WITH A READING GUIDE BY WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON, Ph. D., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH,HARVARD UNIVERSITY, PRESIDENT SMITH COLLEGE, NORTHAMPTON, MASS., SINCE 1917
The purpose of The Junior Classics is to provide, in ten volumes containingabout five thousand pages, a classified collection of tales, stories, andpoems, both ancient and modern, suitable for boys and girls of from six tosixteen years of age. Thoughtful parents and teachers, who realize the evils ofindiscriminate reading on the part of children, will appreciate the educationalvalue of such a collection. A child’s taste in reading is formed, as a rule, inthe first ten or twelve years of its life, and experience has shown that thechildish mind will prefer good literature to any other, if access to it is madeeasy, and will develop far better on literature of proved merit than on trivialor transitory material.
The boy or girl who becomes familiar with the charming tales and poems in thiscollection will have gained a knowledge of literature and history that will beof high value in other school and home work. Here are the real elements ofimaginative narration, poetry, and ethics, which should enter into theeducation of every English-speaking child.
This collection, carefully used by parents and teachers with due reference toindividual tastes and needs, will make many children enjoy good literature. Itwill inspire them with a love of good reading, which is the best possibleresult of any elementary education. The child himself should be encouraged tomake his own selections from this large and varied collection, the child’senjoyment being the object in view. A real and lasting interest in literatureor in scholarship is only to be developed through the individual’s enjoyment ofhis mental occupations.
The most important change which has been made in American schools and collegeswithin my memory is the substitution of leading for driving, of inspiration fordrill, of personal interest and love of work for compulsion and fear. Theschools are learning to use methods and materials which interest and attractthe children themselves. The Junior Classics will put into the home the meansof using this happy method.
Committing to memory beautiful pieces of literature, either prose or poetry,for recitation before a friendly audience, acting charades or plays, andreading aloud with vivacity and sympathetic emotion, are good means ofinstruction at home or at school This collection contains numerous admirablepieces of literature for such use. In teaching English and English literaturewe should place more reliance upon processes and acts which awaken emotion,stimulate interest, prove to be enjoyable for the actors, and result in givingchildren the power of entertaining people, of blessing others with noblepleasures which the children create and share.
From the home training during childhood there should result in the child ataste for interesting and improving reading which will direct and inspire itssubsequent intellectual life. The training which results in this taste for goodreading, however unsystematic or eccentric it may have been, has achieved oneprincipal aim of education; and any school or home training which does notresult in implanting this permanent taste has failed in a very importantrespect. Guided and animated by this impulse to acquire knowledge and exercisethe imagination through good reading,