The greatest need of the primary school to-day is some positive content or subject matter of instruction. The popular conception of such a school is that its main function is to teach the young child to read, write, and cipher. That is, that it has to do mainly with the formal aspects of language and numbers. So long as a certain amount of facility is gained in these formal arts, there is little disposition to demand anything more.

Even so great an authority as the Committee of Fifteen has championed this view, and has given as its deliberate judgment that the first four years of school life should be devoted to the mastery of the formal phases of instruction. While it may be contended that it is not meant to exclude the giving of a positive subject matter, still it is interpreted as sanctioning the present obvious over-emphasis of the formal side of language in our primary schools.

A strict conformity to this formal program would mean that the first four years of school life, the most impressionable[6] period in the pupil’s school career, are to be empty of any real subject matter. The mastery of written and printed forms is to be set up as an end in itself, losing sight of the fact that they are but means for conveying the thought, feelings, experiences, and aspirations of the race from one generation to another.

When we consider what the child at the age of six or seven really is; when we consider his love of story, his hunger for the concrete material of knowledge, his deep interest in the widening of his experience,—it is evident that such a course is out of all harmony with his real nature. It is the giving of stones when the cry is for bread. It is even worse than the proverbial making of bricks without straw. It is attempting to make bricks with straw alone.
THE MASTERY OF A VOCABULARY NOT THE MATERIAL OF INSTRUCTION.

It will be granted that the mastery of a printed and a written vocabulary is of the utmost importance. As a subordinate end, the ability to interpret the printed page and to express thought in correct form is the most imperative demand upon the school. But these acquirements are not a content in themselves. They are not the material of instruction. In themselves, they do not enlarge the understanding or furnish the food which the young mind hungers for—and must[7] have if it is maintained in a condition of health. They are mere forms, and the dwelling upon them during the impressionable years of childhood results in a deadening of his interest and dwarfing of his powers, so that the over-emphasis of this phase of education to the exclusion of content defeats its own ends.

Laying the foundation for a future character edifice, keeping active the developing interests, the widening of his experience, the formation of interpretative concepts,—these are of greater value from the point of view of language mastery, even of its spoken and written forms, than the persistent drill in its formal elements.

Language teaching must be approached from the content side if we are to get any genuine interest in the overcoming of difficulties on the part of the child. There is no interest for the child in the language forms themselves when presented in abstraction and emphasized as such. He may be drilled into proficiency, but the interest does not come from the relation of these formal elements to his own needs or activity. The interest has been external and it flags as soon as the external excitement is withdrawn. A genuine interest, an intrinsic one growing out of his own needs and nature, can be fostered only by supplying a subject matter adapted to the various levels of thought through which his development leads him. If this is furnished, it is no partial, intermittent[8] attention that the pupil gives. While dealing with such a content he is not forming the habit of mind-wandering and inattention so frequently seen when children are kept closely to word drill and to reading for elocutionary purposes.
A WIDER CIRCLE AND PURPOSE, GROWING OUT OF THE CHILD’S LIFE AND NEEDS.

The possession of a wide acquaintance with the standard subject matter of child literature before serious attempts at learning to read are made, will subordinate the acquisition of a reading............