CHAPTER VIII

COMPOSITION, ORAL AND WRITTEN, IN THE PRIMARY GRADES

IN the complaints drawn up by the Colleges against the High Schools, it is the inability to write passably correct English that is most severely complained of. Where does the trouble begin? We have already indicated our opinion that it is in the Elementary Schools. Most assuredly it is anterior to the High School; for the difficulty the High School teacher has to cope with is the positive loathing with which the majority of the Freshman boys and girls regard "composition." What a burden is upon him! How difficult he finds it to overcome a long-standing antagonism, and to convert this bugbear into an angel of grace.

We must, of course, distribute the blame for this crippling condition of affairs over the Primary and Grammar Grades. We attribute it largely to the following general causes: (1) too much written work is asked for; (2) it is too labored, because we press for an excellence in form that is not to be expected from the young; (3) the compositions are often too long; (4) wrong topics are chosen, depriving the work of reality and interest for the child.

we

We have already spoken of the mistake, as regard it, of replacing oral work by written, of educating the eye at the expense of the ear. We make these heavy demands upon children for written work because it presents comforting evidence that we are doing something, and that the children are producing work that shows a kind of progress. Results: we must have results of a finished, certifiable, measurable character. Parents demand them; officials demand them. In the neat copy-book, exercise-book, composition-book, are these outward and visible signs of proficiency marshalled. Oral work being so intangible and unmeasurable goes for little; although it is in fact the crucial, fundamental matter. What boots it that the child has gentler ways of speaking and address, and is taking to browsing in books? There must be something more visibly, tangibly, marketably conclusive that the child is being educated. And so we hurry the stripling into producing much misleading work, — the labored, mechanical outcome of painful drill, — uniform, squad-like, much supervised and tinkered by the anxious teacher.

This is all wrong. These prim products are unnatural to young children. We should expect from them rough, free, hearty work in writing. This does not mean slovenly, careless work; but it does mean sincere, childlike work. Good handwriting will come later; it is a monstrosity at this period; and we scarcely avoid

injuring the child when we press for it. In the child's art-work we are content with approximate excellence; there the rude, groping sincerity of the child's efforts in chalk or clay is the only thing that is æsthetically tolerable; the only sign of life. The painfully drawn type-form is an abnormality, — and much else besides. Then why demand the laboriously even, uniform piece of written work, which is obtained often by copying and recopying?

We must not be misunderstood as protesting against any sort of mechanical exercise in handwriting, pure and simple. Our special problem here is the relation of handwriting to composition; and the point to which we advance now is that in any composition work the child must, as far as possible, be untrammelled by anxiety as to his handwriting. Let his energies flow as unimpeded as may be into the work of saying fluently, in as passably good form as he can under the circumstances (instead of as he must, with copy-book standards before him), what he has in his mind. Just as he must not be worriedly groping after something to say, but trying to express what he holds in easy possession,

so must he not be too much troubled about his penmanship. Otherwise composition work becomes the drudgery it is. We inhibit the child's inventiveness and spontaneity, and we double and redouble toil because we prescribe ridiculous standards of mechanical facility. We must leave the child as far as

possible unhampered by any responsibilities other than those toward his topic; let him do justice to that; for that is his task, and not to produce a masterpiece of penmanship.

It is the difficulty of the mere mechanics of writing, in these early years, that should lead to our being careful, (1) not to ask for much written composition work in the first three years, and (2) to make each composition brief from a short sentence at the very end of the first or in the second year, to a short paragraph or pair of paragraphs at the end of the third.

We are speaking only of written composition. Of oral composition there should be much more than is ordinarily done in our schools; and it should be more systematically and deliberately done. We can be much more careful than we usually are about the form of the sentences in which the child returns answer to our questions; about the form of his oral reproductions of stories told him; and about the coherency of his contributions to the conversations and class discussions. We can begin to train him. to be connected and direct in his statements; we can check rambling and irrelevancy somewhat; and we can partially correct ill-usage. It is because we have not taken this oral work seriously as composition work, and, more than that, have not realized that as are a child's habits of oral expression, so will his habits of written expression tend to become, — or in

other words that his written language and the structure of his written work will be predetermined by his previously acquired oral habit and practice, — that we have slighted oral composition in the first three or four years of school life.

The beginning of the written work in either the First or Second Grade will necessarily be very simple, and will consist of short sentences, following the model of sentences copied from the blackboard, and others reproduced from memory; the classic type of self-sufficient sentence being of course the easy proverb and adage.

The handwriting may be large and bold, with pencil and (later on) pen, upon unlined paper. We must, we repeat, expect it to be uneven and crooked: it will come right in time, and meanwhile the child's nerves and finer muscles are being spared. Plenty of writing on the blackboard in a large and free way will be done; the children enjoy it. Most teachers find, we think, that when their children are not overtaxed, they write a good deal for play at home, and bring their work to school for approval.

The first original sentences may conveniently grow out of the reading lesson or the memorizing. For instance, we recall that at the end of the first year, in windy March, a class that had learned Robert Louis Stevenson's "Wind Song" proceeded, after a little stimulating conversation about the antics of the wind, to write a short sentence recording some one