are of much greater practical value. Illumination of the
things of serious importance in the everyday world of human affairs
should have a large place in reading work of every school.

It is true that the supplementary sets of books have been chosen
chiefly for their content value. Many are historical, biographical,
geographical, scientific, civic, etc., in character. On the side of
content, they have advanced much farther than the textbooks toward
what should constitute a proper reading course. Unfortunately, the
schools are very incompletely supplied with these sets. If we consider
all the sets of supplementary readers found in 10 or more schools, we
find that few of those assigned for fourth-grade reading are found in
one-quarter of the buildings and none are in half of them. The same is
true of the books for use in the fifth and seventh grades. Some of the
books for the sixth and eighth grades are found in more than half
of the buildings, but there is none that is found in as many as
three-quarters of them.

The second thing greatly needed to improve the reading course is
more reading practice. One learns to do a thing easily, rapidly,
and effectively by practice. The course of study in reading should
therefore provide the opportunity for much practice. At present the
reading texts used aggregate for the eight grades some 2100 pages. A
third-grade child ought to read matter suitable for its intelligence
at 20 pages per hour, and a grammar-grade child at 30 to 40 pages
per hour. Since rapidity of reading is one of the desired ends, the
practice reading should be rapid. At the moderate rates mentioned, the
entire series of reading texts ought to be read in some 80 hours.
This is 10 hours' practice for each of the eight school years, an
altogether insufficient amount of rapid reading practice. Of course
the texts can be read twice, or let us say three times, aggregating
30 hours of practice per year. But even this is not more than
could easily be accomplished in two or three weeks of each of the
years--always presuming that the reading materials are rightly adapted
to the mental maturity of the pupils. This leaves 35 weeks of the year
unprovided for. To make good this deficit, the buildings are furnished
with supplementary books in sets sufficiently large to supply entire
classes. The average number of such sets per building is shown in the
following table:

TABLE 2.--SETS OF SUPPLEMENTARY READING BOOKS PER BUILDI