Books and reading Author:Noah Porter Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. HOW TO HEAD—ATTENTION IN READING. Let us then take our clue in hand and follow it out, feeling our way along, in the suggestions and applicati... more »ons to which it will naturally conduct us. It is thought a great feat for a child to learn to read. The process is not a trivial one which is accomplished every day, and is going on in our nurseries and school- houses, by which the infant learns to distinguish letters, to spell them into words, to look through written characters, to interpret words into thoughts and feelings, and do all these so readily that the skill seems literally to have " come by nature." It is indeed a great feat, as we see plainly when a full-grown man or woman attempts it for the first time, and as we mark the slow and painful steps by which such persons must halt and stumble for years, in order to master the mechanical part of the process. It is very rightly thought to be a most important step that is gained when either the child or the man has finished this apprenticeship, and to make a great difference with him to have overcome these obstacles. But why is it so important? What makes the difference so great? Who asks: what is all this for, and how may a man best use the power which is thus gained? It is not enough to say that it enables a person to transact business, to read his own accounts and letters from other people, to know what is going on at New York or Washington, to pore over newspapers, to gape over a few tales of blood and murder, or now and then to extract a thought from a good book on Sunday. If this were all, it were indeed worth all the cost, as the experience and the common sense of the world shows. The transactions and intercourse of civilized life depend on this acquisition; and the unconscious discipline of civilized man th...« less