help to establish that first essential to all true success in
teaching--a relation of friendship between pupils and teacher.

_Culture through literature._ He was a wise educator who said, "The boy
who has access to good books and who has learned to make them his close
friends is beyond the power of evil." Literature in the grades, in
addition to furnishing intellectual recreation, should so cultivate in
the pupil the power of literary appreciation that he will make good
books his close friends. The child who has heard good music from infancy
is not likely to be attracted by popular ragtime. The boy who has been
trained in habits of courtesy, industry, and pure thinking in his home
life, and school life is not likely to find pleasure in the rudeness,
idleness, and vulgarity of the village poolroom. The pupil who is taught
to appreciate the beautiful, the true, and the good in standard
literature is not likely to find pleasure in reading the melodramatic
and sentimental trash that now has prominence of place and space in many
book stores and in some public libraries. It is the duty of the teacher,
and it should be her pleasure, to cultivate in her pupils such a taste
for good literature as will lead them to choose the good and reject the
bad, a taste that will insure for them the culture that good literature
gives.

_Selection of material._ In choosing selections of literary worth to
present to her pupils, the teacher should keep in mind the pupil's stage
of mental development and she should not forget that the study of
literature should give pleasure. Often pupils do not like what moral
writers think they should like, and usually the pupils are right. Good
literature is sincere and is true in its appeal to the fundamental
emotions of humanity, and an obvious attempt to teach a moral theory at
the expense of truth is no more to be tolerated in literature for
children than in literature for adults. The childhood of the race has
produced much literature with a true appeal to the human heart, in the
form of fable, fairy story, myth, and hero story. Most of this
literature appeals strongly to the child of today. For several hundred
years the nursery rhymes of "Mother Goose" have delighted children with
their melody, humor, and imagery. As literature for the kindergarten and
first grade, they have not often been excelled by modern writers. The
task of selecting suitable material from the many poems, stories, and
books writt