CHAPTER XIX
MECHANICAL READING
Reading constitutes a part of the instruction in language.
The problem of instruction in language consists, in our opinion, in directing the pupils in the comprehension of the contents of books written in the literary language. The knowledge of the literary language is indispensable because all good books are written in it.
Formerly, from the very foundation of the school, there was no division between mechanical and graded reading; the pupils read only what they could comprehend—special works, words and phrases, written in chalk on the walls, then the tales of Khudyakof and Afanasief.
I supposed that for children to learn to read they had to have a love for reading, but that to acquire a love for reading it was necessary that what they read should be comprehensible and interesting. This seemed so rational and clear, but this notion is fallacious.
In the first place, in order to pass from the reading on the walls to the reading in books, each pupil had to have a special training in mechanical reading for every book. As the number of pupils happened to be small, and there was no classification of topics, this was possible, and I succeeded without great difficulty in getting the first pupils from reading on the walls, to reading in books; but when new pupils appeared this became impossible. The younger ones had not the ability to read and comprehend stories; the labor of spelling out words and gathering the meaning, taken together, was too great for them.
Another obstacle consisted in the fact that graded reading was interrupted by these stories, and whatever book we chose,—popular, military, Pushkin, Gogol, Karamzin,—it proved that the older scholars in reading Pushkin, just as the younger ones in the reading of
