The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

No just or comprehensive principle can be found to govern the reading of books that cannot be made to apply, by one who really believes it (though in varying degrees), to the genius and to the dolt. It is a matter of history that a boy of fine creative powers can only be taught a true relation to books through an appeal to his own discoveries; but what is being especially contended for, and what most needs to be emphasised in current education, is the fact that the boy of ordinary creative powers can only be taught to read in the same way—by a slower, broader, and more patient appeal to his own discoveries. The boy of no creative powers whatever, if he is ever born, should not be taught to read at all. Creation is the essence of knowing, and teaching him to read merely teaches him more ways of not knowing. It gives him a wider range of places to be a nobody in—takes away his last opportunity for thinking of anything—that is, getting the meaning of anything for himself. If a man’s heart does not beat for him, why substitute a hot-water bottle? The less a mind is able to do, the less it can afford to have anything done for it. It will be a great day for education when we all have learned that the genius and the dolt can only be educated—at different rates of speed—in exactly the same way. The trouble with our education now is, that many of us do not see that a boy who has been presented with an imitation brain is a deal worse off than a boy who, in spite of his teachers, has managed to save his real one, and has not used it yet.

It is dangerous to give a program for a principle to those who do not believe in the principle, and who do not believe in it instinctively, but if a program were to be given it would be something like this: It would assume that the best way to do with an uncreative mind is to put the owner of it where his mind will be obliged to create.

First. Decide what the owner of the mind most wants in the world.

Second. Put this thing, whatever it may be where the owner of the mind cannot get it unless he uses his mind. Take pains to put it where he can get it, if he does use his mind.

Third. Lure him on. It is education.

If this principle is properly applied to books, there is not a human being living on the earth who will not find himself capable of reading books—as far as he goes—with his whole mind and his whole body. He will read a printed page as eagerly as he lives, and he will read it in exactly the same way that he lives—with his imagination. A boy lives with his imagination every hour of His life—except in school. The moment he discovers, or is allowed to discover, that reading a book and living a day are very much alike, that they are both parts of the same act, and that they are both properly done in the same way, he will drink up knowledge as Job did scorning, like water.

But it is objected that many children are entirely imitative, and that the imagination cannot be appealed to with them and that they cut themselves off from creativeness at every point.

While it is inevitable in the nature of things that many children should be largely imitative, there is not a child that does not do some of his imitating in a creative way, give the hint to his teachers even in his imitations, of where his creativeness would come if it were allowed to. His very blunders in imitating, point to desires that would make him creative of themselves, if followed up. Some children have many desires in behalf of which they become creative. Others are creative only in behalf of a few. But there is always a single desire in a child’s nature through which his creativeness can be called out.

A boy learns to live, to command his body, through the desires which make him creative with it—hunger, and movement, and sleep—desires the very vegetables are stirred with, and the boy who does not find himself responding to them, who can help responding to them, does not exist. There may be times when a boy has no desire to fill himself with food, and when he has no desire to think, but if he is kept hungry he is soon found doing both—thinking things into his stomach. A stomach, in the average boy, will all but take the part of a brain itself, for the time being, to avoid being empty. If a human being is alive at all, there is always at least one desire he can be educated with, prodded into creativeness, until he learns the habit and the pleasure of it. The best qualification for a nurse for a child whose creativeness turns on his stomach, is a natural gift for keeping food on the tops of bureaus and shelves just out of reach. The best qualification for a teacher is infinite contrivance in high bureaus. The applying of the Top of the High Bureau to all knowledge and to all books is what true education is for.

It is generally considered a dangerous thing to do, to turn a child loose in a library. It might fairly be called a dangerous thing to do if it were not much more dangerous not to. The same forces that wrought themselves into the books when they were being made can be trusted to gather and play across them on the shelves. These forces are the self-propelling and self-healing forces of the creative mood. The creative mood protects the books, and it protects all who come near the books. It protects from the inside. It toughens and makes supple. Parents who cannot trust a boy to face the weather in a library should never let him outdoors.