III. It is hard and, in the history of the race, a late change, to receive language
through the eye which reads instead of through the ear which hears. Not only is
perception measurably quite distinctly slower, but book language is related to
oral speech somewhat as an herbarium is to a garden, or a museum of stuffed
specimens to a menagerie. The invention of letters is a novelty in the history of
the race that spoke for countless ages before it wrote. The winged word of mouth
is saturated with color, perhaps hot with feeling, musical with inflection, is the
utterance of a living present personality, the consummation of man's gregarious
instincts. The book is dead and more or less impersonal, best apprehended in
solitude, its matter more intellectualized; it deals in remoter second-hand
knowledge so that Plato reproached Aristotle as being a reader, one remove from
the first spontaneous source of original impressions and ideas, and the doughty
medieval knights scorned reading as a mere clerk's trick, not wishing to muddle
their wits with other people's ideas when their own were good enough for them.
But although some of the great men in history could not read, and though some
of the illiterate were often morally and intellectually above some of the literate,
the argument here is that the printed page must not be too suddenly or too early
thrust between the child and life. The plea is for moral and objective work, more
stories, narratives, and even vivid readings, as is now done statedly in more than
a dozen of the public libraries of the country, not so often by teachers as by
librarians, all to the end that the ear, the chief receptacle of language, be
maintained in its dominance, that the fine sense of sound, rhythm, cadence,
pronunciation, and speech-music generally be not atrophied, that the eye which
normally ranges freely from far to near be not injured by the confined treadmill
and zigzag of the printed page.
Closely connected with this, and perhaps psychologically worse, is the
substitution of the pen and the scribbling fingers for the mouth and tongue.
Speech is directly to and from the soul. Writing, the deliberation of which fits
age better than youth, slows down its impetuosity many fold, and is in every way
farther removed from vocal utterance than is the eye from the ear. Never have
there been so many pounds of paper, so many pencils, and such excessive
scribbling as in the calamopapyrus [Pen-paper] pedagogy of to-day and in this
country. Not only has the daily theme spread as infection, but the daily lesson is
now extracted through the point of a pencil instead of from the mouth. The
tongue rests and the curve of writer's cramp takes a sharp turn upward, as if we
were making scribes, reporters, and proof-readers. In some schools, teachers
seem to be conducting correspondence classes with their own pupils. It all makes
excellent busy work, keeps the pupils quiet and orderly, and allows the school