kind of benefit from the study of grammar? The present state of pedagogical knowledge does not permit a precise answer to this question. The acts of discrimination required in the mastery of grammar vary between those that may be performed by the average ten-year-old pupil and those that would tax the powers of a college freshman. Manifestly this applies also to the knowledge of the mind which an intelligent study of grammar requires.

There are, then, phases of the subject easily within the grasp of the pupils of the elementary school. But it does. not follow that because they are, grammar should be made a part of the elementary-school course. No one has a right to form a definitive opinion on that point until he has made an exact comparison of the precise benefits to be derived from the study of grammar with those that might be derived from the study of some substituted subject. That comparison no one can now make in any exact sense; it is safe to say that no one will ever be able to make it. We shall probably always be obliged to content ourselves with a feeling as to what is true in this direction a feeling that can never be expressed in the terms of an exact science.

QUESTIONS ON THE TEXT.

1. Show that spelling has little educational value. 2. What are the uses of forgotten knowledge?

3. What does Fitch mean by "fruit-bearing"?

4. What is meant by conventional value?

5. What words should children be taught to spell ?

6. What is the conventional value of the ability to use good English?

7. How does grammar cultivate the power of discrimination? 8. Illustrate how it promotes the study of the mind.

9. What is the difference between a logical and a psychological concept?

10. What is the difference between opinion and knowledge, and in what way does the study of grammar help to make it clear? II. At what age should the study of grammar be undertaken?

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS.

1. Can you illustrate from your own experience the fact that you have derived benefit from learning some things which you have entirely forgotten?

2. Illustrate the fact that growth in intellectual power consists in the development of the capacity of discrimination.

3. What relation does grammar bear to logic, psychology, and history?

4. Mention some parts of grammar that the primary pupil can comprehend, and some that are beyond the range of the grammar school pupil.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF READING.

Reading and Education. This chapter could with almost equal propriety be entitled The Educational Value of Education. For the process of education might without serious inaccuracy be defined as reading the right books in the right way. He who leaves school with his taste so cultivated that he can discriminate between good books and bad, and with his powers so developed that he can assimilate what he reads, has the essentials of an education; while he who cannot do this is at bottom an uneducated man, no matter what universities he may have attended or how many degrees may have been conferred upon him.

Nevertheless the training resulting from such subjects as arithmetic, grammar, language lessons, nature study, and even history could not, without an undue extension of the term, be included under reading as the word is used in this country. What is here proposed for discussion is the educational value of that school exercise which goes by the name of reading.

Dr. Harris on the Educational Value of Reading. Dr. Harris maintains that the mere process of learning to read is "far more disciplinary to the mind than any species of observation of differences among material things, because of the fact that the word has a twofold character ad

dressed to external sense as spoken sound to the ear, or as written and printed word to the eye-but containing a meaning or sense addressed to the understanding and only to be seized by introspection." "The pupil," he continues, "must call up the corresponding idea by thought, memory, and imagination, or else the word will cease to be a word and remain only a sound or character. On the other hand, observation of things and movements does not necessarily involve this twofold act of analysis, introspective and objective, but only the latter the objective analysis. It is granted that we all have frequent occasion to condemn poor methods of instruction as teaching words rather than things. But we admit that we mean empty sounds or characters rather than true words. Our suggestions for the correct method of teaching amount in this case simply to laying stress on the meaning of the word, and to setting the teaching process on the road of analysis of content rather than form. In the case of words used to store up external observation the teacher is told to repeat and make alive again the act of observation by which the word obtained its original meaning. In the case of a word expressing a relation between facts or events, the pupil is to be taken step by step through the process of reflection by which the idea was built up. Since the word, spoken and written, is the sole instrument by which reason can fix, preserve, and communicate both the data of sense and the relations discovered between them by reflection, no new method in education has been able to supplant in the school the branches, reading and penmanship. But the real improvements in method have led teachers to lay greater and greater stress on the internal factor of the word, on its meaning, and have in manifold ways shown

how to repeat the original experiences that gave the meaning to concrete words, and the original comparisons and logical deductions by which the ideas of relation and causal processes arose in the mind and required abstract words to preserve and communicate them."1

The Educational Value of Reading and Observation Lessons. While what is here said as to improvements in the methods of teaching reading may be readily granted, the validity of the argument to show the superiority of the educational value of learning to read over observation lessons is not beyond dispute. For, however true it may be that the observation of a flower, for example, calls for nothing but objective analysis, while learning to read a simple sentence, as The dog runs, involves not only this, but the recalling of the thought which it expresses, we have no right to draw from this any conclusions as to the comparative disciplinary effect of the two processes on the mind until we have learned which of the two calls forth the more strenuous exertion. If the objective analysis involved in the study of the flower demands more concentrated attention than do both the objective and the introspective analysis required in reading a sentence, then the single act of analysis necessary in the one case is more disciplinary than the double act involved in the other.

From this point of view it is at once evident that the question whether the observation of things or reading is the more disciplinary cannot be answered. For while in some cases the introspective analysis required in intelligent reading is so simple that the school child in the lowest grades has no difficulty in performing it, in others it tests Report of the Committee of Fifteen.

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