school. These human, efflorescent, dramatic qualities characteristic of child life may be crystallized into reading material by a quick, effective use of the blackboard, and in the reading books of the child's own making.

There is not enough reading to children in the primary years. A child should be read to every day without being expected to make any return. Spoken language is acquired by such means. One is willing to talk and talk to a child, long before he is able to answer with a spoken word; the child understands, although he says nothing himself; he is collecting the material of speech, storing it somewhere, and sometime he will suddenly surprise you with his accumulated possessions. Reading has this nascent period too, and a child should have the opportunity to follow with his own book in hand a good reading of familiar stories again and again, that the printed symbol, and its oral expression, may be unconsciously identified. By such a method a child gets technique, and the thought expressed by it, without too much conscious focusing upon the technique itself. He will become accustomed to read as rhythmically as he talks, without stilted and forced inflection. Six or eight minutes given to this practice each day will increase the desire to read, give conscious models for imitation, and train the class in attention.

Reading should lead to imagery, association, feeling, and motor response. Does the average reading book excite such responses, or does it deal with commonplaces which are merely rolled about on the tongue ?

The reading lessons are apt to go ahead of the child's power, we are so impatient of progress, so jealous of time. We lay too much stress upon the number of pages covered, too little upon the desire awakened and the taste acquired.

Children should be allowed time at least once a week for undirected reading, save as to a suggestion of what to read, time to read with no thought of reproduction other than a voluntary one; they should have time to read for mere delight, to form a reading habit, and to establish reading tastes.

Reading is thinking by means of the printed page, not the technical mastery of words. Little children are in the language-building period, and if the proper transition is made, will quickly learn the language of the printed page as well as of the spoken word. Their interests are so varied and their curiosity so keen that one cannot set the limits to what they may acquire. The secret of success is to keep the work childlike, full of action, and vitally related to the daily interests and habits. Children are accumulating, putting together, labeling, classifying, and selecting in a wholesale sort of way. They are open to suggestion along a thousand different lines, but ready for prescription in none.

CHAPTER XVI

HANDWRITING

I. Writing in the race. Handwriting is one of the latest and highest achievements of man. Geiger calls it "the most marvelous art which it was at all possible for man to create." Like all great things, it is the result of a long, gradual development.

The beginnings of the art were rude and desultory scrawls such as even eolithic man must have produced in his idle moments, prompted by the old instinct of workmanship. The rudiments of handwriting in the child are found in playful scribbling similar in origin and character. The hand is a most natural means of expression as well as of construction. The facial and laryngeal muscles scarcely exceed it in mobility and sensitiveness to mental states. Just as the dog's tail, not being burdened with the task of locomotion, became an animated semaphore, with a considerable code of language wags, so the hand of primitive man became the vehicle of communication. The hand is anatomically so superior to the canine tail that it lends itself to a high development of sign language. The gestures of primitive man at first surpassed speech in efficiency. Living primitive people show marvelous power in hand talk. To this day the Indians of the Mississippi Valley, with their scores of dialects, cannot understand each other by word of mouth, but they meet on the ground of a universal gesture language. By this Esperanto of the hand they can trade, negotiate, and even tell each other love stories.

There are innumerable nerve filaments which bind the fingers to the brain cortex. With the development of mental imagery and mental coördination, pictures emerge out of the rude, aimless scrawls, somewhat as articulate speech arises out of babbling and cooing. Picture writing is really a form of gesture, graphic pantomime. "On bark and wood and stone, on skulls and skins and bones and teeth, on surfaces formed of various fibers, and with some tribes on the human body in tattooing, the pictures were made according to the exigency of the case or the whim of the artist."

The pictographs were, of course, very rude, concrete, and unconventional. It took hours to tell a simple story which we now could write out in as many minutes, but in these same rude pictographs, as Huey says, "lay the germs of the alphabets which made civilization possible." In some cases the historian has actually traced out the pedigree. Our letter M, for example, passed through seven distinguishable metamorphoses, starting with an Egyptian hieroglyphic owl. It surely is interesting to reflect upon the immense gap between the laborious, slow-witted etchings of the cave man and the modern lightning stenographs which are dashed off at the rate of two hundred words per minute; but it would be wrong to think that there is no genetic relationship between pictography and penmanship.

II. Motion-picture writing. The pedagogy of penmanship must recognize the genetic background of handwriting. Primitive man wrote pictorially before he wrote alphabetically, and so should the child. Even Pestalozzi appreciated that there is some pedagogical connection between elementary drawing and writing. To the primary-school child handwriting is about as foreign and impossible as it is to a patient suffering from the brain troubles known as agraphia and alexia. The highly complex and conventional symbols of

the copy book are as foreign to his experience as Sanskrit is to most of us. If we want to draw out his powers of hand-expression, we must make connection with his own. stock of concrete, mental images.

And the beauty of it is he has just those visual-motor images of motion which are pictorial in import but contain the basal elements of handwriting. These mental motion pictures which he so easily and joyfully transfers to the blackboard make a splendid transition from drawing to penmanship. The crude sketches of men, animals, houses, etc. of course come first of all. Through these drawings the child develops his powers of coördination and perception, but he will represent moving things as naturally as stable ones, just as primitive man in pantomime, dance, and pictograph represented the rocking of the waves, the heaving of nets, or the flight of birds. Such dynamic, pictorial representations will resemble writing as much as drawing, because they will have the progression and continuity of fluent script.

If children are too suddenly and arbitrarily introduced to letter forms, expression is stilted and crippled. If we start with the copy book, the child has neither motor images that command nor coördinated muscles which execute. The use of pictorial or representative writing in the early stages is effective because its starting point is familiar motor images related in the child's mind to pleasant reactions. In language making the child imitates tone, inflection, and rhythm of speech before he masters words; so in writing there is a play period working toward muscular control which expresses itself in bold, flowing, pictorial representation of rhythmical sound and movement. Children will only write easily when the mind is filled with easy, continuous motor images which are so compelling that they coax the muscles into involuntary play.