CHAPTERPAGE
I.Why Do We Read?[9]
II.Literature in the School-room[25]
III.Learning to Read[45]
IV.The Study of the Lesson[87]
V.Language Lessons as a Preparation for Reading Lessons[105]
VI.Expression in Reading[117]
VII.Lessons to Suggest Plans of Work[139]
VIII.Lessons to Suggest Plans of Work—continued[157]
IX.The Study of Pictures[185]
X.Hints for Reading Lessons[199]
XI.The Use of the Library[223]
XII.A List of Books[251]
XIII.A List of Poems[273]

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hidden and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought that they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. We owe to books those general benefits which come from high intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them the perception of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to the moral power. Go with mean people, and you think life is mean. Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and demi-gods standing around us, who will not let us sleep. Then they address the imagination: only poetry inspires poetry. They become the organic culture of the time. College education is the reading of certain books which the common sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already accumulated. In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

READING: HOW TO TEACH IT.

CHAPTER I.
WHY DO WE READ?

The power to read is so ordinary a part of our mental equipment that we rarely question its meaning or its origin. All common things pass us unchallenged, however marvellous they may be. We take little note of our sunrises and sunsets, the hill range which we see every day from our window, the clear air which infuses new energies into our lives with every new morning. Common institutions, however precious—the home, the school, the church, the state—are received by us as a matter of course, just as children receive without surprise the most valuable gifts from the hands of their friends. We need not marvel, then, that this power, which has so long been a part of ourselves, should remain unquestioned, or that we learn to read without giving a thought to the motive which impels us to learn. It may be well for even the most thoughtful among us to pause for a moment to question why everybody learns to read; to ponder the returns from the effort, the time, and the pains spent in the mastery of the art.