impulse to widen the vernacular. To pause to learn several foreign equivalents of
things of sense may be anti-educational if it limits the expansion of thought in
our own tongue. The two are, in fact, often inversely related to each other. In
giving a foreign synonym when the mind seeks a new native word, the
pedagogue does not deal fairly. In this irradiation into the mother tongue,
sometimes experience with the sentiment or feeling, act, fact, or object precedes,
and then a name for it is demanded, or conversely the sound, size, oddness or
jingle of the word is first attractive and the meaning comes later. The latter needs
the recognition and utilization which the former already has. Lists of favorite
words should be wrought out for spelling and writing and their meanings
illustrated, for these have often the charm of novelty as on the frontier of
knowledge and enlarge the mental horizon like new discoveries. We must not
starve this voracious new appetite "for words as instruments of thought."
Interest in story-telling rises till twelve or thirteen, and thereafter falls off
perhaps rather suddenly, partly because youth is now more interested in
receiving than in giving. As in the drawing curve we saw a characteristic age
when the child loses pleasure in creating as its power of appreciating pictures
rapidly arises, so now, as the reading curve rises, auditory receptivity makes way
for the visual method shown in the rise of the reading curve with augmented zest
for book-method of acquisition. Darkness or twilight enhances the story interest
in children, for it eliminates the distraction of sense and encourages the
imagination to unfold its pinions, but the youthful fancy is less bat-like and can
take its boldest flights in broad daylight. A camp-fire, or an open hearth with
tales of animals, ghosts, heroism, and adventure can teach virtue, and
vocabulary, style, and substance in their native unity.
The pubescent reading passion is partly the cause and partly an effect of the new
zest in and docility to the adult world and also of the fact that the receptive are
now and here so immeasurably in advance of the creative powers. Now the
individual transcends his own experience and learns to profit by that of others.
There is now evolved a penumbral region in the soul more or less beyond the
reach of all school methods, a world of glimpses and hints, and the work here is
that of the prospector and not of the careful miner. It is the age of skipping and
sampling, of pressing the keys lightly. What is acquired is not examinable but
only suggestive. Perhaps nothing read now fails to leave its mark. It can not be
orally reproduced at call, but on emergency it is at hand for use. As Augustine
said of God, so the child might say of most of his mental content in these
psychic areas, "If you ask me, I do not know; but if you do not ask me, I know