The net result when the work is
done as described is to develop a critical consciousness of methods,
without helping the children to enter normally and rightly into the
experience of the writer. The children of Cleveland need this genuine
training in reading.
Reading in the high schools needs very much the same sort of
modernization. There are more kinds of literature than classical
belles-lettres, and perhaps more important kinds. We would not
advocate a reduction of the amount of aesthetic literature. Indeed, the
young people of Cleveland need to enter into a far wider range of such
literature than is the case at present. But the reading courses in
high schools should be built out in ways already recommended for
elementary schools.
The training, however, should be mainly in reading and not in
analysis. The former is of surpassing importance to all people; the
latter is important only to certain specialists. And, what is
more, fullness of reading and right ways of reading will accomplish
incidentally most of the things aimed at in the analysis.
The following table of the reading outline of the High School of
Commerce is a fair sample of what the city is doing. Note how much
time is given to the reading and analysis of the few selections
covered in four years.
TABLE 3.--WEEKS GIVEN TO READING OF DIFFERENT BOOKS IN HIGH SCHOOL OF
COMMERCE
Weeks to read
First Year
Ashmun's Prose Selections 9
Cricket on the Hearth 5
Sohrab and Rustum 3
Midsummer Night's Dream 6
Ivanhoe 11
Second Year
Autobiography of Franklin 7
Idylls of the King 10
Treasure Island 7
Sketch Book 7
Vision of Sir Launfal 3
Third Year
Silas Marner 7
Iliad (Bryant's--4 books) 5
Washington's Farewell Address 5
First Bunker Hill Oration 6
Emerson's Compensation 5
Roosevelt Book 6
Fourth Year
Markham's The Man with the Hoe 2
Tale of Two Cities 10
Public Duty of the Educated Man 4
Macbeth 11
Self-Reliance 6
When a short play of a hundred pages like Macbeth requires nearly
three months for reading, when almost two months are given to Treasure
Island and nearly three months to Ivanhoe, clearly it is something
other than reading that is being attempted.
Pages:
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32