Stories and Tales: From the Animal World (Classic Reprint)

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LULU Press, 2018 M04 29 - 256 pages
Excerpt from Stories and Tales: From the Animal World

Nobody likes to be always learning something. Even Solomon was fain to say at the end, And much study is a weariness to the flesh.

Beef and whole-wheat bread are, undoubtedly, muscle builders, but a delicate pudding, or nuts and raisins, or an ice-cream are very pleasant at the end of a dinner, and with out them we feel defrauded Of something that is the cherished heritage of civilized man.

Perhaps education has no better purpose than to create a hunger for knowledge and an absorbing desire to learn; but do you, my grown-up reader, ever feel in such mood that philosophy and abstruse poetry and logic pall upon your intellectual taste? Do you sometimes feel in such' mood that only a fascinating monthly magazine or an absorbing short story is the measure of your receptive powers?

Everybody must; everybody does; and children more than any others. Children do grow, sometimes, just a little tired Of plumule and radicle, and vertical lines, and Charles and Mary Lamb; while the teacher and the mother, finding that so much time is needed to explain and illustrate, often feel that the child's reading would be far better if he read much more and they explained much less.

I once heard a second grade class in a Chicago school reading an easy {esop's Fables as well as you or I could.

How in the world did you get second-year children to read like this? I asked the teacher.

By having these delightful books which they like - no, love; for, truly, that is their feeling for these fables, she replied. Not a child ever looks around for something else to do when we read these stories. They scarcely raise their eyes from the page, they are so absorbed in them. They have learned to read because they like to read, -and, really, would like to be reading most of the time, if other books were as interesting as these are.

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