“Twenty-five years ago pupils learnt from ten to fifteen thousand words, but as a result of investigations carried on during the past two decades, it has been found that the typical graduate of a high school does not need in his school work, and will not need in later life, to spell more than three thousand words at the outside, unless he engages in some technical pursuit, when it may be necessary for him to master a special and technical vocabulary. The typical American in his correspondence rarely employs more than fifteen hundred different words; many of us never use more than half this number. In view of these facts, the course of spelling in the schools to-day is being constructed on the principle that the words that will be actually used in daily life should be mastered so that they can be spelled automatically, and the technical and unusual words that were formerly taught but that will probably never be used are being eliminated” (p. 384). This seems to me a most singular inversion. It is still thought that a man should know how to spell a word he is going to use, although Shakespeare and Milton could not spell, and the importance of spelling is purely and solely conventional. But for this trivial purpose there is a willingness to sacrifice the teaching of a large vocabulary, without which it is impossible to write well, or even to understand good writing. The important thing is not to know how to _spell_ words, but how to _use_ them; evidently this was not taught in the days when boys learned to spell 15,000 words but men only used 1,500. The way to learn to _use_ words is to read some good literature often and carefully, intensively, not extensively. But careful reading is positively discouraged. The same book says of school-children: “They are trained to read as rapidly as possible so that they will not be halted in the gaining of meaning by giving attention to separate words, since explicit awareness of separate words in one’s reading delays and often confuses the process of interpreting the thought contained in the reading” (p. 420). I wonder what pupils so trained would make of Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair. No doubt it will be said that the modern man has no time for such trivialities as the appreciation of great poetry. Yet the very men who say this are prepared to set aside a great deal of time in order to teach young men how to kill each other scientifically. This is surely the _reductio ad absurdum_ of a utilitarian philosophy.