Education for Leisure-Reading

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Education for Leisure—Reading

It may seem unnecessarily formal to begin with definitions, but words in such common and thoughtless use as education, leisure and reading without definition are almost surely misleading. Let us take them in order.

Education, as I think of it and shall use it here, in two things, or one thing with two aspects. It is, on the one hand, the process of progressive adjustment of the individual to life and its conditions. On the other hand it is the accumlated knowledge and the wisdom, that is power to use knowledge that are acquired in the process.

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Leisure I shall define as the time left to us after the hours necessarily given to the work by which we earn our living and the time properly given to sleep and meals are taken from the twenty-four.

And reading is the process by which we transfer from the written or printed page to our own minds the thoughts, emotions, truths there held in mere arbitrary symbols. The process is not complete until these thoughts, emotions, truths have been taken into the mind in the reader's mind in the same significant relations in which they were held in the writer's

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mind. The way even say it is not complete until the reader's mind after grasping them as nearly as possible as the writer held them has adjusted to them to his own thoughts, emotions, & conceptions of truth in the mental process of give and take.

It may well be that from this last process the thoughts, emotions, and concepts of truth which emerge as the readers shall be as different from either original groups as the child is from the parents whose

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blood he mingles.

Education is the business of all life. The business of the school is to help in the process. Our question tonight is, I suppose, what can the school do to help life educate the individual through reading for an enlightened and truly humane living in his leisure hours. To begin with, the school must give children such possession of the arbitrary symbols of language that the mere physical aspects of the printed page are not confusing. How this shall be done I leave to special teachers The sooner it is done

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and the more thoroughly it is done the better. A more difficult thing remains, and this is a work for every teacher of every subject in every school. It is this ⁴⁰⁰ more difficult thing that I defined under the term reading.

Every subject in the curriculum, even physical education, manual training, drawing, and music, involves a course of reading. That some of these subjects involve besides the mastery of the usual linguistic symbols, mastery also of other sets of symbols does not destroy the truth of the first assertion.

And here I must recur to