# The High School Boy and His Problems/Books and Reading

Printing, which is not such an ancient art after all, helped very much to make books more plentiful. Before printing was invented the man outside of the Church who owned a book or who could get at one easily was almost as rare as the man who kept a pet elephant. There were not many books, and those there were, were hard to get at and had few readers. The ability to read was not so common as today, for schools were not run at public expense, and education was not general and was not compulsory. Books were laboriously lettered by hand and bound with great care. It took a long time to make a book. Sometimes they were chained to the table upon which they lay, so that people might have an opportunity to read them and yet not be able to carry them away. The reading habit was, therefore, not a common one.
Even after printing was introduced, books did not at once become plentiful. For generations, the daily newspaper was almost unthought of. When it was established, it had little circulation excepting in cities, and neither newspapers nor books were generally to be found in the houses of the common people. They could not afford them, and they did not realize either the pleasure or the benefits of reading.
Respect for books, even within the experience of our ​grandparents, was much greater than it now is. It was a signal honor to be given a book. When as a boy of ten Jim Justice, our neighbor boy, won a copy of Robinson Crusoe as a prize for regular attendance at school, he was looked upon almost with as much respect as today is accorded the returning soldier who has won the Distinguished Service Medal. It is not so in these times. Books are too common; they are too easily obtained and too generally at our disposal.
I ran across grandmother's geography this morning, The Village Elementary Geography, standing primly beside Bob's First Year Latin Lessons, on our bookshelves. Bob is my nephew who is in high school. Grandmother's book is yellowed with age, but, save for a few thumb prints, the pages are clean and without dog ears. It is still covered with the bright calico which her grandmother sewed on for her to keep the book from being soiled or injured when the little girl carried it to school. Grandmother's name and the date is on the flyleaf written in a cramped childish hand, for grandmother was only eight when she got the book, and the date is near the beginning of the last century. She always handled the book with the greatest care, for they had respect for books in those days.
Robert's book presents a somewhat different appearance. It was bought only a few months ago, but the cover is torn and battered and hangs by a thread. Inside, the pages are mutilated or missing, and pen sketches ​and hieroglyphics are scrawled across the text making it almost unreadable. As I turn through, I find the dignified Cicero wearing a sombrero and smoking a pipe, and Cæsar with a beard done in India ink. The book has suffered every insult and indignity possible to be thought of by a boy of fourteen. Robert knows more than grandmother did at his age, but neither he nor the children with whom he associates have the love and respect for books that grandmother had as a girl.
As for me I should as soon see a dear friend abused as a book I have worked with and come to know and to understand. I do not mind the ordinary wear of use and age any more than I am annoyed by wrinkles in the faces of my friends who are growing old, but intentional indignities hurt me.
Is it because books are so plentiful or so cheap that we care so little about them? Is it because they cost us now no sacrifice, no struggle, no tender thought or anxious anticipation that we think of them so lightly and toss them about so carelessly? I have heard grandmother tell of how happy she was and how proud when her father first put the little geography into her hands. Neither high school nor college students often feel so today.
The story of Lincoln, unable to find a half dozen books in the community in which he lived and willing to work days in order that he might become the owner of a worn and rain-soaked volume of biography seems almost ​unbelievable to the young boy of today who spends his money freely on moving picture shows and ice cream sodas, but who would seldom go far or suffer much to get a book, and who, in fact, is often bored if he is called upon to read one.
Books were never so readily within the reach of all as today; newspapers were never before so abundant and so full of varied information as at the present time; a bulky and profusely illustrated magazine that will keep one reading for many hours, may be bought for a dime. There is no one so poor that he can not buy reading matter, or there are not many who are not now within reasonable distance of libraries with free access to the most varied assortment of books and newspapers. Few people, in this country at least, can assert truthfully that there is nothing for them to read. No doubt the very abundance of books, the ease with which we get at them, causes us to value them less than we otherwise should and to respect them less. That which is most difficult is obtain is most valued. Tom Sawyer recognized this fact when he had the garden fence whitewashed by his eager pals. If we had fewer books we should think more highly of books and respect them more. We see them scattered about us so abundantly that we take them like automobiles and aëroplanes as a matter of course.
If a high school boy does not have the reading habit it is certainly not from lack of opportunity to acquire it. In ​the elementary school and high school curriculum more time is given to English, including reading, grammar, literature, and composition, than to any other two or three subjects in the school course combined. Perhaps the reason why young people read so badly when called upon orally to interpret a page, and care so little for reading, is that they have so much of it. We can all become sated with the most delightful things; I have known boys who ate so much cake and ice cream that they never wanted any again.
Another reason, perhaps, why high school and college students (for the difficulty is not confined to the high school) read so badly and take so little pleasure in reading is because all through their school life their taste is forced, they are made to read what is far beyond their ability to understand and to enjoy, and they are taught to cultivate critical judgment rather than appreciation. They analyze what they read when they should be allowed to give themselves over to the pleasure of reading. They attempt to be critics rather than lovers of books. They are told what is good and what effect it should have upon their minds and their emotions, and they play the hypocrite often by pretending to feel what they are told they should feel.
"What do you think," I asked my fourteen-year-old boys in Sunday School a few years ago, "is the best book in the world? What is the best book you ever read?"
"The Bible," one boy piously answered.
​"Shakspere's Macbeth," another literary hypocrite shouted waving his hand in the air. Not one of the boys told the truth; they were afraid to do so. Down in their hearts they were really enshrining Huckleberry Finn or one of the heroes of Nick Carter's exciting tales. They were saying what they thought they ought to say. They were following the example which many of us who are older set for them in our spoken estimate of the fine arts, especially of music and painting. It takes training and experience and education to enjoy the best things in these arts, and many of us have not brought ourselves to the point of really enjoying what is best. We yawn or sleep through a concert, or we stand bored before a great painting praising the artistic product with our lips but getting little enjoyment out of it in our souls, because we do not yet know enough to enjoy it. And that is the way many boys feel about the literature they are forced to read and to criticise in the high school.
There is little doubt in my mind that Mr. William Shakspere was a great writer of English poetry and of the English drama; he was, perhaps, the greatest writer that we have ever known, but he is not the most easily understood, nor is he ever likely to give the greatest enjoyment to young and immature minds. Even in college it is not common to find a young fellow of eighteen or twenty who picks up a volume of Shakspere to read for pleasure to fill in an hour of leisure. I confess I was not a little startled a few months ago when an eighteen-year-old ​convalescent in our hospital asked me to bring him a book to read while he was getting well.
"What would you like?" I asked, expecting of course that he would say Harold Bell Wright or O. Henry, or suggest a stray copy of the Cosmopolitan or the Red Book.
"I think I should like to read Henry V," was his reply. The only explanation is that he must have had a rare mind or an unusually inspiring teacher.
I do not wish to suggest to high school boys that they are justified in spending their time on trashy reading. The better things they read and understand and enjoy, the better for them. I am convinced that they are asked to read many books good in themselves, but far beyond their understanding and their appreciation. It is the reading habit which they should cultivate, and no one is likely to get that habit unless reading is a pleasure for him, unless books tempt him when he sees them lying about, and lure him away from his work or from other appealing pleasures. I know few boys who would decline an invitation to a moving picture show in order to finish an interesting book.
There is a good deal said against the reading of trashy books by boys, and I think much that has been said is not without a foundation of truth; the practice is too general. I think I read up to the age of fifteen as much trashy stuff as any normal boy of my age. I read Mary J. Holmes and E. P. Roe and all their clan, from Edna Rivers to Barriers Burned Away. I went through the goodie-goodie ​volumes in our Sunday school library at the rate of two or three a week. I waited with the utmost impatience for the weekly copy of the Saturday Night contributed to the family stock of reading matter by our hired man, and containing the most exciting tales of murder, mystery and adventure. I remember still the lurid title of one of these tales—Bentley Burroughs, or The Skeleton Hand.
I had something on hand to read all the time, and, fortunately I developed the habit of reading. In the course of events the stock of sensational and sentimental and adventurous stuff gave out, but my appetite still had to be satisfied. I went quite naturally to Dumas and Scott and Cooper and Bulwer-Lytton; to Dickens and Eliot and Thackeray. I even read some poetry at my father's suggestion, and I got a good deal of insight into historical works. Before I was grown, I had read pretty widely, far more widely, in fact, than I should ever under any other circumstances have had the time to do. I am thankful every day that thus early in my life I became acquainted with so wide a range of literature, even if some of the books I read are not now contained in the admirable list suggested by President Eliot. I can not now see how I was hurt in any way. I got enough, after a while, of the poorer stuff and ultimately developed an appetite for something solider and better.
I do not believe that my experience is unique. I have asked my friends, many of them, whose reputation for clear thinking and balanced judgment in literary matters ​is better than my own, and not one of them has any serious regrets concerning his early reading, which was in many cases quite as light as mine. The reading of the poorer forms of literature often makes the good better in contrast. The main thing is that one should get the habit of reading. If that is developed early, the problem of cultivating a liking for what is good and of eventually developing a real interest in what is best, is not so difficult.
The high school boy is at the age when adventure and mystery are most appealing to him. He will learn to read this sort of literature most readily. He might as well be fed on Dumas and Jules Verne and Conan Doyle and Stevenson as upon Nick Carter; he might as well have good English and stimulating healthy adventure as the opposite.
The reading habit is cultivated like any other habit, and the taste for books developed like any other taste, by practice, and persistence. We can learn anything if we want to do so and if we keep at it. The reading habit is a good one because it furnishes us a ready method of getting information, of learning about what has been done and what is doing in the world. We would stagnate if we did not read; we could make little progress in any sort of work without reading. The business or professional man who does not read soon gets to be a back number in his work.
There is nothing that can give one more pleasure than the habit of reading. If one has learned to read and ​to enjoy books he need never have a dull or a lonesome moment. No matter where he may be, if he has an interesting book at hand, he can soon in imagination surround himself with interesting scenes and pleasing friends, and his cares and his boredom will vanish. If a boy likes to read, an evening at home alone, a long wait in an otherwise dull railway station, lack of companionship for a time, isolation of any sort, will not only have no horrors for him, but may even be for a time a source of actual enjoyment. I always like a rainy day or a stormy night in winter, or a quiet undisturbed Sunday afternoon, because it furnishes a chance to stay in-doors and to cultivate the companionship of an entertaining book.
When I hear boys, or men, complaining of the fact that Sunday is such a long, dull day, that there is nowhere to go and nothing to do, when I see them yawning with the weariness of leisure and strolling aimlessly down the street tired of existence, I know for one thing that they find little comfort in religion, and for another, that they have not cultivated the reading habit, and so find little pleasure in books. I am always sorry to think what pleasure they have missed, and I wish that I might lead them into the friendships and the companionships which are so easily formed through reading. Think what it must mean not to have known and enjoyed Wilkins Micawber, and King Lear, and Tom Tulliver, and D'Artagnan and Sidney Carton and Colonel Newcome ​and Tom Jones, and Becky Sharpe, and all the myriad of interesting characters with which literature is filled. Life must be pretty dull to those whose acquaintance is limited to real people only.
One of the most placid and contented persons I have ever known was an old lady who was totally blind and who was forced for several years to lie in bed a good deal of the time alone. I used to drop in upon her frequently and usually quite unexpectedly. The great surprise to me was that I never found her depressed or with time hanging heavy on her hands. She was uniformally cheerful and happy and with a mind that seemed constantly occupied with something that was interesting and pleasing.
"What do you doto occupy your time and your thoughts when you are so much alone," I asked her once, "especially when you can not see?"
"I visit with my old friends," she said.
Then she went on to tell me that all through early and middle life, although she had had little opportunity for education in the schools, she had been a constant reader. I was amazed to discover how much she had read and how well she remembered it. Now that she was old and blind she went over all these literary experiences in her mind daily, and she got from the recollection infinite pleasure and recreation. Just the day I had been talking to her, she told me, she had been recalling the incidents in Scott's Heart of Midlothian ​the scenes of which were made more vivid to her from the fact that she had been born in northern England, had visited Edinburgh as a girl, and knew very well, because her own youthful feet had trodden it, the road which Jeanie Deans had taken from Edinburgh to London when she went to plead for her sister's life. Her early reading was the source of hourly pleasure to her, and made quite bearable an existence which might otherwise have been wretched even to contemplate.
No one has so much time at his disposal to learn to read as the young person before he enters high school and during his high school course. More than this, youth is the habit-forming time, as I have said, more than once. If one does not learn the habit of reading then, he is not likely ever to acquire it. It would seem easy to prove that with all the opportunities furnished the boy for reading while he is in the elementary school, and after he enters high school, with the great variety of reading he is required to do, and with the wide range of books from which he may choose, he would learn to like something, he would cultivate his interest, and would continue his acquaintance with books during vacation and after he had graduated from high school. The number of boys, however, who regularly and of their own choice read books while they are in the high school and after they get out is small, and the class of books in which they find interest is often very poor. The training in English in our schools does not develop the ​reading habit generally nor does it awaken generally an interest in good not to say the best, literature. I have suggested previously that I believe the explanation of this condition arises from the fact that we force the taste of young people and feed them at first on things they can not assimilate. We give them literary indigestion, and they revolt from reading.
There is scarcely a day of his life until he finishes high school that a boy might not devote at least a short time to reading from which he could derive both pleasure and profit. If you want to learn to read, select first the things that are most interesting to you—history, science, poetry, fiction, the news of the day, or whatever it may be. Read the best things that you can understand and enjoy. You will find that scientific facts as presented by Darwin and Huxley and John Burroughs are not only quite as dependable as those which commonplace writers give you, but they are so simply and so interestingly presented that they read like a story book; they will develop your scientific interest far more quickly than if you give your time to some other author who knows less and writes worse. If you enjoy history, then read Macaulay or John Fiske, or Motley or any one of a dozen men who will give you all the facts that a less brilliant author might present, and who will do it in a style that is at once delightful and inspiring. If you are drawn to the fiction of heroism and adventure you will not know what delight there is in romance at its best until you have tasted ​the incomparable Dumas who will lead you through one volume and another with a fascination that is impossible to resist. The boy who once gets into the Three Musketeers and who lays it down before it is finished, has a self-control which is beyond my understanding.
If you find it not easy to cultivate the reading habit from lack of interest or for apparent lack of time, you will be tempted to it rather subtly by having a book near by, so that when you drop into an easy chair, or stretch yourself on a couch, for a little rest or to wait until dinner is ready, it will catch your eye or fall easily into your hand. If the book is your own, and especially if you have been led through curiosity or passing fancy to pay for it with your own money, the temptation will be all the stronger for you to see what is in it; and, if you have any persistence, having once begun it, you will be sure to stay with it until you have finished it. The reading of one book almost invariably leads to the reading of another, and so gradually the habit fastens itself upon you.
The difficulty which most men have in college or later in life in accomplishing as much reading as is set for them to do, is due to their not having cultivated the habit of reading rapidly. The ability to read rapidly comes from experience; if you have read little you are quite likely to read slowly. Reading is very largely a mechanical process acquired through daily practice like playing the piano or operating a typewriter. If ​it takes you all the evening to get through a few pages, it is quite certain that you have not cultivated very fully the reading habit. Here, again, the value of beginning while young and while you have leisure to cultivate the habit of reading rapidly and reading widely is apparent.
The wider the range of your reading, the more enjoyment you will get out of it, and the greater will be the development of your knowledge, your sympathies, and your imagination. Everyone should read the daily newspapers in order that he may have an intelligent knowledge of the world and its progress at home and abroad. No intelligent boy can now afford to be ignorant of the progress of events in all lands. The world is, after all, a pretty small place, and it is not very hard, if one tries, to know something about a good deal of it. If you read the newspaper as you should, you will read it pretty thoroughly from the feature news on the first page through the editorials to the market reports on the last page. The cartoons, the jokes, and the sporting page will, of course, interest you most, but you can easily cultivate an interest in other things.
You should keep up with the literature of the profession or business in which you are engaged or in which you expect to engage. It is not enough, however, if you are interested in farming to be satisfied with reading an agricultural journal and the local weekly paper. I know a good many farmers who get no further in their reading ​than the perusal once a week of a stock journal. These are not very progressive men, however. The newspapers and the technical journals are for information largely. You should read something regularly for inspiration, for kindling your imagination, and for developing your ideals. Read poetry. The better magazines are full of pleasant and inspiring verse, and there is always, to fall back upon, the good old standbys which you have studied and are studying in high school. You will never be sorry if you form the habit early of committing to memory such lines or stanzas or whole poems as especially please you. All through your life these lines will come back to you to be a source of pleasure and a stimulation to happy memories. Middle life and old age seem to you now very remote possibilities, but they will be on you, especially if you lead a busy life, almost before you know it. You will always be glad if while your mind is plastic and easily impressed, you let it dwell upon things that are pleasing and beautiful, and if at will you can recall passages from the best things that have been written.
Nearly everyone reads fiction of some sort, of course—adventure, romance, mystery, character study, philosophy—there are many things treated in the modern novel or short story, and every day, almost, there seems to be a new magazine springing up filled with fiction and feature stories and attracting the eye with its bizarre and particolored cover. Most of these are rather trashy,—a good deal of the fiction of today is hardly worth the time ​it takes to read it. The magazines which our fathers read and which have stood the test for fifty years or more, are still the best, and one of these, at least, you ought to read regularly. A magazine usually announces both the quality and the character of its contents by the refinement and taste of the design on its cover. The quiet ones are the most conservative and the most worth while.
You will have to read some books of the present day; you would be thought ignorant and behind the times otherwise. People will continue to talk about last month's "best sellers," and though very often there is little reason why these books should sell so well, you will miss something if you are unacquainted with them. Your greatest pleasure in reading, however, will be in the books that have stood the test of time—in Scott, and Cooper and Dickens, and Eliot and Thackeray and Hawthorne and Stevenson, of whose infinite variety you can not tire. If you have not already made their acquaintance, you should begin at once. If you have not before this read the most that they have written, you have to look forward to one of the great pleasures of your life.
Since I began the writing of this paper I have been reading aloud Dickens' David Copperfield. I read it first when I was ten with the greatest pleasure and interest; I have read it since a half dozen times, I have no doubt, and yet I think the fact of any former readings adds rather than detracts from the pleasure which I get from it today. As long as I live it will give me joy to go through its chapters.
​Sometimes I hear boys say "I don't like Stevenson," or "I don't like Dickens." In such cases, however, I usually find that they have read very little of these authors—one book perhaps—and have based their judgment upon that one volume. Don't be discouraged if you are not pleased the first time you dip into an author; try something else. No two books are more unlike than The Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations and any one who has read only Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might not suspect that Stevenson wrote a book like Treasure Island or The Wrong Box. An author, like any other normal human being, has different interests and different moods, and we can not honestly judge him until we have seen him under different conditions.
If from your high school course you get nothing else than the ability to read intelligently, an appreciation of books, and a liking for their companionship, the years in school will not have been spent in vain. If you come away from your high school training with a dislike for study, and with little or no interest in books, and no joy in the anticipation of reading you have missed much of what you should have gained.