What the Schools Teach and Might Teach | Page 7

Island and nearly three months to Ivanhoe, clearly it is
something other than reading that is being attempted. It is perfectly
obvious that the high schools are attending principally to the mechanics
of expression and not to the content of the expression. The relative
emphasis should be reversed.
The amount of reading in the high schools should be greatly increased.
Those who object that rapid work is superficial believe that work must

be slow to be thorough. It should be remembered, however, that slow
work is often superficial and that rapid work is often excellent. In fact
the world's best workers are generally rapid, accurate, and thorough.
Ask any business man of wide experience. Now leaving aside pupils
who are slow by nature, it can be affirmed that pupils will acquire slow,
thorough habits or rapid, thorough habits according to the way they are
taught. If they are brought up by the slow plan, naturally when speeded
up suddenly, the quality of their work declines. They can be rapid,
accurate, and thorough only if such strenuous work begins early and is
continued consistently. Slow habits are undesirable if better ones can
just as well be implanted.
To avoid possible misunderstanding, it ought to be stated that the plan
recommended does not mean less drill upon the mechanical side of
reading. We are recommending a somewhat more modernized kind of
mechanics, and a much more strenuous kind of drill. The plan looks
both toward more reading and improved habits of reading.
One final suggestion finds here its logical place. Before the reading
work of elementary or high schools can be modernized, the city must
purchase the books used in the work. Leaving the supplying of books to
private purchase is the largest single obstacle in the way of progress.
Men in the business world will have no difficulty in seeing the logic of
this. When shoes, for example, were made by hand, each workman
could easily supply his own tools; but now that elaborate machinery
has been devised for their manufacture, it has become so expensive that
a machine factory must supply the tools. It is so in almost every field of
labor where efficiency has been introduced. Now the books to be read
are the tools in the teaching of reading. In a former day when a mastery
of the mechanics of reading was all that seemed to be needed, the
privately purchased textbook could suffice. In our day when other ends
are set up beyond and above those of former days, a far more elaborate
and expensive equipment is required. The city must now supply the
educational tools. It is well to face this issue candidly and to state the
facts plainly. Relative failure can be the only possible lot of reluctant
communities. They can count on it with the same assurance as that of a
manufacturer of shoes who attempts to employ the methods of former
days in competition with modern methods.
In this city the expenditures for supplementary textbooks have

amounted to something more than $31,000 in the past 10 years.
Approximately one-third of this sum was spent in the first seven years
of the decade and more than $20,000 in the past three years. This
indicates the rapid advance in this direction made under the present
school administration but the supply of books still falls far short of the
needs of the schools. A fair start has been made but nothing should be
permitted to obstruct rapid progress in this direction.

SPELLING
Cleveland has set apart an average amount of program time for spelling.
Possibly the study might more accurately be called word-study, since it
aims also at training for pronunciation, syllabification, vocabulary
extension, and etymology. Since much of the reading time is given to
similar word-study, the figures presented in Table 4 are really too small
to represent actual practice in Cleveland.
TABLE 4.--TIME GIVEN TO SPELLING
===================================================
===== | Hours per year | Per cent of grade time
|-----------------------|------------------------ Grade | Cleveland | 50 cities |
Cleveland | 50 cities -------------------------------------------------------- 1 |
47 | 54 | 6.5 | 6.3 2 | 63 | 66 | 7.2 | 7.3 3 | 79 | 73 | 9.0 | 8.0 4 | 63 | 67 | 7.1
| 6.9 5 | 51 | 61 | 5.7 | 6.3 6 | 47 | 58 | 5.4 | 5.9 7 | 47 | 52 | 5.4 | 5.3 8 | 47 |
51 | 5.4 | 5.1
===================================================
===== Total | 444 | 482 | 6.5 | 6.4
--------------------------------------------------------
The general plan of the course is indicated in the syllabus:
"Two words are made prominent in each lesson. Their pronunciation,
division into syllables, derivation, phonetic properties, oral and written
spelling and meaning, are all to be made clear to pupils.
"The