mind by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things." Not therefore to cancel this real world of poetry, but to establish it in right and consistent relation to the other real world of science, must be our educational aim.

A helpful clew to this child's world of disentangled fact and fiction is primitive man, whose value is recognized in the culture-epoch conception which has been carried into experimental effect in a few schools. Only, here we have the other extreme: no allowance is made for the fact that the child is living in the twentieth century, and is forced to relate himself to the phenomena of the modern world. True, he is a myth-maker, an animist, a polytheist, with early Aryan and Persian, Greek and Roman; but he has to become, and is gradually becoming, a citizen of this scientific age. He approaches his problem of interpreting the life of his time from two ends, advancing with rapid, sevenleagued strides from the early world to the latter age, and working backward from his own age to the luminous dawn of history, from appearances to their

historic explanation.

Our stories must be selected accordingly. We shall try to do rough justice to these two worlds, or, as we prefer to put it, to the two alternating tempers and outlooks of childhood; to the embryo poet and embryo scientist; to the realist and the romanticist; to the

Platonist and the Aristotelian. On this account we shall feed him on stories of heroes, both mythical and historical; on the adventures of a Columbus, a Captain John Smith, and a Nansen, as well as of a Ulysses, a Crusoe, and a Sinbad. We shall weave for him "true stories" of the transactions of bee and bird, dog and horse; as well as the unverifiable life of the creatures of Alice's Wonderland, Uncle Remus's wood side, Mowgli's jungle. Folk-lore and fable, myth and legend, Indian, Negro, Greek, Norse, Teutonic, and Celtic, we need; but we also need history, biography, nature-narrative, the story of the heroisms and wonIders of the human and animal worlds.

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CHAPTER V

LEARNING TO READ AND TO WRITE

I

THE problem of instruction in reading and writing is still the arena where the most vigorous encounters of the pedagogues of primary education take place. A decade or more ago it was chiefly the question of how to teach these that was fought out; a dispute admirably summed up in 1889 by President G. Stanley Hall in his monograph, "How to teach Reading" (Heath). Nowadays it is the more fundamental question of when to teach that is being debated, the question raised in militant mood by Professor John Dewey in his article in the Forum of May, 1899. This is no new question, to be sure; but it is one that has assumed new aspects. It resolves itself into the general question of the educational value and fitness, under the altered conditions of modern life, of reading and writing in the earliest years of school life. A marked tendency has recently shown itself to discount the high value generally put upon reading and writing heretofore, and as a consequence to alter radically the course of study in the Primary Grades. It will have been gathered from preceding pages that the writer is sympathetic toward this new

realistic tendency in modern education, but he believes that it may easily be pushed to harmful extremes. It may be well, therefore, to review the discussion.

"What sense is there," asked Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi in her interesting volume on "Primary Education" (Putnams), published in 1889-"what sense is there, then, in beginning education with instruction in the arts of reading and writing?" (p 3). The emphasis of her objection, however, does not fall where Professor Dewey's does it is psychological, whereas his is mainly sociological. She holds that early attention to reading and writing, to book-work, is wrong, because "the first intellectual faculties to be trained are perception and memory," and that, therefore, the child's first studies should be those which aid the development of these faculties, the seasonable unfolding of faculties being, in her view, the proper aim of modern education.

To be brief in comment upon a familiar contention, this criticism reveals a danger of overlooking the very important part which language may play in the training of these very faculties of perception and memory. Clear expression is a mark of clear perception, and the effort to attain it involves the clarification of confused percepts. To remember is to reëxpress. Perception and memory are not only developed in learning to read and write, but they soon find in reading and writing indispensable aids and tests. However, to press on to more important points,- Dr. Jacobi adds another time

honored objection: "To study words before things tends to impress the mind with a fatal belief in their superior importance; and to study expression before subjects of thought have been accumulated, is to cultivate the habit always prevalent in civilized life of talking fluently without having anything to say. To direct attention to sets of arbitrary signs before attention has been trained by contemplation of real objects, teaches the mind to place conventional and contingent facts on the same level with necessary truths. We thus weaken in advance the power of belief in necessity and reality." These last words strike deep into the ethics of the subject; but concerning the argument in general, we have only to point to the development of the Kindergarten and, under Kindergarten influences, of observational and manual work in the Elementary School, to show that these objections have lost a good deal of their old force. It is no longer sweepingly true if we look at the work done in our best school systems-that modern education begins with the study of words. But, more than that, "instruction in the arts of reading and writing" does not imply, and never could imply, that the study of words (as if words were a system of hieroglyphics) could precede, or could be wholly separated from, the study of the things they symbolize; nor can it involve anything like exclusive preoccupation with expression before subjects of thought have been accumulated. The study of words must be, to no small extent, at least by