The second thing greatly needed to improve the reading course is more reading practice.  One learns to do a thing easily, rapidly, and effectively by practice.  The course of study in reading should therefore provide the opportunity for much practice.  At present the reading texts used aggregate for the eight grades some 2100 pages.  A third-grade child ought to read matter suitable for its intelligence at 20 pages per hour, and a grammar-grade child at 30 to 40 pages per hour.  Since rapidity of reading is one of the desired ends, the practice reading should be rapid.  At the moderate rates mentioned, the entire series of reading texts ought to be read in some 80 hours.  This is 10 hours’ practice for each of the eight school years, an altogether insufficient amount of rapid reading practice.  Of course the texts can be read twice, or let us say three times, aggregating 30 hours of practice per year.  But even this is not more than could easily be accomplished in two or three weeks of each of the years—­always presuming that the reading materials are rightly adapted to the mental maturity of the pupils.  This leaves 35 weeks of the year unprovided for.  To make good this deficit, the buildings are furnished with supplementary books in sets sufficiently large to supply entire classes.  The average number of such sets per building is shown in the following table: 

  Table 2.—­Sets of supplementary reading books per building

Grade   Average number of sets
1             10.0
2              6.3
3              5.1
4              5.5
5              6.3
6              5.3
7              5.5
8              6.0

A fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth-grade student ought to be able to read all the materials supplied his grade, both reading texts and all kinds of supplementary reading, in 40 or 50 hours.  He ought to do it easily in six weeks’ work, without encroaching on recitation time.  He can read all of it twice in 10 weeks; and three times in 14 weeks.  After reading everything three times over, there still remain 24 weeks of each year unprovided for.

The reply of teachers is that the work is so difficult that it has to be slowed down enough to consume these 24 weeks.  But is not this to admit that the hill is too steep, that there is too much dead pull, and that the materials are ill-chosen for practice in habits of rapid intelligent reading?  It is not by going slow that one learns to go fast.  Quite the reverse.  Too often the school runs on low speed gear when it ought to be running on high.  The low may be necessary for the starting, but not for the running.  It may be necessary in the primary grades, but not thereafter for those who have had a normal start.  Reading practice should certainly make for increased speed in effective reading.

The actual work in the grades is very different from the plan suggested.  In taking up any selection for reading, the plan in most schools is about as follows: