The object in selecting
reading for children is to make it impossible for them to see any
evidence except the best. That is the teacher's business, and how few
understand their business! How few are educated! In the best literature
we find truth about the world, about human nature; and hence, if children
read that, they read what their experience will verify. I am told that
publishers are largely at fault for the quality of the reading used in
schools--that schools would gladly receive the good literature if they
could get it. But I do not know, in this case, how much the demand has to
do with the supply. I am certain, however, that educated teachers would
use only the best means for forming the minds and enlightening the
understanding of their pupils. It must be kept in mind that reading,
silent reading done by the scholar, is not learning signs and calling
words; it is getting thought. If children are to get thought, they should
be served with the best--that which will not only be true, but appeal so
naturally to their minds that they will prefer it to all meaner stuff. If
it is true that children cannot acquire this taste at home--and it is
true for the vast majority of American children--then it must be given in
the public schools. To give it is not to interrupt the acquisition of
other knowledge; it is literally to open the door to all knowledge.

When this truth is recognized in the common schools, and literature is
given its proper place, not only for the development of the mind, but as
the most easily-opened door to history, art, science, general
intelligence, we shall see the taste of the reading public in the United
States undergo a mighty change: It will not care for the fiction it likes
at present, and which does little more than enfeeble its powers; and then
there can be no doubt that fiction will rise to supply the demand for
something better. When the trash does not sell, the trash will not be
produced, and those who are only capable of supplying the present demand
will perhaps find a more useful occupation. It will be again evident that
literature is not a trade, but an art requiring peculiar powers and
patient training. When people know how to read, authors will need to know
how to write.

In all other pursuits we carefully study the relation of supply to
demand. Why not in literature? Formerly, when readers were comparatively
few, and were of a class that had leisure and the opportunity of
cultivating