CHAPTER XVII

COMPOSITION IN THE HIGH SCHOOL

We shall not in this chapter cover ground already traversed in our chapters on composition in the Primary and Grammar Grades, but, taking for granted the leading principles affecting composition advanced in those chapters, shall try to meet the new circumstances and demands that arise in the High School. What changes in method of attack and in the development of plans are called for, now that we have the adolescent to deal with? Generally, it may be said that the vital distinction between this stage and the preceding stages of our work is that, whereas the emphasis has hitherto been strong upon habituation and uniformity, in the High School stage a new reliance is put upon conscious freedom or self-regulation, and upon developing individual differences and preferences. We have to deal with students who, while much more critical than pupils of the pre-adolescent period, are nevertheless much more accessible and mouldable, much more readily and deeply inspired, than their juniors. In the English work the most important developments are of those nascent emo

tions referred to in an earlier chapter, a feeling for style and a capacity for appreciating poetry.

The first essential of real success in composition work is to make proficiency in it seem worth while to our students. This does not mean getting up a sensational interest in the work. It does not mean cockering the whims, the passing moods, and flying interests of the student. Nor does it mean working by the fashionable recipe that school is, not a preparation for life, but life itself, a doctrine that too easily tends to sap the vitals of youth and to work havoc among us. The pupil knows better. He discriminates between the life of adult self-direction and vocation which is ahead of him, and the necessary preparation for that life. This preparation will seem worth while, and will even be "good sport" to him, for all its austerities, provided the end is appreciated and the teachers trusted. In this field, as in the field of athletics, the student takes his seat at the training table to make ready for a contest that is ahead. He is doing what others think it right that he should do, to attain ends he cannot fully foresee or appraise. Humility is required of him, and trustful obedience. Let him feel that the wisdom of the ages and the sages-the long experimentation and gathering tradition of centuries-is behind him; and that respect for his elders and betters is his first lesson. He is not in school primarily to please himself; he is there to fulfil his rational human destiny, as his elders

interpret it. He is there for work; and he is fortunate if, in doing that work, he gets (as well he may, — and should) a sense of the worth-whileness of it that is a joy and a satisfaction to him.

The moral of which reflections is, that the English teacher will do a great wrong to his students unless his labors with them are touched by something of a spirit of austerity, requiring a serious, self-denying girding of the loins. One may so easily follow the fashion of going too eagerly in quest of the student's so-called "interest," especially at a time when he is prone imperiously to assert them. We have too frequently seen the debilitating effects of such concessions. Instead, it is rather a teacher's business, sometimes to create interests; sometimes to starve them. His point of view, which he must help his students to take with him, is that of the race and the ages; his outlook, that of civilization and its needs. It is his business to lift his students out of narrow and narrowing grooves of interest, to keep open, as Herbart puts it, the circle of their ideas, and to expand that circle. It is his business to tone his students up with a manly zest, so that they may regard the tasks assigned to them as so many challenges,ay, as foes resolutely to be wrestled with, if you will. And this attitude does not involve any repression of individuality, which every good teacher rejoices to recognize and foster; it merely means safeguarding true individuality against premature and one

sided expression; against wilfulness and self-indulgence.

An attitude of this sort is quite consistent with a recognition of the varied incentives to effort that ought to count in English work. There is the utilitarian incentive, the practical importance of the art of the ready writer; its sheer business value. With one type of student of the poorer sort undoubtedly—this will have considerable weight; but it should yield to higher motives. There will be no heartiness in work done under its merely prospective influence. It may be supplemented by an appeal to the social motive, to amour propre, an appeal that may be most effectively de indirectly by the quiet assumption that refined speech is an indispensable part of good manners and gentle breeding, the safest passport into cultivated society. While this may be preached sometimes from the teacher's desk, it is to be felt chiefly through the teacher's own example and personality; through the spirit and atmosphere of the work. Goodness, as some one has said, is self-diffusive; and so it is with good manners; they are self-commending; and the teacher who has them, perforce diffuses them.

But these motives to taking pains must not stand in the way of a third, the princeliest of them all,- a craftsman-like pleasure in the work itself. Nothing less will satisfy the good teacher; he must rouse the linguistic conscience and artistic spirit. To excel in

the work must be a point of honorable and cherished ambition. The boy or girl must be happy, his classmates and, above all, his teacher must be happy, over any good piece of language work turned out from the literary shop or workroom, as over any admirable piece of work turned out from the art studio or the machine shop. This or that deft piece of narrative or ingeniously-wrought story; this or that graphic description, flashing a place or a personality upon the mind; this or that crystal-clear exposition or irresistible argument, - should provoke admiration and delight just as an effective piece of wood-carving or bent iron-work or beaten brass does. And it may. We speak out of personal experience in a Manual-training School, where the good literary craftsman was frequently followed in his work with the interest with which the craftsman in wood or iron was followed at the bench or forge; where literary products were overhauled with something of the curiosity and pride shown in overhauling the products of the arts and crafts.

Speaking with no sentimental yearning toward academic Utopia, but on the basis of actual experience and groping effort, we say deliberately that the trouble with much of our work is that it is too coarsely and too clumsily done. It lacks atmosphere; it is not pursued either broadly or finely enough, in the spirit of the craftsman. Anything like delight in the making and using of linguistic products is absent from it. The