It is as undesirable as it is impossible to try to feed the minds of children only upon facts of observation or record. The immense product of the imagination in art and literature is a concrete fact with which every educated being should be made somewhat familiar, such products being a very real part of every individual’s actual environment. … Do we not all know many people who seem to live in a mental vacuum—to whom we have great difficulty in attributing immortality, because they apparently have so little life except that of the body? Fifteen minutes a day of good reading would give any one of this multitude a really human life. “The uplifting of the democratic masses depends upon the implanting at schools of the taste for good reading.”
Charles W. Eliot.
CHAPTER II.
LITERATURE IN THE SCHOOL-ROOM.
Learning to read is an important part of the children’s training, but learning what to read is quite as important. A child’s mastery of the printed page may leave him with the key to that which is base and ignoble in literature, or it may open to him that which is noble and inspiring. His newly gotten power may unlock to him the dime novel, or the Iliad. Whether he turns to the one or to the other depends largely upon his early associations. It is determined especially by his early teaching.