ABSTRACT
Many English teachers plough grimly through the texts, commenting, expounding, suppressing evident inattention, and discovering the less obviously inattentive children by slip tests. Other teachers comment less and expound hardly at all, and so having nothing much to 'test', make the boys write out the substance of the passages read. The boys have remained boys, interested in games, or electricity, or thrillers, that is, at first hand or vicariously, in action. The boys are unsophisticated, avid, joyous in their reading. The Middle School Years–the second, third, and fourth years–are quite different from the first year. To the Middle School boy lyric poetry is 'sloppy'; analyses of the grande passion are 'daft'. The break with the Junior School was obvious from the first, and its attendant problems have been widely debated. The Middle School teaching problem was not solved–and never has been solved–by the Public Schools.
