Not that he will seriously try to open it; for with the ability to read the desire to read will have aborted.

The distrust of the child, on which Western education is based, is a bottomless gulf in which educational effort, whatever form it may take or in whatever quarter it may originate, is for the most part swallowed up and made as though it had not been.

The child who leaves school at the age of fourteen will have attended some 2,000 or 3,000 reading lessons in the course of his school life.

From these, in far too many cases, he will have carried nothing away but the ability to stumble with tolerable correctness through printed matter of moderate difficulty.
He will not have carried away from them either the power or the desire to read.
In the days of percentages, instruction in "_Writing_" below Standard V was entirely confined to handwriting and spelling; and even in the higher Standards the teacher thought more about handwriting and spelling than any other aspect of this composite subject.

Now handwriting and spelling are merely means to an end,--the end of making clear to the reader the words that have been committed to paper by the writer.