THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY: THE MOVEement for the Reform of ENGLISH STUDIES AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

THIS book is written toward the close of a stubborn agitation directed against the inefficiency of the English training given in our schools and colleges. The outcome of this agitation is that a new and revolutionizing importance attaches to the study of our English speech and its literature. To use that speech proficiently has now become the first requirement of our educational systems; to know and appreciate that literature, their chief test of culture. Hence it is that, for the first time in the history of education, the work of teaching English is being organized with something like scientific foresight and method. An unprecedented activity and enthusiasm in the pursuit of this aim are strikingly manifest. There is a bewildering output of educational textbooks, Language Lessons, Readers, and Spellers; Grammars and Rhetorics; special school editions without end of the classics, old and new. Our educational journals are full of reports of new methods and experi

ments. The literary interests of childhood are being studied and catered for, as they never have before, by our writers of prose and verse, by our psychologists and compilers and adapters, and by the multiplying libraries that are so rapidly establishing children's departments for the satisfaction and stimulation of young appetites.

This literary movement in education is the more remarkable because it is contemporaneous with a seemingly countervailing movement for the furtherance of scientific and practical education, to meet the more and more exacting demands of our expanding industrialism and commerce for high skill, intelligence, and scientific attainments. This dominating scientific and practical spirit of the age is expressing itself in the swift introduction of manual training, nature study, and commercial courses into our schools; in the rapid multiplication of our technical, professional, and business institutes; and in the elaborate equipment of laboratory and shop in the Grammar School, High School, and College. And yet this scientific and practical tendency has by no means thwarted the synchronous literary movement, with its demands upon our schools for much greater proficiency in the use of the English language and for a wider and more thorough literary culture. What is the significance of this?

Under one aspect it is itself an outcome of these very practical, utilitarian demands of the age. Of late it has become increasingly evident that the linguistic resources

of the average public schoolboy are conspicuously unequal to the needs of modern life-even of business life. The expressional power of the school or college graduate lags behind his knowledge and his thought power. Harvard College has declared that its Freshmen do not know how to use those tools of speech which, more than any others, are needed daily in college work. They can express themselves neither correctly nor effectively. So Harvard has taken heroic measures through its famed Freshman course in "daily themes" to repair the disability. Doubtless this illiteracy is due partly to the deterioration of our linguistic manners, the depression of linguistic standards, by the influence of foreign immigrants — a fact that explains why it is that this new strenuous movement for the improvement of our national tongue has its origin in America rather than in England or her colonies.

Other factors must, however, be taken into account in explaining the situation. Despite the fact that the main tide of our life flows in the channels of commerce and trade, and waters chiefly the fields of invention and science, the tributary streams of art and literature are large and fertilizing. The standard of culture is rising among us. The masses must be fed daily or weekly with a liberal meal of literary gossip. They buy new dollar books by the half-million; and expect a literary bargain counter in their mammoth stores. They erect libraries by the score. In fact, America feels the challenge of

Europe in the field of culture as in all other fields of activity; she is as ambitious (e.g. at the Paris Exposition) of artistic as of scientific laurels; of her educational as of her mechanical achievements. As a consequence of this ambitious rivalry, her culture at its best tends to assume a new and more original type. This is the main factor in the case: the rise of a new type of national culture. Our American literary culture owes less and less directly to antiquity, and is moving farther and farther away from the ideals of the Renascence. More and more we draw from modern, and especially from ancestral British sources. There will no doubt be a new amalgam of this element, as the main constituent, with other elements and tendencies, German and (happily) Celtic, French, Norse, etc., which are powerfully represented in our population; but it is clear that the old native basis will remain.

This literary movement in our schools means, we think, the conscious, systematic, and more liberal use of our English studies as the chief instrument of culture. A native culture, modern in spirit, and a new discipline, conscience, and pride in the use of our native tongue, are to become the touchstones of our intellectual life. We have a prophecy in the field of letters of this new American culture, in the bold American spirit of Emerson's1 and Whitman's work on 1 The key-note is struck in the opening paragraph of his "Nature." * His conviction to this effect is expressed in his “Democratic Vistas " and other prose pieces.

the one hand, and in Lowell's1 more scholarly, academic work on the other. We have its exemplars in the broader fields of public life and personality in such types of simple, indigenous manhood as Lincoln and Grant.

We cannot develop this thesis here, important as it is in giving a proper orientation to the new English movement in our schools. We will only add this enlargement: that as we have in Emerson and Whitman a frank recognition that our life is too full of new resources and opportunities, new tasks and inspirations, and is too bare of reminders of a long, classic past for us to busy ourselves, as the European nations do, with historic background and survivals; so in Lowell (for that matter in Emerson too) we have a surviving pride of language, a pious recognition of the glory of our national speech, which will serve as the needed literary and scholarly element in our culture. Lowell, surely, was a sufficiently jealous American; yet it was true of him, as Mr. Henry James puts it, that "the thing he loved most in the world after his country was the English tongue, of which he was an infallible master, and his devotion to which was, in fact, a sort of agent in his patriotism." It is this linguistic form of patriotism – by which we rejoice that we

1 Note especially expressions of his Americanism in some of the Essays in "My Study Windows" (eg. On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners) and the "Commemoration Ode."