ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents freer rein to the his own beliefs, and provides suggestions based on his own experience as an English teacher and as a trainer of teachers, as well as on the basis of the investigation. He shows that any solution of the depressing difficulties of 'teaching literature' to boys of the ages depends on knowing what boys really are like at the ages and on understanding the changes that take place in them between their twelfth and their sixteenth birthdays. The boy, to whom contemplation is anathema and inaction unendurable, is fed upon reflective essays. The sound reason for letting boys of the ages have inferior books is that they get something out of them–some emotional, imaginative, intellectual experience which meets their needs. The differences between Senior and Secondary School boys' reading records are clearly to a great extent a function of the supply of books in their homes and at their schools.
