hy is extended reading essential to success in teaching?

7. What works of Dante have you read? of Victor Hugo? of Shakespeare?
How will the reading of such authors improve the teaching ability of
elementary teachers?

8. What are the distinguishing characteristics of the vitalized teacher?

CHAPTER III

THE CHILD

=The child as the center in school procedure.=--The child is the center
of school procedure in all its many ramifications. For the child the
building is erected, the equipment is provided, the course of study is
arranged and administered, and the teacher employed. The child is major,
and all else is subsidiary. In the general scheme even the teacher takes
secondary place. Teachers may come and go, but the child remains as the
focus of all plans and purposes. The teacher is secured for the child,
and not the child for the teacher. Taxpayers, boards of education,
parents, and teachers are all active in the interests of the child; and
all school legislation, to be important, must have the child as its
prime objective. Colleges of education and normal schools, in large
numbers, are working at the educational problem in an effort to develop
more effective methods of training the teachers of the child. A host of
authors and publishers are giving to the interest of the child the
products of their skill. In every commonwealth may be found a large
number of men and women whose time and energies are devoted to the work
of the schools for the child.

=All children should have school privileges.=--All these facts are
freely admitted, wherever attention is called to them, but we still have
truant officers, and child labor laws. We admit the facts, but, in our
practices, strive to circumvent their application. If the school is good
for one child, it is good for all children. Indeed, the school is
maintained on the assumption that all children will take advantage of
and profit by its presence. If there were no schools, our civilization
would surely decline. If school attendance should cease at the end of
the fifth year, then we would have a fifth-year civilization. It rests,
therefore, with the parents of the children, in large measure, whether
we are to have an eighth-grade civilization, a high-school civilization,
or a college civilization.

=Parental attitude.=--Schools are administered on the assumption that
every child is capable of and worthy of training, and that training the
child will make for a bet