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Indiana University Studies 



tal to work in other subjects, and in the upper grades receives 

 almost no direct attention. Such incidental work as is given is 

 of course vahiable. The teacher in the arithmetic class finds 

 that she must teach the pupil to read the problem in order that 

 he may solve it; the teacher of historj^ finds the children do not 

 understand what they read and she must give a little help in read- 

 ing. Such incidental help is, however, usually regarded by the 

 teacher as outside the business in hand and a thing to be avoided 

 or gotten over Avith the least possible time and thought. What- 

 ever improvement in general reading ability the children acquire 

 they get, as it were, surreptitiously, because the average teacher 

 in the upper grades insists on assuming that the children can read. 

 If by some chance she discovers that a child fails in geography 

 because he can not read she is more than likely to regard it as 

 an evidence of inefficient teaching in the lower grades rather than 

 a legitimate problem for her to solve. In this respect she is much 

 like the high school teacher of science who regards a student's 

 training in English to be the exclusive business of the English 

 department, and, like him, she makes the very serious error of 

 believing that effective thinking can go on in other fields without 

 adequate language training. 



An adequate investigation would doubtless show that many 

 of the failures in other school subjects are due to the inability of 

 pupils to read, and that children learn to solve problems, to 

 understand the history and geography texts, and to do effective 

 work in these fields just in proportion as they acquire a mastery 

 of the language in which these texts are written. When we con- 

 sider further that the texts in school subjects which children must 

 use in the seventh and eighth grades contain prose very much 

 more difficult than anything the children meet in the reading 

 work of the earlier grades, it becomes evident that the easy 

 reliance which teachers put upon the reading ability of pupils 

 is misplaced. Training in reading should be given on the basis 

 of the advanced prose which children must interpret, and just 

 because the pupils — so long as they remain in school — are pas- 

 sing on to more and more difficult texts, this training must be 

 continued thruout the elementary grades and probably also thru 

 the high school and into the college. In time many children 

 learn to teach themselves, but the school authorities can never 

 be certain that this will occur, and are always under the obligation 

 to see that the essential improvement is taking place. This view 



