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to talk and to listen;
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to act (in the dramatic sense of the word);
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to draw, paint and model;
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to dance and sing;
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to know the why of things;
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to construct things.
Now I shall have something to say by and by on the amazing preponderance in this list of those instincts which Aristotle would have called “mimetic.” This morning I take only the least imitative of all, the desire to know the why of things.
Surely you know, taking only this, that the master-key admitting a child to all, or almost all, palaces of knowledge is his ability to read. When he has grasped that key of his mother-tongue he can with perseverance unlock all doors to all the avenues of knowledge. More—he has the passport to heavens unguessed.
You will perceive at once that what I mean here by “reading” is the capacity for silent reading, taking a book apart and mastering it; and you will bear in mind the wonder that I preached to you in a previous lecture—that great literature never condescends, that what yonder boy in a corner reads of a king is happening to him. Do you suppose that in an elementary school one child in ten reads thus? Listen to a wise ex-inspector, whose words I can corroborate of experience:
The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an ordinary elementary school while a reading lesson is in progress is that the children are not reading at all, in the accepted sense of the word. They are not reading to themselves, not studying, not mastering the contents of the book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual nutriment that it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up one by one and reading aloud to their teacher.
Ah! but I have seen far worse than that. I have visited and condemned rural schools where the practice was to stand a class up—say a class of thirty children—and make them read in unison: which meant, of course, that the front row chanted out the lesson while the back rows made inarticulate noises. I well remember one such exhibition, in a remote country school on the Cornish hills, and having my attention arrested midway by the face of a girl in the third row. She was a strikingly beautiful child, with that combination of bright auburn, almost flaming, hair with dark eyebrows, dark eyelashes, dark eyes, which of itself arrests your gaze, being so rare; and those eyes seemed to challenge me half scornfully and ask, “Are you really taken in by all this?” Well, I soon stopped the performance and required each child to read separately: whereupon it turned out that, in the upper standards of this school of seventy or eighty children, one only—this disdainful girl—could get through half a dozen easy sentences with credit. She read well and intelligently, being accustomed to read to herself, at home.
I daresay that this bad old method of block-reading is dead by this time.
Reading aloud and separately is excellent for several purposes. It tests capacity: it teaches correct pronunciation by practice, as well as the mastery of difficult words: it provides a good teacher with frequent opportunities of helping the child to understand what he reads.
But as his schooling proceeds he should be accustomed more and more to read to himself: for that, I repeat, is the master-key.
Lecture IV
Children’s Reading (II)
Wednesday, February 21, 1917
I
In our talk, Gentlemen, about Children’s Reading we left off upon a list, drawn up by Mr. Holmes in his book What Is, and What Might Be, of the things that, apart from physical nourishment and exercise, a child instinctively desires.
He desires
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to talk and to listen;
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to act (in the dramatic sense of the word);
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to draw, paint and model;
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to dance and sing;
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to know the why of things;
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to construct things.
Let us scan through this catalogue briefly, in its order.
No. (1). To talk and to listen—Mr. Holmes calls this the “communicative instinct.” Every child wants to talk with those about him, or at any rate with his chosen ones—his parents, brothers, sisters, nurse, governess, gardener, boot-boy (if he possess these last)—with other children, even if his dear papa is poor: to tell them what he has been doing, seeing, feeling: and to listen to what they have to tell him.
Nos. (2), (3), (4). To act—our author calls this the “dramatic instinct”: to draw, paint and model—this the “artistic instinct”—to dance and sing—this the “musical instinct.” But obviously all these are what Aristotle would call “mimetic” instincts: “imitative” (in a sense I shall presently explain); even as No. (2)—acting—like No. (1)—talking and listening—comes of craving for sympathy. In fact, as we go on, you will see that these instincts overlap and are not strictly separable, though we separate them just now for convenience.
No. (5). To know the why of things—the “inquisitive instinct.” This, being the one which gives most trouble to parents, parsons, governesses, conventional schoolmasters—to all grown-up persons who pretend to know what they don’t and are ashamed to tell what they do—is of course the most ruthlessly repressed.
“The time is come,” the Infant said,
“To talk of many things:
Of babies, storks and cabbages
And—
—having studied the Evangelists’ Window facing the family pew—
And whether cows have wings.”
The answer, in my experience, is invariably stern, and “in the negative”: in tolerant moments compromising on “Wait, like a good boy, and
