(4) For work in reading we may avail ourselves of letters and numbers printed on cards, which lend themselves to a variety of arrangements. If children are slow about learning to read, the blunder must not be made of neglecting their mental culture in other directions, as though reading were its necessary prerequisite. Reading often demands a large amount of patience, and should never be allowed to produce a feeling of aversion to teachers and books. (5) Writing is ushered in by the elementary drawing that must accompany observation exercises. Writing itself, when once well started, furthers reading. 216. But already at this point many fall behind. Puzzled at first by the demand upon them for the dull labor of learning, they surrender themselves later on to the feeling of incapacity. In large schools, where there are always some outstripping the rest, and where the majority are trying to keep up with the pace set, performance can be had more readily, although it is performance by imitation rather than by an inner sequence of thought. And even here we find thoroughly disheartened laggards. CHAPTER III =Boyhood= 217. The boundary line between boyhood and early childhood is fixed, so far as this is possible at all, by the fact that the boy, if allowed to do so, will leave the company of adults. Formerly he felt insecure when left alone: now he considers himself fairly well acquainted with his immediate environment, beyond which vistas of all sorts are opening. Accordingly, at this stage it becomes incumbent on the adult to attach himself to the boy, to restrain him, to divide the time for him, and to circumscribe the fancies born of his self-confidence,--a course of action rendered all the more necessary by the circumstance that the boy is a stranger as yet to the timidity with which the youth joins the ranks of men. For boyhood is marked off from adolescence by this, that the boy’s aims are still unsettled; he plays and takes no thought of to-morrow. Moreover, his dream of manhood is one of arbitrary power. The play-impulse remains active for a long time, unless checked by conventionality. During this period, the work of linking instruction to sense-impression is by no means to be omitted entirely, not even where fair progress has already been made in scholarship. We must make sure of a solid foundation.