The teacher and children's reading

There is no individual who to-day has a greater opportunity in guiding children's reading than the teacher. Too often the parent is either indifferent or grossly ignorant of what the child should read. Consequently, the mediocre, and even the vicious, falls into the hands of the young, and a low standard is established. This works havoc with the taste for good literature. The librarian is willing and anxious to help, but he must wait for the child to come to him before he can give advice. Even then a full confidence must be established before his influence can count for very much with the child. The teacher has every advantage. He has the child five days of the week. He has the pupil's confidence, for whatever teacher says is true, indisputable, beyond question. Then, too, the opportunity is afforded for knowing each child as an individual. The teacher can and should make a special case of each one, studying the background, the temperament, and the tastes of all under his care. So, with this opportunity before it is nothing short of the teacher's duty to recognize the problem of children's reading and to cope with it in an intelligent, enlightened manner. That the problem is with us there can be no doubt. Two distinct phases of it stand out most prominently. There is the child whose reading has been absolutely neglected, and there is the child who comes from the bookless home of nonreading parents. The former has been allowed, with the complacent remark that he would read enough to hurt him, to read whatever may have come his way. The latter knows nothing of the world of make-believe and unseen ships and far-off shores. Each of these constitutes a problem, and neither should be neglected. Probably more juvenile criminals have resulted from secretly hidden copies of Nick Carter, Diamond Dick, and the like, than from any other one source. So the effect of such reading is not merely negative, as so many negligent parents blindly suppose, but is positively harmful. And we cannot but pity the child who knows not books and is allowed to go through life without meeting Alice and the White Rabbit or Robin Hood and Little John. Fortunate, indeed, is the child who comes from that rare and cultured home where good books are as much a part of the daily family life as

Developmental psychology · Duty · Nothing · Pedagogy · Political science · Reading (process · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis