The pedagogic world has tended to make much of the great influence of teachers Zacariah Riney and Mentor Graham upon the life of Abraham Lincoln,, Not to be passed over lightly, however, is the work of his intellectually soul-hungry and ambitious mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who, though dead before the boy was ten, had stirred his natural desire to learn into an insatiable appetite to know and to understand. The tutoring which he received from this understanding and competent mother was supplemented only by two short terms of school, yet at the age of eight he could read the Bible with understanding and had become the neighborhood scribe. Thus "it did set everybody a-wonderin' to see how much he knowed."

None can fail to envy this pioneer parent the simplicity of her task. Here was a world where learning was still revered for the sake of knowing, and no one asked: "What am I going to get out of this?" There was as yet no danger of dwarfing junior's personality by teaching him the difference between right and wrong. It was still fashionable for children to obey their parents and respect authority wherever they encountered it. There were no telephones to become critically important at study time: "but we're talking about our homework." There was no television with its "musts." The child's world was not a questionable blend of the real and the unreal. The real world's edge was the farthest side of the dark forest, and the world of imagination was the bright stars set in the still sky. It was an age before "social adjustment" was necessary, yet children developed into normal human beings. Nancy Hanks Lincoln could offer the child no great variety of educational toys and picture books to guard against his becoming disinterested, but with the Bible, a speller, and an English grammar, she fanned the spark--the child's natural desire to learn-- and from his early years started him toward "the Ages."

Child and parents have already become important partners in learning before the age for school is reached. There have been thousands and thousands of questions from the child's world of wonder which the parent found time to patiently answer. But the first years of school seem to break down, rather than strengthen this partnership. Both child and parent seem to meet frustration, and in many cases stumble somewhat blindly through the first three or four years of school. The child discovers that school is not exciting after all and that there isn't much to learn, and the parent becomes wholly confused as to exactly what the child is supposed to be doing.

Certainly all children, except the hopelessly dull, begin school with great enthusiasm and excitement. They have been told that they are going to be taught many things, among which are reading and writing; and that they are going to work with real school books--not just story books like the ones read at bedtime.

It is difficult to estimate the damage that can be done, but certainly it is great, during the first years of school. After several months the enthusiasm begins to lag, and the wonder and awe have disappeared from school. It is just something that is--like muddy boots, lost jackets, chicken pox, and sore throat.

Mary's case is typical of many, and should serve as a warning for parents to try to find out exactly what problems are becoming man-size in a child's mind,, At the middle of her fourth grade year, Mary's parents began to catch disturbing elements in Mary's telephone conversations with her friends: "I hate school, don't you?" or some other equally frank variation on the same theme. Although Mary's parents had been somewhat frustrated during the three and one half years in their attempts to find out exactly what Mary was doing in school, or was supposed to be doing, the fact that a child, even before reaching the age of ten, should hate school came as something of a shock. Having done what they thought right and proper, serving on Visitors' Week committees, taking part in P.T.A. projects, and being proud observers of bulletin board displays and Thanksgiving and Christmas plays, Mary's parents began to realize that more was needed. It was evident that something very important was missing from the child's education. The "more" which was needed, as Mary's parents discovered to their great relief, was not something darkly complicated and further frustrating. The obvious, so long overlooked, was missing. In three and one half years of school, Mary had formed no patterns of learning. She had followed the habits of the class from "bell to bell,�� and at home she had simply formed no distinctive habits of study.

The patterns and habits which Mary and her parents discovered, though much later than most of them could have been started, changed her whole attitude toward school in general, her teacher, and her parents. The putting into effect of these patterns of learning and habits of incentive is so obvious as to be within the reach of any parent who is willing to spend twenty minutes an evening upon his child's future.

The beginning years of school center chiefly around reading and writing, and since the child's first great source of excitement is concerned with the magic of learning to read, it is here that the parent can find a starting point from which the home can help the teacher build. A question common among most parents, "Where do I start?" should never carry the connotation that the "School has done so little I don't know where to begin." You can be sure that the teacher has ever so patiently dealt with letters and sounds and words--the endless drill and drudgery which most parents could not survive. Now upon this beginning the parent can make the teacher's work meaningful and give the child that most precious of all knowledge--the desire to learn.

A sense of the importance of desiring to learn can be taught from the beginning of school. The twenty minute bedtime story period now takes on a new emphasis. It becomes more than a story; it is reading. And the minute it becomes reading, it becomes the major part of your child's world of learning. Many patterns make up reading, but the first with which we will concern ourselves is the pattern of words. There are also many good habits to be followed in reading, but we will interest ourselves first with the one most taken for granted and therefore most obviously neglected--seeing words.

Through the preschool years the bedtime reading period has dealt only with a story. Now it begins to deal with what makes the story. If the reader is beginning late, and junior is now in the fourth grade and has outgrown the story time, it makes little difference. A few minutes practice reading from one of his school books, or any book, can serve as a beginning. The chances are good, indeed, that any talk of words will be new to him--they have been "something he had to learn" and have never been related in any way to an exciting story.

Perhaps the best approach to the pattern of words is to tell the child a story about how words were so important to one little boy. Whether he is in the first grade or the fourth, he will probably respond with only a sophisticated, quizzical look or smile--meaning "You're way gone." If at school the next day he tells his teacher that his father or mother told him a story about words, or even if he only tells a friend on the way to school: "My old man told me the dumbest story about Abraham Lincoln and words, he musta been crazy," you will have started him thinking about words. Whether it was Lincoln or you he thought of as being crazy will matter not at all:

Once upon a time there was a little boy who, just as all other little boys and girls, liked to have stories read to him. He lived in a wilderness far away from towns and stores and libraries, so there was no way for his mother to get new books. Besides, they were very poor people and couldn't have bought many books anyway.

So his mother read the same stories over and over again. The little boy heard them so many times that he knew all the words. His mother tired of the same stories too, so she would stop now and again in reading and ask the little boy to change a word and try to make the story better. One of the stories which she read the little boy many times was about two brothers, named Cain and Abel, and how Cain became angry and destroyed Abel. "When they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him." The mother and the little boy would find words to replace rose up: conspired against, blindly hated, moved treacherously. And for slew they would find: murdered, killed, butchered, assassinated. The mother also told the little boy that the big word assassination was used to describe the killing of important people--kings and generals.

The little boy became so excited about finding words that he could find enough words to make a story about almost anything he saw around him. A green tree was also many other colors. So he could tell his mother a story about a green tree in summer, yellow and red in autumn, gray in winter, and black against a moonless sky, or dappled gold and silver in the moonlight.

As this boy grew up he listened to other people talk, and he tried to put their words into language he could understand. He learned that there are many words for feelings and thoughts just as there are many words for things. He learned to put not only his own feelings and thoughts into wisely chosen words, but he learned to put other men's feelings and thoughts into words.

He became a great man, and today some of his letters and speeches are put in books year after year as examples of the beauty and clearness that can be coaxed from words. When his country was in great trouble, he was able to save it by the very choice of the words he used in speaking to the people. When someone rose up against him and slew him, he had become a great man so everybody used the word assassinated. The boy's name was Abraham Lincoln.

A group of eighth grade students were asked to reproduce the following statement about study: "Learning how to study involves putting away the habits and ideas which have made study unpleasant and burdensome, and taking on habits and ideas which make study a really constructive and dedicated force--aimed at the ultimate fulfillment of the talents which separate man from 'the beasts of the field'."

Since the statement had been assigned as memory work, the students had, of course, read it several times, and they showed in their reproductions that they had memorized it. They also showed, and herein lies the tragedy, that more than half of them had never been taught to see words. Here is the way one paper was written, and it is typical of several: "Learning how to study involves putting away habits and idea that have made studying unpleasant and buigensome and taking on new habits that make study a really constructive and a great force aimed at the ultimate fulfillment of the talents which separates men from the beasts of the field (no punctuation of any kind).

This and the papers like it are examples of what happens to children who have been allowed to neglect the obvious. The child who made the above mistakes would probably spell all of the words correctly on a spelling test; just as he would be very careful about punctuation on an English test. However, even though he is a bright child, he finds assignments difficult. The simple truth of the matter is, he has never been taught to look for something. What could have been done at home during story time, he must do now alone, exercising infinite patience and extreme self-discipline, for he has now reached the point where he has to concentrate on looking for ideas, ideas which he will be called upon to reproduce in words of his own or apply as experience in thinking.

Somewhere during the years between first and fifth grades this future blindness can be prevented.