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"The Man without a Country," in the Atlantic Monthly; and Howells's "Venetian Life," in the Boston Advertiser; and these are but a few instances. (20: 357-361)

For the method of conducting the class work and arranging assignments in a course based on the reading of contemporary magazines, the student should read the whole article from which the above quotation is taken.

Short, serious articles on current events read for recreation. In connection with the reading of magazines for purposes of enjoyment it is not necessary to confine one's self exclusively to fiction. Many high-school students are interested in topics of the day and would do more or less reading concerning them if properly stimulated and encouraged. By proceeding from the news items and cartoons in the daily papers to news summaries and cartoons in the weekly reviews, and from these to editorials in the newspapers and articles of similar type in the weekly reviews or in the magazines, it would be possible to initiate habits of reading such material. As with adults, the initial interest is always aroused by the fact that something of general human interest is taking place. Hence the simple narrative of such an event is usually of quite general interest, and by skillful teaching the interest can be carried over to the more thoughtful discussions of current events. Certainly many adults find their daily or weekly recreation in the reading of such material, and many of the questions and events of the day possess interest and educational possibilities for adolescents.

If classics are taught, correct methods should be used. After we have considered current books of fiction and current newspapers, reviews, and magazines, with their installments of fiction and their discussions of the vital and serious problems of daily life, we have covered practically all the forms of reading for recreation which will play any considerable part in the lives of the adults that most high-school boys and girls will become. If teachers of English are themselves

acquainted with the good and the bad in current books and magazines, and are skilled teachers, they will find it easier to develop habits of good taste and refined enjoyment in reading by using material from contemporary social life than by using material from past social situations which are relatively remote from the interests of young persons of to-day. If, however, it is considered desirable to study classics which reflect former social situations or which may be considered good stories for all time, certain special points in method should be kept in mind.

Teacher must know what is adapted to students. The first point to be considered is the adaptation of the material to the interests of the students. The importance of the teacher's judgment in this connection is emphasized in the following statement by Professor F. T. Baker:

In the teaching of literature we are to assume [in the teacher], as I have already said, a good general knowledge of real literature, sound taste, and openness of mind.

But knowing literature in this way is not enough. One must come to know what it may mean, or may be made to mean, to the boy and girl-what things in a given poem or story or drama may have interest and significance to an immature mind. He must know, in other words, the points of contact between the literature and adolescent minds. If the main interest of the selection, as he sees it, is beyond the reach of boys and girls, he had better pass the selection by. Some girls will get the quaint humor and the gentle pathos of " Cranford"; most boys will not. The selfquestioning of George Eliot's heroines is too analytic and too excessively moral for boys and girls. George Eliot, except for "Silas Marner," belongs to the college age. The conceits of the Elizabethan and Cavalier lyrics presuppose a background of general reading and special interests which, for most people, postpones them indefinitely. (12: 340)

Satire on analytical methods with classics. - The second point to notice, if teachers expect to continue to teach literary

classics, is that the method should emphasize the obvious effects which the author intended to secure in his writing, and should not involve a detailed analytical study of his devices for securing these effects, or other matters of technique. An excellent satire on the current analytical and technical methods of studying literary classics is the following quotation from an address by Professor F. N. Scott. In it he describes an imaginary experiment in teaching English literature to a sophomore class in a high school in which the collegeentrance requirements in English literature had been abolished and the teachers left free to choose any books to be read by the students. He proceeds as follows:

If I were not engaged in this inferior business of teaching in a university, and my time were not all taken up with it, I should like to go into a high school where these formal prescriptions had been put aside and take charge of a class in English. I think I should talk to the pupils in some such way as this:

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The classes of former years have been reading this prescribed set of books a pretty poor sort of literature, in my opinion, and not proper for young people to read. You are very fortunate in being able to get rid of them. They are mostly very dull and uninteresting. There is the Iliad, for example, full of fighting and blood and the killing of men, and of armies clashing with one another in desperate conflicts where all the elementary and violent human passions are set free. Horrible! The International Peace Society cannot approve of anything of that sort. We will put this book aside, and I hope none of you will touch it. Then there is the Faërie Queene,' all about giants and maidens in distress, magic and mystery of all sorts-perfectly useless, a futile, silly thing, nearly as bad as the Arabian Nights. Don't go near it. I trust, also, that no one will attempt to read 'As You Like It,' which has a wrestling match in the very beginning (these minor athletics ought not to be allowed in literature) and tells about a girl who ran off into the forest in boy's dress-a most improper performance on her part. I am sure we ought not to talk about those things in this class. And even worse, perhaps, is Tennyson's ' Princess,'

where a prince, who ought to know better, disguises himself in woman's clothing and gains admission to a girls' academy. A scandalous thing! No gentleman would act in that way. In short, these books are all harmful and ought to be destroyed. For the present I will put them on the top shelf of the closet here, and just as soon as the janitor is at liberty we will have them burned.

"And now we are going to take up some books which I know you will enjoy. I want you to be just as enthusiastic as you can about them, for we are going to study them and study them hard, and you will get a great deal of profit out of them, and all will be greatly improved. For the boys we will take Captain Mayne Reid's 'Afloat in a Forest.' We are going to read that book a paragraph at a time and examine carefully every allusion in it. It is about some people who floated down the river Amazon. First we will draw a map of South America, locating the course of the river, and then we will ascertain how wide the Amazon is at various points and how fast the current moves. Finally we will determine the amount of silt which is deposited by the river at its mouth. Captain Mayne Reid, by the way, makes a mistake. He has three people float down in a much shorter time than they possibly could. You will see that this is so when we discover the ́exact relationship between the flow of the stream and their rate of progress. We shall go into these details with the utmost care, and after a little while you will write some nice little essays about them.

"For the benefit of the girls we will read in the same careful and scholarly way Robert Chambers's Heart Throbs of a Multimillionaire.' We will determine just how many times the heart throbs when two hearts are in unison, and learn about the two kinds of blood corpuscles, and so on, and there will be essays on all these things also.

But this is not all. Two years from now, when you are seniors, we will take these books up again and go over them and over them and over them until you know the answers to every last question in regard to all these mathematical, biological, chemical, and topographical things, and that will be absolutely delightful."

I think we can all prophesy what would be the result of such an experiment. If the room were not locked or the closet door locked, after two or three weeks those classics which were put on

the top shelf would have to be rebound, and as regards the other books, when their very names were mentioned, I think the pupils would fly shrieking. They would never want to see the "Heart Throbs of a Multimillionaire" again, or even "Afloat in the Forest," good as that book is. (19: 70-72)

Schools

Two lines of reading: studying and enjoying. have dealt so exclusively with subjects in which intellectual processes, such as reflective thinking or acquiring information, are uppermost, that teachers are at a loss to know what methods to use when the responses to be secured are primarily emotional. Similarly, they are at a loss to know how to proceed to develop abiding interests, that is, habitual tendencies to reach out after more experiences along certain lines. Hence, in teaching literature they apply the methods that have been used in the study of mathematics, science, grammar, history, etc., with the result that they develop an abiding distaste for literature instead of an abiding interest in it. An excellent discussion of these mistakes in method is found in an article entitled "Two Lines of High-School Reading,' which teachers of literature should read. (21: 476–482)

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Difficult to avoid snap courses in reading for enjoyment. Closely related to the difficulty that we have been discussing is the fear that a course intended to develop habits of enjoyment will become a snap. This means either that the students will not have to dig and grind to overcome difficulties or that they will not do the outside reading which is required. The first of these meanings need not concern us, since persons are not supposed to dig and grind to enjoy artistic productions. The second danger, namely, that students will not do the outside reading, is difficult to meet. As a first step, however, the list of readings can be made up of such interesting books that students will wish to read them. Secondly, the readings can be discussed in class in an informal way, so as to secure an indirect check upon the reading done by the students.

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