can be readily
introduced and one that will stay when it is put in use. The officials
who adopt a schoolbook are not the users of the book. They are adults
long past the school age. Cases have been known when in important
adoptions the majority of the adopting board had not seen the inside of
a school room for twenty-five years. Of course such men are far behind
the schools. They are governed by their own past experience. When the
teachers are allowed to have a voice in the way of advice, the real
needs of the pupils obtain more consideration. But the final real judge
of the merits of a schoolbook is the boy or girl who uses it. If the
book is truly pedagogical, adjusted in every part to the average mental
development of the child, it becomes a valuable tool in the school room.
If on the other hand it is a mere collection of novelties such as catch
the eye of inexpert judges and impress merely the imagination, the books
may be introduced; but they won't stay.

[Child Nature]

The McGuffey Readers had staying qualities. Teachers often became so
familiar with their contents that they needed no book in their hands
to correct the work, but to each child the contents of the book were
new and fresh. It is the fashion of the present day to exalt the new
at the expense of the old. But the child of today is very much such
as Socrates and Plato studied in Greece. The development of the human
mind may be more generally understood than it was then; but it may be
doubted whether the mass of teachers are today wiser in the results of
child-study than were the philosophers of ancient days. Child nature
remains the same. At a given stage in his upward progress, he is
interested in much the same things. He is led to think for himself
in much the same way, and the whole end and aim of education is
to lead toward self activity. The readers that deal simply with
facts--information readers--may lodge in the minds of children some
scraps of encyclopedic information which may in future life become
useful. But the readers that rouse the moral sentiments, that touch the
imagination, that elevate and establish character by selections chosen
from the wisest writers in English in all the centuries that have passed
since our language assumed a comparatively fixed literary form, have a
much more valuable function to perform. Character is more valuable than
knowledge and a taste for pure and ennobling literature is a safeguard
for the young that c