ABSTRACT
In Secondary Schools the amount of attention given to school stories progressively declines as the boys get older, until at the age of 15+ such stories score only just over 5 per cent. Detective stories probably render a further service to the boy in allowing him a vicarious satisfaction of his aggressive impulses, which adult civilized life so notably restrains. Historical stories may be thought of as adventure stories in a temporally remote setting. Collections of stories was a category inserted as a means of coping with those heterogeneous compilations which consist of numerous short stories of many kinds by divers authors. Only a little attention is given to the remaining four categories: humour, sport, travel, biography. Some of the children, however, saw that certain books which they had read did not fit into the categories specified, and spontaneously gave such descriptions as 'Science', 'Life Story', 'Travel Tales', 'Humorous Book'.
