This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ... to the teacher To encourage in boys and girls a taste for good reading and to give them some knowledge of where to turn to satisfy that taste is without any question one of the most beneficent things the schools can do. The introduction of literature within recent years into the common school curriculum has had this object primarily in view, but has too often failed of its accomplishment. So long as careful investigations of the reading of children reveal a gulf between the reading done in school and that done outside which at first sight seems impassable; and so long as the reading of the majority of adults who have been educated in the common schools continues to be second-rate at best, and often cheap and sensational, we cannot pride ourselves upon the success of our literary courses in their primary object. This failure is due in many instances to the fact that the literature read in school is so far removed, both in subject matter and in form, from the things which a child chooses for himself, that the school-room procedures fail to make connection with the habits of out-of-school life. This schoolroom literature has consisted largely of a rather limited selection of standard English verse, of classics adapted to the understanding of children, and of children's stories. Now it need hardly be said that these tilings are all essential and desirable and that each has its place in a child's education. An acquaintance with English verse is an indispensable experience, one that should begin in the nursery and never be discontinued; an early introduction to the classics is invaluable; and children's stories help a child both to interpret and to enlarge his own life. But it is a rare boy or girl, man or woman whose voluntary reading will...