Educational Texts
When a successful writer elects to disclose something of his modus operandi, it is only natural to listen. Professor Robert M. Gay, well-known to Atlantic readers as essayist and reviewer, has once before divulged some of his professional secrets in Writing Through Reading; but it is in the introduction to his new volume, Fact, Fancy, and Opinion, that the student who would ‘commence author’ will find a new and special guidance. Professor Gay speaks informally and practically, from the depths of his own experience. Fact, Fancy, and Opinion is an anthology of brief essays, newspaper editorials, book reviews, and other types of modern writing, chosen as illustrations of diverse means of approach and treatment in various fields of composition. They come from English and American newspapers and magazines, the book reviews being chosen entirely from the ‘Atlantic’s Bookshelf.’ The general reader who enjoys this type of literature will find the volume no less entertaining because the editor compiled it with pedagogic purpose.
There is no denying that children have been much put upon in the matter of nature-faking in books devised for their reading and study, and it is natural that teachers and parents should begin to demand texts which manage to convey real information along with an interesting story. Fairy tales, of course, are in a class by themselves; when we read them we care little whether the toads are blue or brown, the crows black or white. But when we want children to learn something about the world they live in, we rather feel that crows should be black and toads brown. The first two volumes of the ‘Little Gateways to Science Series,’ Bird Stories and Hexapod Stories, have proved that actual fact can be made interesting enough for children to enjoy. The third volume, A Little Book of Nature Secrets, by Mary D. Chambers, leaves the world of birds and insects for one much more vague in most of our minds, though no less concrete and real: the realm of chemistry and physics. Mrs. Chambers has made carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and their like, as intelligible and interesting as Miss Patch made the hexapods and birds, though she sacrifices no scientific truths in so doing.
The private school which advertised that it made its students ‘able to do’ may have been somewhat vague in its phraseology, but at least its principle was well founded. And no doubt the instructors — having one point in common with Mr. Squeers — knew that the best way to learn to do is by doing. On this principle Dramatic Episodes in Congress and Parliament was conceived and executed. Miss Ethel H. Robson has vitalized history by giving it dramatic form, reproducing as literally as possible the actual dialogues that took place in the various parliamentary episodes in the development of the American nation. The text has the apt subtitle of ‘ A Parliamentary Reader,’for as the pupils in the Junior High School impersonate their favorite orators they will also learn the regulations of parliamentary practiee. The author is a history specialist who is also a school supervisor in Chisholm, Minnesota, and her book, which is unique in its field, is sure to find its place in many curricula.
No educational Shop-Talk would be complete without its chapter of the Little Grammar travelogue. This ubiquitous text has now made its way into the schools of twenty-two states — it has just been adopted as a basal book in Utah — and far across the sea to Persia, where it is used in Teheran.