ASSOCIATION TRACKS IN READING AND SPELLING. 59 
ech 
i be 
ect 
$0 
ea- 
an 
ng, 
ner 
ord 
and 
nal 
ble 
vay 
rds 
ch- 
Lhe 
ive 
uat 
Je. 
en 
1a~ 
he 
she 
led 
vet 
in 
mn 
10h 
ald 
» Or 
sty 
tly 
ved 
by 
san 
ist- 
und 
an 
ing 
aS 
It is, however, not merely the gain in time which is of most importance. 
The process of thinking directly in printed speech in reading is also easier 
than that of translating first the printed symbols into oral symbols ; and 
training a child to get thought by the most direct route, as it were, and 
along the line of least resistance, contributes largely to fostering in his 
mind a love for reading. That children, coming from intelligent homes, 
who have done much silent reading from their earliest years, are for the 
most part eye-minded in reading, read intelligently and yet with great 
rapidity, and love reading, goes far toward confirming the ground here 
taken. 
By a line of reasoning similar to this in regard to spelling, it may 
be shown that the first association which should be made is not that 
between the oral word as pronounced by the teacher in the spelling exer- 
cise and the muscular movement of the hand in writing (spelling) it, but 
that between the visual or printed form and this muscular movement on 
the one hand, and between the thought and the muscular movement on the 
other, the latter soon displacing the former association. In other words, 
children should not be made ear-minded in spelling, nor even eye-minded, 
in so far as it can be avoided, but motor-minded. This would eliminate 
much self-consciousness from spelling, and would remove a frequent cause 
of misspelling from schools and from everyday life—misspelling a word by 
spelling it phonetically. 
It has been a fundamental error in teaching reading and spelling to 
treat printed and written language as if it were primarily the representa- 
tion of oral language instead of the immediate representation of thought. 
[n the historical development of written language in the human race, the 
written symbol was at first the picture of the object which it denoted ; 
shat is, it was the immediave representation of the object itself, and only 
In an altogether secondary sense a representation of the oral name of it. 
The invention of separate letters to represent separate sounds was a late 
and altogether artificial device of immense practical advantage to the race, 
out a misleading device as far as the first steps in teaching a child to read 
and spell are concerned. 
This false assumption of the relation of printed and written language to 
shought in primary education has been used as the basis for an argument 
1 favor of spelling reform whose force is largely fictitious. Spelling reform 
8, no doubt, one of a number of very desirable reforms, but a phonetic 
system of spelling would not save the time which it is supposed to save in 
teaching a child to read and spell, if, in teaching these subjects, the 
printed and written word were at first treated as the immediate symbol 
of the thought, and were directly associated with the thought instead of 
mdirectly through the oral word. 
Several interesting questions present themselves for future investiga- 
tion