day problems and conditions or with their historical background. Probably
children should read many more selections of literary art than are found in the
textbooks and the supplementary sets now owned by the schools. But certainly
such cultural literary experience ought not to crowd out kinds of reading that are
of much greater practical value. Illumination of the things of serious importance
in the everyday world of human affairs should have a large place in reading
work of every school.
It is true that the supplementary sets of books have been chosen chiefly for their
content value. Many are historical, biographical, geographical, scientific, civic,
etc., in character. On the side of content, they have advanced much farther than
the textbooks toward what should constitute a proper reading course.
Unfortunately, the schools are very incompletely supplied with these sets. If we
consider all the sets of supplementary readers found in 10 or more schools, we
find that few of those assigned for fourth-grade reading are found in one-quarter
of the buildings and none are in half of them. The same is true of the books for
use in the fifth and seventh grades. Some of the books for the sixth and eighth
grades are found in more than half of the buildings, but there is none that is
found in as many as three-quarters of them.
The second thing greatly needed to improve the reading course is more reading
practice. One learns to do a thing easily, rapidly, and effectively by practice. The
course of study in reading should therefore provide the opportunity for much
practice. At present the reading texts used aggregate for the eight grades some
2100 pages. A third-grade child ought to read matter suitable for its intelligence
at 20 pages per hour, and a grammar-grade child at 30 to 40 pages per hour.
Since rapidity of reading is one of the desired ends, the practice reading should
be rapid. At the moderate rates mentioned, the entire series of reading texts
ought to be read in some 80 hours. This is 10 hours' practice for each of the eight
school years, an altogether insufficient amount of rapid reading practice. Of
course the texts can be read twice, or let us say three times, aggregating 30 hours
of practice per year. But even this is not more than could easily be accomplished
in two or three weeks of each of the years—always presuming that the reading
materials are rightly adapted to the mental maturity of the pupils. This leaves
weeks of the year unprovided for. To make good this deficit, the buildings are
furnished with supplementary books in sets sufficiently large to supply entire
classes. The average number of such sets per building is shown in the following
table: