Children and Their Books | Page 2

previous experience to which to refer. Edward Thring says:
"The emptiness of a young boy's mind is often not taken into account,

at least emptiness so far as all knowledge in it being of a fragmentary
and piecemeal description, nothing complete. It may well happen that
an intelligent boy shall be unable to understand a seemingly simple
thing, because some bit of knowledge which his instructor takes it for
granted he possesses, and probably thinks instinctive, is wanting to fill
up the whole."
To impart the desire for knowledge and the power of getting it is next
to character-building the most important work of the school. Encourage
self-activity to the fullest extent. When the child asks a question be
careful not to put him off or discourage him, but if it is possible to
show him how to find the answer for himself do so, even at the expense
of considerable time and trouble. Aid that quenches curiosity retards
mental growth. Many children ask questions merely for the sake of
talking, and forget the question before they have heard the answer. As
the child gradually becomes able to use them show him how to employ
books as tools. Keep reference books on low shelves or tables in
convenient places, where it is easy to get at them. Show the child that
the dictionary, the atlas, and the encyclopaedia contain stores of
knowledge accumulated by the work of many scholars for many years
and laboriously classified and arranged for the benefit of seekers after
information. Show him how to investigate a subject under several
different titles and how to get what he needs from a book by the use of
the table of contents, index, and running head lines, and how to use
card catalogues and Poole's Index. Help him to look up on the map the
places he reads about. Explain the scale of miles and teach him to use
his imagination in making the map real; show him that the dots
represent towns and cities with churches, parks, and trolley cars, and
that the waving lines are rivers on which are steam boats carrying the
productions of one section to another.
As he grows older teach him to draw his own conclusions from
conflicting statements and to preserve the happy medium between
respect for the authority of books and confidence in his own
observation. Most boys and girls do not observe and they do not think;
they have no opinions except those made for them by others. We are
too apt to cultivate the memory and to neglect observation, imagination,

and judgment. The result is a wooden type of mind which has too great
respect for printed matter and little initiative in accurate observation
and in using the imagination and the judgment in making what has been
observed and read practically useful.
Encourage the child to talk about what he reads in a natural way, but do
not allow him to become a prig by saying what he supposes you would
like to have him rather than what he really thinks.
Do not be too eager to stamp your individuality upon the child; he has a
right to his own. Find out what his tastes and inclinations are and
develop him through them. Ascertain what he is really interested in;
very often it is something quite different from what you suppose. His
point of view is different from yours. Translate what you wish him to
be interested in into terms of his own life and experience. Success in
education comes to a great extent from skill in establishing relations
between what the child already knows and that which you wish him to
acquire.
No part of education has more to do with character-building than the
inculcating of a love of good literature. S. S. Laurie calls literature "the
most potent of all instruments in the hands of the educator, whether we
have regard to intellectual growth or to the moral and religious life". "It
is easy," he says, "if only you set about it in the right way, to engage
the heart of a child, up to the age of eleven or twelve, on the side of
kindliness, generosity, self-sacrifice; and to fill him, if not with ideals
of greatness and goodness, at least with the feelings or emotions which
enter into these ideals. You thus lay a basis in feeling and emotion on
which may be built a truly manly character at a later period--without
such a basis you can accomplish nothing ethical, now or at any future
time. But when the recipient stage is past, and boys begin to assert
themselves, they have a tendency to resist, if not to resent, professedly
moral and religious teaching; and this chiefly because it then comes to
them or is presented to