p. 28 | How to Help Children in Their Reading

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 8, 1885

How to Help Children in Their Reading.

By Rev. Charles H. Richards

BUNYAN tells us that when the devil sets out to capture Mansoul, Eyegate is one of his favorite points of attack. This is important to remember in the training of children—and especially with reference to their reading. The children of our day read prodigiously. Books and periodicals open up to them another world from that of their every-day experiences. Through the imagination the printed page introduces them to other scenes and companions as though they led a double life; and these often color and mould character and conduct as powerfully as the scenes and associates of the active hours.

This throws a heavy responsibility upon their parents, teachers, and friends. For if there is anything in which a child needs guidance, restraint, encouragement, and help, it is in this matter of determining what and how to read. He should not be left to himself to devour indiscriminately whatever comes in his way any more than he should be turned loose into a room where foods and poisons stand invitingly side by side. It is as dangerous for a child to grow up in the book-world alone, with no one to put him on his guard against the contaminations and perils that lurk there, as to let him grow up unfriended amid the temptations and dangers of a great city. Father, mother, day school teacher, Sunday-school teacher, librarian, and all wise friends, have it as a sacred and urgent duty to look carefully after the children's reading, to know what they are reading and how they read it; and by wise counsel and assistance to put them on the track of such reading as will strengthen, enrich, and ennoble their lives.

When we ask how the elders can help the younger readers in this matter, the first answer that suggests itself is that they should guard them with utmost vigilance from bad books and papers. These include not only the indecent and salacious productions, which are read for the most part on the sly, being passed stealthily, and under pledge of secrecy, from hand to hand on their corrupting work. Children should be warned against these, and taught to loathe them as reptiles carrying the venom of hell, so that as soon as the serpent's head appears they will put the heel of indignant rejection instantly upon it and crunch it into the dust. But books containing copious descriptions of crime and criminals are also dangerous.

Detailed biographies of vicious characters, the thrilling exploits of daring rascals, the presentation of crime in a jocular and airy manner, as though sin were funny instead of hateful, is very fascinating to some boys; it opens up to their excited imaginations a side of life that is novel and full of surprising episodes. But association with scoundrels breeds the scoundrel spirit, and the criminal classes are being constantly recruited by means of this incendiary stuff. Other bad reading may be found in the sensational and vulgarizing stories of 'dime' and 'nickel libraries;' and much of the so-called 'religious reading' for children is also mere weak sentimentalism and literary drivel, that ought not to be allowed to go into a child's hands without thorough sifting. Guard them against anything that will vitiate, dissipate, or weaken the mind or moral nature.

Then keep them well supplied with the best reading. Do not cater to mere love of excitement, else you will make them literary inebriates, rushing feverishly from book to book, as the drunkard goes from glass to glass, to satisfy a diseased craving. Give them that which will awaken a healthy relish for good literature, and which will tend to make them wise, strong, upright, and noble-hearted.

Some will object that their children have no taste for the best things. The good books selected for them they throw aside as dull and spiritless; they prefer spicy stories, exciting adventure, and fun with a dash of slang in it. The parents conclude that the taste must mature before it will readily turn to better things, and that it is well enough to let them read what they please till they outgrow their present fancy for trash. No greater mistake could be made. The literary taste gets its direction fixed in childhood as a rule. If a child manifests a perverted or depraved taste, you cannot begin too soon to reform it, unless you wish him through life to prefer light and worthless reading. Reconstruct his literary appetite. If he does not like the best, let your ingenuity and patient training teach him to like it. If parents and teachers are willing to give self-denial and painstaking care enough to it, they will be surprised, and so will the children, to see how they presently turn with repugnance from things beneath them, and with eager relish to books that both interest and help them.

All who mean to help children in this matter should themselves have a high standard of reading. The general sentiment of the household goes far to determine the child's ideas. The book that the teacher talks about, or that the librarian recommends, will attract attention and interest. Contempt for trash, and enthusiasm for the best reading should be so vital an element in the family atmosphere that it should be breathed in by the child, as the instinct for good behavior ought to be. Charles Dudley Warner says the reason why children read trash 'is because their parents, or older persons about them, either have not the habit of reading, or they also read trash. . . . I suspect that the vast majority of people care little for reading, except as it furnishes them a smattering of news or gives them a temporary excitement.' Children will be quick to catch the tone of such persons, and will care only for the newspaper, the novel, and the picture paper.

It is a great help for the parent or older friend to read with the child. The companionship in letters helps the younger one over the hard places, and tends to interest him in what might otherwise grow dull. Mothers have carried their boys of twelve through Plutarch's Lives, and D'Aubigné's Reformation, and Prescott's and Motley's histories, and the poems of Scott, and Milton, and Whittier, and Longfellow, to the growing delight of the boys, and the profit of both parties. A special advantage of this method is the relish it awakens in the child for things that interest maturer minds.

It is a great point gained when a boy feels that it is a little beneath him to be interested in children's literature chiefly. 'We have little liking,' says Miss C. M. Yonge, 'for 'books for boys.' If boys have healthy, intelligent minds, they would be doing much better if they were reading books for men.' It helps create a relish for this higher class of reading to read with the children.

Another help is to give the children illustrated editions of the best books; the picture tells the story even more vividly than the words. Better yet is the custom, practiced in some schools, of letting them make their own illustrated editions of history, travel, or biography, with pictorial papers, scissors, and scrap-book. Another method of illustrated readings is to connect the children's reading with their studies; as, in studying geography, to read 'poems of places' in connection with localities described; in studying history, to read stories that illustrate a particular epoch, with the account of the illustrious men and the great writers of the period; in studying mechanics, to read the stories of inventors and inventions. Good reading thus gains a practical value to the child's mind from the association, and so gains attractiveness.—Rev. Charles H. Richards, in Congregationalist.