Excerpt from A Spelling Book Improved methods in the teaching of spelling are replacing old ones as rapidly as the modern principle of teaching form through content is gaining recognition in schoolroom practice. The principles underlying the teaching of spelling are precisely those underlying the enriching and shortening of the entire course of study, by which the child takes a short cut to knowl edge through an appeal to his interest and the power gained through the cultivation of his mind. So long as we hammer at the child's brain as though it were so much cold steel in the belief that if we hammer hard enough and long enough some impression must be made, so long will the teaching of spelling meet with a greater or less degree of failure. It is a common fallacy for teachers to believe that if they teach the letters of a word, time will fill in the empty form with the proper content. Two things are forgotten in this process: first, that in the human mind nothing dwells in isolation and that the child puts some content into every form he learns a wrong one if he is not supplied with the right one and second, that the child, realizing that his teacher is indifferent to his knowing the content of the word, grows both mentally and morally careless. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.