EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

FROM one point of view the significance of the development of modern education can best be estimated by the progress of the mother-tongue toward the central place in formal instruction. When the study of the mother-tongue and its literature is made the core of the curriculum, education is something quite different from that training in which a foreign, perhaps an ancient, tongue holds the chief place. No people is intellectually independent until it has a language and a literature, all its own, worthy to be an educational instrument and an educational end. We English-speakers have been independent in the eyes of all the world at least since Chaucer's day, but our education has been sadly slow in catching up with our needs. The Latin tradition, French as the speech of the cultivated and the polite, and the dream of a universal language have all helped keep in the background the systematic study of English by those who use it. We have been told by one school of critics that the mother-tongue need not be taught, for it will be picked up somehow; by another, that it cannot be taught, for there is nothing to teach. Both fallacies have had their day, and we are now in the presence of a sane and healthy movement for the more careful and devoted study of the English language and

its literature. This movement has found its way into the elementary school, the secondary school, and the college. The present volume is, in a sense, an exposition and a criticism of it.

The first effect of this movement, if wholly successful, ought to be a new care for the purity and the precision of our speech and a new love for its literary masterpieces. Familiarity with them will not breed contempt, but rather respect and affection.

A chief obstacle to an early acquaintance with correct English and a use of it is the elaborate pains taken to approach it by a highly developed method. The matter is very largely one of imitation, and the child invariably uses the sort of English he is accustomed to hear, not the sort of English he is taught. He knows no distinction between the vernacular and literary English, and if he hears both he will use both indifferently. All the painstaking effort to raise him from the one plane to the other is time wasted. The one ruling maxim of English teaching ought to be: The child will speak and write the sort of English that he hears and reads.

The mother-tongue differs in one respect from all other subjects of study. It is not only an end, but the vehicle, of instruction. For this reason all teaching is English teaching, and every school exercise may be made, and should be made, an English lesson. English is a living language, not a dead one. Therefore it is that its modern masters vary it and add to it in ways that mark their genius. Pedantic English is not the same thing as correct English. School-taught English usually errs in the direction of pedantry; it lacks life and virility. The corrective is to be found by bringing

the child early and late into contact with literature that has character and distinction. Teach him to love this, to return to it often, and his own spoken and written English will be worthy.

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,

October 4, 1902.