e--he has the passport to heavens unguessed.

You will perceive at once that what I mean here by 'reading' is
the capacity for silent reading, taking a book apart and
mastering it; and you will bear in mind the wonder that I
preached to you in a previous lecture--that great literature
never condescends, that what yonder boy in a corner reads of a
king is happening to _him._ Do you suppose that in an elementary
school one child in ten reads thus? Listen to a wise ex-inspector,
whose words I can corroborate of experience:

The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an
ordinary elementary school while a reading lesson is in
progress is that the children are not reading at all, in the
accepted sense of the word. They are not reading to
themselves, not studying, not mastering the contents of the
book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual nutriment that
it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up one by
one and reading aloud to their teacher.

Ah! but I have seen far worse than that. I have visited and
condemned rural schools where the practice was to stand a class
up--- say a class of thirty children--and make them read in
unison: which meant, of course, that the front row chanted out
the lesson while the back rows made inarticulate noises. I well
remember one such exhibition, in a remote country school on the
Cornish hills, and having my attention arrested midway by the
face of a girl in the third row. She was a strikingly beautiful
child, with that combination of bright auburn, almost flaming,
hair with dark eyebrows, dark eyelashes, dark eyes, which of
itself arrests your gaze, being so rare; and those eyes seemed to
challenge me half scornfully and ask, 'Are you really taken in by
all this?' Well, I soon stopped the performance and required each
child to read separately: whereupon it turned out that, in the
upper standards of this school of 70 or 80 children, one only--
this disdainful girl--could get through half a dozen easy
sentences with credit. She read well and intelligently, being
accustomed to read to herself, at home.

I daresay that this bad old method of block-reading is dead by
this time.

Reading aloud and _separately_ is excellent for several purposes.
It tests capacity: it teaches correct pronunciation by practice,
as well as the mastery of difficult words: it provides a good
teacher with frequent opportunities of helping the child to
understand what he reads.