and tastes.
Suggestive and briefly descriptive lists of best books and authors by authorities
in different fields on which some time is spent in making selection, talks about
books, pooling knowledge of them, with no course of reading even advised and
much less prescribed, is the best guidance for developing the habit of rapid
cursory reading. Others before professor De Long, of Colorado, have held that
the power of reading a page in moment, as a mathematician sums up a column of
figures and as the artist Doré was able to read a book by turning the leaves, can
be attained by training and practise. School pressure should not suppress this
instinct of omnivorous reading, which at this age sometimes prompts the resolve
to read encyclopedias, and even libraries, or to sample everything to be found in
books at home. Along with, but never suppressing, it there should be some stated
reading, but this should lay down only kinds of reading like the four emphasized
in the last chapter or offer a goodly number of large alternative groups of books
and authors, like the five of the Leland Stanford University, and permit wide
liberty of choice to both teacher and pupil. Few triumphs of the uniformitarians,
who sacrifice individual needs to mechanical convenience in dealing with youth
in masses, have been so sad as marking off and standardizing a definite quantum
of requirements here. Instead of irrigating a wide field, the well-springs of
literary interest are forced to cut a deep canyon and leave wide desert plains of
ignorance on either side. Besides imitation, which reads what others do, is the
desire to read something no one else does, and this is a palladium of
individuality. Bad as is the principle, the selections are worse, including the
saccharinity ineffable of Tennyson's Princess (a strange expression of the
progressive feminization of the high school and yet satirizing the scholastic
aspiration of girls) which the virile boy abhors, books about books which are two
removes from life, and ponderous Latinity authors which for the Saxon boy
suggest David fighting in Saul's armor, and which warp and pervert the nascent
sentence-sense on a foreign model. Worst of all, the prime moral purpose of
youthful reading is ignored in choices based on form and style; and a growing
profusion of notes that distract from content to language, the study of which
belongs in the college if not in the university, develops the tendencies of
criticism before the higher powers of sympathetic appreciation have done their
work.[18]
(B) Other new mental powers and aptitudes are as yet too little studied. Very
slight are the observations so far made, of children's historic, which is so clearly
akin to literary, interest and capacity. With regard to this and several other