. Pity it is that the biographies of so few of the world's many great women are written. The taste for love stories increases steadily to the end of the high school course. Beyond that we have no record." Thus "the maximum amount of reading is done in every instance between the sixth and eighth grades, the average being in the seventh grade at an average age of fourteen and one-tenth years." Seventy-five per cent of all discuss their reading with some one, and the writer urges that "when ninety-five per cent of the boys prefer adventure or seventy-five per cent of the girls prefer love stories, that is what they are going to read," and the duty of the teacher or librarian is to see that they have both in the highest, purest form.
Henderson[15] found that of 2,989 children from nine to fifteen, least books were read at the age of nine and most at the age of fifteen, and that there was "a gradual rise in amount throughout, the only break being in the case of girls at the age of fourteen and the boys at the age of twelve." For fiction the high-water mark was reached for both sexes at eleven, and the subsequent fall is far less rapid for girls than for boys. "At the age of thirteen the record for travel and adventure stands highest in the case of the boys, phenomenally so. There is a gradual rise in history with age, and a corresponding decline in fiction."
Kirkpatrick[16] classified returns from 5,000 children from the fourth to the ninth grade in answer to questions that concerned their reading. He found a sudden increase in the sixth grade, when children are about twelve, when there is often a veritable, reading craze. Dolls are abandoned and "plays, games, and companionship of others are less attractive, and the reading hunger in many children becomes insatiable and is often quite indiscriminate." It seems to "most frequently begin at about twelve years of age and continue at least three or four years," after which increased home duties, social responsibilities, and school requirements reduce it and make it more discriminating in quality. "The fact that boys read about twice, as much history and travel as girls and only about two-thirds as much poetry and stories shows beyond question that the emotional and intellectual wants of boys and girls are essentially different before sexual maturity."
Miss Vostrovsky[17] found that among 1,269 children there was a great increase of taste for reading as shown by the number of books taken from the library, which began with a sharp rise at eleven and increased steadily to nineteen, when her survey ended; that boys read most till seventeen, and then girls took the precedence. The taste for juvenile stories was declining and that for fiction and general literature was rapidly increased. At about the sixteenth year a change took place in both sexes, "showing then the beginning of a greater interest in works of a more general character." Girls read more fiction than boys at every age, but the interest in it begins to be very decided at adolescence. With girls it appears to come a little earlier and with greater suddenness, while the juvenile story maintains a strong hold upon boys even after the fifteenth year. The curve of decline in juvenile stories is much more pronounced in both sexes than the rise of fiction. Through the teens there is a great increase in the definiteness of answers to the questions why books were chosen. Instead of being read because they were "good" or "nice," they were read because recommended, and later because of some special interest. Girls relied on recommendations more than boys. The latter were more guided by reason the former by sentiment. Nearly three times as many boys in the early teens chose books because they were exciting or venturesome. Even the stories which girls called exciting were tame compared with those chosen by boys. Girls chose books more than four times as often because of children in them, and more often because they ware funny. Boys care very little for style, but must have incidents and heroes. The author says "the special interest that girls have in fiction begins about the age of adolescence. After the sixteenth year the extreme delight in stories fades," or school demands become more imperative and uniform. Girls prefer domestic stories and those with characters like themselves and scenes like those with which they are familiar. "No boy confesses to a purely girl's story, while girls frankly do to an interesting story about boys. Women writers seem to appeal more to girls, men writers to boys. Hence, the authors named by each sex are almost entirely different. In fiction more standard works, were drawn by boys than by girls." "When left to develop according to chance, the tendency is often toward a selection of books which unfit one for every-day living, either by presenting, on the one hand, too many scenes of delicious excitement or, on the other, by narrowing the vision to the wider possibilities of life."
Out of 523 full answers, Lancaster found that 453 "had what might be called a craze for reading at some time in the adolescent period," and thinks parents little realize the intensity of the desire to read or how this nascent period is the golden age to cultivate taste and inoculate against reading what is bad. The curve rises rapidly from eleven to fourteen, culminates at fifteen, after which it falls rapidly. Some become omnivorous readers of everything in their way; others are profoundly, and perhaps for life, impressed with some single book; others have now crazes for history, now for novels, now for dramas or for poetry; some devour encyclopedias; some imagine themselves destined to be great novelists and compose long romances; some can give the dates with accuracy of the different periods of the development of their tastes from the fairy tales of early childhood to the travels and adventures of boyhood and then to romance, poetry, history, etc; and some give the order of their development of taste for the great poets.
The careful statistics of Dr. Reyer show that the greatest greed of reading is from the age of fifteen to twenty-two, and is on the average greatest of all at twenty. He finds that ten per cent of the young people of this age do forty per cent of all the reading. Before twenty the curve ascends very rapidly, to fall afterward yet more rapidly as the need of bread-winning becomes imperative. After thirty-five the great public reads but little. Every youth should have his or her own library, which, however small, should be select. To seal some knowledge of their content with the delightful sense of ownership helps to preserve the apparatus of culture, keeps green early memories, or makes one of the best tangible mementoes of parental care and love. For the young especially, the only ark of safety in the dark and rapidly rising flood of printer's ink is to turn resolutely away from the ideal of quantity to that of quality. While literature rescues youth from individual limitations and enables it to act and think more as spectators of all time, and sharers of all existence, the passion for reading may be excessive, and books which from the silent alcoves of our nearly 5,500 American libraries rule the world more now than ever before, may cause the young to neglect the oracles within, weaken them by too wide reading, make conversation bookish, and overwhelm spontaneity and originality with a superfetation of alien ideas.
The reading passion may rage with great intensity when the soul takes its first long flight in the world of books, and ninety per cent of all Conradi's cases showed it. Of these, thirty-two per cent read to have the feelings stirred and the desire of knowledge was a far less frequent motive. Some read to pass idle time, others to appear learned or to acquire a style or a vocabulary. Romance led. Some specialized, and with some the appetite was omnivorous. Some preferred books about or addressed to children, some fairy tales, and some sought only those for adults. The night is often invaded and some become "perfectly wild" over exciting adventures or the dangers and hardships of true lovers, laughing and crying as the story turns from grave to gay, and a few read several books a week. Some were forbidden and read by stealth alone, or with books hidden in their desks or under school books. Some few live thus for years in an atmosphere highly charged with romance, and burn out their fires wickedly early with a sudden and extreme expansiveness that makes life about them uninteresting and unreal, and that reacts to commonplace later. Conradi prints some two or three hundred favorite books and authors of early and of later adolescence. The natural reading of early youth is not classic nor blighted by compulsion or uniformity for all. This age seeks to express originality and personality in individual choices and tastes.
Suggestive and briefly descriptive lists of best books and authors by authorities in different fields on which some time is spent in making selection, talks about books, pooling knowledge of them, with no course of reading even advised and much less prescribed, is the best guidance for developing the habit of rapid cursory reading. Others before professor De Long, of Colorado, have held that the power of reading a page in moment, as a mathematician sums up a column of figures and as the artist Doré was able to read a book by turning the leaves, can be attained by training and practise. School pressure should not suppress this instinct of omnivorous reading, which at this age sometimes prompts the resolve to read encyclopedias, and even libraries, or to sample everything to be found in books at home. Along with, but never suppressing, it there should be some stated reading, but this should lay down only kinds of reading like the four emphasized in the last chapter or offer a goodly number of large alternative groups of books and authors, like the five of the Leland Stanford University, and permit wide liberty of choice to both teacher and pupil. Few triumphs of the uniformitarians, who sacrifice individual needs to mechanical convenience in dealing with youth in masses, have been so sad as marking off and standardizing a definite quantum of requirements here. Instead of irrigating a wide field, the well-springs of literary interest are forced to cut a deep canyon and leave wide desert plains of ignorance on either side. Besides imitation, which reads what others do, is the desire to read something no one else does, and this is a palladium of individuality. Bad as is the principle, the selections are worse, including the saccharinity ineffable of Tennyson's Princess (a strange expression of the progressive feminization of the high school and yet satirizing the scholastic aspiration of girls) which the virile boy abhors, books about books which are two removes from life, and ponderous Latinity authors which for the Saxon boy suggest David fighting in Saul's armor, and which warp and pervert the nascent sentence-sense on a foreign model. Worst of all, the prime moral purpose of youthful reading is ignored in choices based on form and style; and a growing profusion of notes that distract from content to language, the study of which belongs in the college if not in the university, develops the tendencies of criticism before the higher powers of sympathetic appreciation have done their work.[18]
(B) Other new mental powers and aptitudes are as yet too little studied. Very slight are the observations so far made, of children's historic, which is so clearly akin to literary, interest and capacity. With regard to this and several other subjects in the curriculum we are in the state of Watts when he gazed at the tea-kettle and began to dream of the steam-engine; we are just recognizing a new power and method destined to reconstruct and increase the efficiency of education, but only after a long and toilsome period of limited successes.