14826 
 
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 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
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To What End Do High Schools 
 Teach English ? 
 
 A PAPER 
 
 READ BEFORE THE HIGH SCHOOL SECTION OF THE 
 RHODE ISLAND INSTITUTE OF INSTRUCTION,, 
 
 November 4, 1892. 
 
 SAMUEL THURBER, 
 
 GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL, BOSTON, MASS. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 willXrd small, 
 
 1892. 
 
To What End Do High Schools 
 Teach English ? 
 
 A. PAPER 
 
 READ BEFORE THE HIGH SCHOOL SECTION OF THE 
 RHODE ISLAND INSTITUTE OF INSTRUCTION, 
 
 November 4, 1892. 
 
 , h 
 
 SAMUEL THURBER, 
 
 GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL, BOSTON, MASS. 
 
 BOSTON : 
 
 WILLARD SMALL, 
 
 1892. 
 
 E.V. 
 
TO WHAT END DO HIGH SCHOOLS 
 TEACH ENGLISH? 
 
 What is perhaps a rather widely prevalent 
 misconception of the object of the secondary- 
 teaching of English, was illustrated, the other 
 day, at a meeting of high school teachers. 
 I had had occasion to say, speaking of high 
 school girls, that they seemed to me to have 
 achieved fluency and correctness of expres- 
 sion in satisfactory measure, and could pro- 
 ceed to their next studies without being 
 treated as if their composition were in ar- 
 rears. This elicited from a college man who 
 was present the sarcastic remark that it 
 might be, " in the next century we were to^ 
 be inundated by a flood of notable female 
 writers." Thus my excellent college friend 
 naively revealed his ideal of high school 
 achievement in English, and perhaps threw 
 light upon a subject on which he could speak 
 with more authority, — the actual aim of the 
 professorial teaching of English within the 
 college walls. 
 
Here was an educator in conspicuous posi- 
 tion, announcing literary distinction as the 
 , ambition that governs, or should govern, us 
 
 y teachers of English in our laborious super- 
 vision and correction of compositions. Be- 
 fore taking in hand this absurd ideal, and 
 trying to show its utter irrelevancy to the 
 conditions in which we ^york, I cannot for- 
 bear stopping a moment to query, — for this 
 is a high school section, and here we are, all 
 by ourselves, and can speak, as it were, sub 
 rosa, — whether we have not our own prob- 
 lems to solve, and whether it is not better 
 for us to solve them without too much help. 
 It is a curious manner of speech that allows 
 j our schools to be spoken of as fitting schools, 
 
 J having a chief and determining relation to 
 other schools that are to follow. No such 
 presupposition exists in the German or the 
 French educational system ; no familiar no- 
 menclature exists in the German and French 
 languages for translating the terms that ex- 
 press such a presupposition. Study the lit- 
 erature of the gymnasium and the lycee, and 
 you find the men of those schools conferring 
 with each other and with the authorities of 
 the State, theorizing, publishing, urging, agi- 
 
tating, warning, all in their own bailiwick, as 
 free citizens, not as dependents ; considering 
 what the nation needs or desires, what a good 
 psychology permits or demands, what inno- 
 vations in school practice the advance of '-^ 
 science suggests as feasible, what improve- 
 ments are called for in hygienic conditions : 
 only you do not hear about college examina- 
 tions as a goal of endeavor, due consideration 
 of which is coming to be neglected. Hence 
 I believe the fascination to us Americans of 
 the study of pedagogy in the foreign systems 
 and literatures. One feels himself there in a 
 clearer atmosphere. Ambitions are there less 
 clouded with personal strivings for distinc- 
 tion. One hears nothing of this or that 
 gymnasium as getting more boys in, or as 
 winning more or less honors. 
 
 It is no more true that we prepare youth 
 for college than it is that the college carries 
 on the youth whom we prepare. The stand- 
 ard of excellence in the school is no more -s/ 
 relative to the college than the standard of 
 excellence in the college is relative to the 
 school. Each must find its law in social 
 conditions and in psychologic truth. It is 
 our concern that we hitch our wagon to a 
 
star, just as it is the concern of the college 
 also to hitch its wagon to a star. That is, 
 we must adjust our theory and practice to 
 our conditions, according as these conditions 
 exist as limitations or promptings in our 
 total environment. We have to study the 
 laws of mind and the organization of the 
 subjects we teach ; we have to consider, each 
 day, — is this or that the better procedure ; 
 we have to interest our pupils, and, to that 
 end, to choose from the infinite riches of 
 nature, art, and literature, as freely as possi- 
 ble, without bias from external disturbers and 
 marplots ; we have to pay homage to the 
 science and art of teaching, in whose domain 
 examinations ab extra are a foreign and unas- 
 similable importation, injected and intruded 
 as an anarchic element into the life that, 
 should be permitted to attend to its own 
 business in peace and tranquillity. 
 
 But to return from my digression, — 
 what is the proper ideal for us to keep in 
 mind in our teaching of English ? Is it 
 possible that a single high school teacher 
 contemplates literary activity as the end and 
 aim of his labor in this department ? Is the 
 training of notable writers, male or female, 
 
a business with which we have any con- 
 cern ? 
 
 Just as much as the high school teacher of 
 astronomy aims to give the world a flood of 
 astronomers ; or the teacher of history to 
 call into being a multitude of historians ; or 
 the teacher of gymnastics to train a genera- 
 tion of athletes ; or the teacher of drawing 
 to inspire a host of artists ; or the teacher 
 of Latin to produce countless classical phi- 
 lologists ; — so much, I suppose, is it the 
 function of the English teacher to set up 
 for his goal the capacity or the ambition to 
 win the regard of the world by the produc- 
 tion of literary work. Probably no one 
 within the secondary pale would have ex- 
 pressed a conception so belated, so ill-judged, 
 so out of all relation to the primary concepts 
 of pedagogy. Certainly our main concern 
 is to attend to our own business, without 
 taking too much advice. We must not let 
 our ideas become confused as to the object 
 for which we are striving. 
 
 Firsts — what function have secondary 
 teachers of English in common with the 
 other secondary teachers } Secondly, — what 
 function have secondary teachers of English 
 peculiar and special to themselves ? 
 
8 
 
 The high school does not exist to train 
 specialists. It deals with youth at that 
 most interesting and momentous period of 
 life when intellectual enthusiasms are bud- 
 ding and beginning to bloom ; it deals with 
 minds eminently plastic and docile and trust- 
 ful ; it deals with wills unsubjugated either 
 by low considerations of prudence and self- 
 interest or by high altruistic motives of duty 
 to society and the state ; it deals with young 
 citizens not yet entered into the arena of 
 business competition, not yet knowing, or 
 capable of comprehending, the maxims of 
 the market, not yet seasoned with that un- 
 belief which puts by the ideals of righteous- 
 ness as being unpractical in this modern age. 
 
 The secondary period of education is 
 very different from the primary period on 
 the one hand, and from the tertiary period 
 on the other. It has its unmistakable char- 
 acteristics — a right to live its own inde- 
 pendent life and to seek its own laws. The 
 high school must be autonomous if it is to 
 flourish. The youth is neither infant nor 
 man. He cannot be dealt with without 
 reference to his tastes, as the child must ; 
 nor can he be allowed to circumscribe his 
 
education within the limits of his own de- 
 sires, as the man may. The great presup- 
 positions common to all civil life are still 
 the main staple of his study. He does not 
 yet choose his profession, any more than 
 does the child ; yet his intellectual yearnings 
 must be noted, respected, and deferred to, 
 as must those of the adult man. The sec- 
 ondary period is a period of transition, and 
 so is full of contradiction. Hence perhaps 
 the difficulty of formulating a consistent sec- 
 ondary pedagogy, — a task which, however, 
 we must either perform ourselves, or consent 
 to see performed for us by men not of the 
 guild. 
 
 All secondary teachers must begin by 
 studying the youth himself. Then they 
 must consider the total environment in 
 society and the state for which the youth is 
 to be fitted. From the limitless range of 
 sciences and arts, languages and literatures, 
 they must select the most fundamental, on 
 which various superstructures of culture and 
 conviction may be most solidly built. Dur- 
 ing the years of secondary education the 
 youth matures ; and the later years of it 
 are very unlike the earlier ones. Hence 
 
lO 
 
 courses of study must be progressive, so as 
 ever to give the newly developed powers 
 resistance worthy of their prowess, — some- 
 thing to attack and conquer, — in order that 
 the consciousness of victory and achievement 
 may be awaked, and so may serve to invigo- 
 rate all the faculties for new efforts. The 
 pugnacity and the wilfulness of boys and 
 the patience and complaisance of girls must 
 have their due recognition and employment. 
 The too easily aroused base motive of desire 
 to beat each other must be taught to yield 
 to the high motive of desire to beat things. 
 The problems of science and the tasks of 
 art lead the striving mind only upward. 
 The shrewdness that looks to the beating of 
 an examiner usually squints towards knavery. 
 In this point we secondary teachers have a 
 clear and distinct duty. Our relations in- 
 volve the ever present danger of overgrowth 
 of personal competition. Personal competi- 
 tion is to the struggle with objective difficul- 
 ties very much what drunkenness is to in- 
 spiration. 
 
 The child in the primary school is always 
 supervised : if he is given something to do, 
 the teacher looks on while he does it. The 
 
r 1 
 
 young man in college is practically never 
 supervised : he is given something to do, and 
 is then left to himself to do it or to devise 
 ways of not doing it. The youth in the 
 high school is treated perhaps too much like 
 the primarian. The true function of the 
 secondary teacher is to enlist the interest of 
 the pupil so that he shall address himself to 
 his work from an inner motive of his own. 
 A great boy or girl studying at a little desk, 
 in a row with other boys and girls, under the 
 eye of a teacher, is a queer spectacle, if you 
 will view it from the vantage-ground of rea- 
 son. Our ideas of what constitutes a school 
 are largely conventional, inherited from 
 primitive times and conditions. A master or 
 a mistress keeping order in a flock of youth, 
 and hearing recitations, is about the sum and 
 substance of the prevailing idea of a school. 
 And so tyrannical are in our minds the con- 
 notations of the term class, that we ignore 
 the individual, and try to teach groups, as if 
 groups were teachable entities. This idea 
 yields all too slowly to the conception of 
 individual youth pursuing lines of study and 
 investigation, with the teacher at hand to 
 guide, to stimulate, to praise. 
 
12 
 
 / 
 
 You see I can hardly tear myself aVay 
 from the allurements of the general part of 
 my theme, which is only preliminary to the 
 special business on which I came here at 
 your kind invitation. To this I must at 
 once proceed. 
 
 To the teacher of English falls a triple 
 function. He is to introduce his pupils to 
 English literature ; he is to awaken the dor- 
 mant language sense, the linguistic conscious- 
 ness, with reference to the mother tongue ; 
 he is to stimulate and direct the ambition for 
 neat and comely expression. These three 
 elements, distinct and separable both in 
 theory and in practice, find their common 
 principle in the obvious fact that they deal 
 with the language and with the thought that 
 is expressed in it, or with the art of express- 
 ing in it thought that is new and original. 
 
 With regard to English literature, the 
 secondary education should aim to give a 
 conspectus of the five centuries that begin 
 with the age of Chaucer and Wycliffe. 
 
 If the teacher knows his subject, he will 
 dispense with text-books of literary history, 
 in which all the members of a class simul- 
 taneously learn the same lessons, and will 
 
13 
 
 use the method of research, giving many 
 topics for exploration, sending pupils to 
 many books, and requiring reports in writing 
 or in oral speech. There is here no possible 
 forward marching by platoon front; the indi- 
 vidual must find his own way, not relying on 
 the touch of elbows, but examining with his 
 own eyes the ground he comes to, and with 
 his own judgment planning his next steps. 
 The thing to eliminate from the recitation is 
 identity of preparation. Nowhere but in the 
 despotism of school duress, can thirty young 
 people be brought together all prepared to 
 say the same things. Absolutely the exercise 
 must not be allowed to become uninteresting 
 and monotonous. Thirty pupils do no more 
 than one, if all do the same things ; but 
 thirty pupils do thirty times as much as one 
 if each does a different thing from any other. 
 The only limitation this 'procedure finds in 
 practice is the lack of time for listening to 
 what so many have to say. When each has 
 made his own discovery, he will not be apt 
 to acquiesce in the loss of his chance to 
 make his report. The clock is merciless. 
 Each should have his opportunity at once, 
 and so it is better to keep a rein on this 
 
14 
 
 exercise, lest it run away with all the English 
 time. 
 
 The conspectus of five centuries of Eng- 
 lish literature that may be contemplated as 
 feasible in the secondary course must be 
 modestly planned. I would consider only 
 four periods, — the Early period, coming 
 down to the middle of the sixteenth century ; 
 the Elizabethan, taking in Milton, but not 
 Dryden; the Eighteenth century, including 
 Dryden and Butler, and ending with Cow- 
 per; and the Modern. These periods can be 
 characterized with sufficient distinctness for 
 high school pupils to appreciate their differ- 
 ences. Pupils will make acquaintance with 
 them through the specimens which they will 
 read in class. It will be the teacher's busi- 
 ness to direct the choice of these specimens, 
 and to bring out by his hints and suggestions 
 the ways in which they relate themselves to 
 and illustrate the period to which they be- 
 long. High school pupils can understand 
 that Coriolanus could not have been pro- 
 duced in the same century with Cato, Comus 
 under the same influences as Hudibras, Pil- 
 grim's Progress in the same environment as 
 the Sentimental Journey, or either of these 
 simultaneously with Childe Harold. 
 
15 
 
 I wish here to enter my earnest protest 
 against the assumption that high school 
 youth are not grown up to a perception of 
 the broad and obvious historical relations 
 and characteristic differences of literary peri- 
 ods. This assumption is made by the col- 
 lege requirements, which prescribe unrelated 
 atoms of reading, under the most unnatural 
 and crudely conceived stress and strain of anti- 
 cipated compositions on themes of remem- 
 bered matter. What the youth can discover 
 and understand it is proper to say he has a 
 natural right to be put in the way of meeting. 
 Feeble methods in education always address- 
 the memory. An examination gropes for 
 the residuum which a mental process has left 
 in the memory. If the mental process has 
 been conducted under anticipation of an 
 examination, it has labored under an incubus,, 
 and has probably been checked midway, its 
 spontaneity thwarted, its results spoiled. 
 
 The pupil's writing, in a course of litera- 
 ture, should be, not in the form of examina- 
 tions, but in the form of theses, or reports of 
 explorations, drawn up with a prime purpose 
 to make known to a listening auditory what 
 the explorer has done. The existence of this 
 
i6 
 
 prime purpose is all important. The youth 
 has no business to write until he has some- 
 thing to communicate, and a desire to make 
 the communication to a public of his peers. 
 The English of this thesis or report consti- 
 tutes a secondary purpose. The thesis 
 should be well written, as a matter of course, 
 just as it should be well pronounced in de- 
 livery, and just as the reader should be 
 neatly dressed. 
 
 Even when it has the best imaginable op- 
 portunity, the course in literature must select 
 a very small number of authors for reading 
 in the class. Yet many authors can be 
 made the objects of research, the aim being to 
 find passages illustrative of their lives, their 
 relations to their contemporaries, and of the 
 form and content of their works. Here the 
 teacher must know his ground, and start the 
 learner on fruitful lines. It does not follow, 
 however, that the teacher must have every- 
 thing cut and dried. It is easy to overdo a 
 direction. The question-cues must be mere 
 starters. E. g. ; Do you agree with Johnson 
 and Macaulay as to the absurdity of Mrs. 
 Thrale's second marriage .'' Why should 
 Bunyan and Milton not have been intimate ? 
 
17 
 
 What did Thomas Gray probably think of 
 Samuel Johnson ? Compare Goldsmith's life 
 and Gray's. Find portraits illustrating Eliza- 
 bethan peaked beards and ruffs and eigh- 
 teenth-century shaven faces and wigs. 
 Show us Fanny Burney, Geo. III., Queen 
 Charlotte, Garrick, Sir Joshua, Dr. Burney, 
 etc., etc. Did Wordsworth show apprecia- 
 tion of Burns ? Did Milton show apprecia- 
 tion of Shakespeare .? Compare a specimen 
 of Milton's prose with a specimen of Dry- 
 den's. Compare Twickenham and Straw- 
 berry Hill with the homes of Wordsworth 
 and Tennyson. Find illustrations of Cow- 
 per's playfulness, of his domesticity, of his 
 indignation, of his melancholy, of his piety. 
 Take us to a coffee house of Queen Anne's 
 time. Has our prose grown more or less, 
 regular and precise since Addison wrote ? 
 Are Elizabethan poetic forms, or eighteenth- 
 century poetic forms, the more in vogue in 
 the modern period? Was Shakespeare 
 played and read in London in the eighteenth 
 century? Show us a portrait of Mrs. Sid- 
 dons, and tell some anecdotes of her. Find 
 pictures and descriptions to illustrate Ker- 
 amos. Read to the class Johnson's parallel 
 
i8 
 
 between Pope and Dryden, and comment on 
 its form and content. Do the same for the 
 classic lona passage in the Journey to the 
 Western Islands. Organize some of your 
 classmates into a company to play scenes 
 from Goldsmith's and Sheridan's comedies. 
 In a similar way present the Masque of 
 Pandora. Was Comus ever put on the 
 public stage? What contemporary English 
 writers did Benjamin Franklin read? What 
 English writers did Irving, Hawthorne, Em- 
 erson, and Lowell meet in their visits to Eng- 
 land? What famous English writers have 
 visited this country? Correct Macaulay's 
 estimate of Steele by reference to more im- 
 partial authorities. Imagine an interview 
 between Goldsmith and Chatterton. Set 
 forth the case of the disputed authorship of 
 The Ode to the Cuckoo. What facts of 
 Milton's life could we ascertain from his 
 English poems ? Present the historical asso- 
 ciations connected with the site of Barclay & 
 Perkins's brewery. Trace the custom of tea- 
 drinking by the allusions to it in English 
 literature. Compare the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries as to their ways of 
 viewing Alpine scenery. Look up fore- 
 
19 
 
 shadowings of Wordsworth in Gray. Make 
 a collection of Wordsworth's strongest lines. 
 
 These are a few specimens of the endless 
 profusion of topics suitable for secondary 
 exploration. For lower classes topics more 
 easy and obvious, and for the maturest and 
 most energetic pupils, topics much more diffi- 
 cult, may be devised. 
 
 In all this teaching of English literature 
 the teacher must be the unifying principle, J" 
 referring all details and particulars to their 
 just place in the whole, and keeping the 
 pupils' attention ever alert for indications of 
 historic time. The teacher being present, 
 intent on this business, there will be no need 
 of further systematizing the work. We are 
 too much afraid of desultoriness. It is a 
 great note of the schoolmasterly mind to 
 schematize, to skeletonize, to paradigmatize, 
 all the matter of instruction. Hence school- 
 masters' books, the so-called text-books, are 
 notably devoid of interest for the public at 
 large ; and when some one makes a book for 
 schools that is consecutive and readable, as 
 Mr. John Fiske did in his Civil Government, 
 teachers look upon it askance because the 
 skeleton in it is not immediately visible. 
 
20 
 
 Spontaneity is better than any parade of 
 method. The instruction will have system, 
 that is, it will stand together as a whole, 
 provided it issue from one clear insight into 
 the nature of the intended result. The more 
 original the teaching, the more vain to ask 
 the teacher for his syllabus. 
 
 Thus while we teach English literature, 
 our aim is to make the youth acquainted 
 with English literature, — not merely with a 
 few atoms and fragments of it, but, so far as 
 our opportunity and the capacity of our 
 pupils allow, with the entirety of it as a 
 growth and organism, which visibly changes 
 from century to century, and in which Chau- 
 cer and Tennyson are linked together, not 
 merely as chance additions to a great aggre- 
 gate, but as fellow members of one race, liv- 
 ing far apart in time, but close together in 
 soul, in speech, in poetic power. 
 
 The English teacher must be fully imbued 
 with a sense of the greatness of the great 
 writers. Above all things, he must appre- 
 ciate Shakespeare, and inculcate belief in 
 the poet's superiority over all else in litera- 
 ture. Not many persons have explored the 
 literatures of the world so thoroughly as to 
 
21 
 
 know, of their own knowledge, that any one 
 writer is absolutely unapproached ; but the 
 older one grows, and the more one reads, the 
 more one comes to feel that this common 
 convention, this universal agreement of the 
 modern world to acknowledge the suprem- 
 acy of Shakespeare, is just. Of course, in 
 teaching, this convention becomes one of the 
 leading motives. It should be taught like 
 an article of a creed, with all reverence, to 
 be explained, but not to be subjected to 
 doubt. All writers, in fact, with whom it is 
 worth while to deal in school at all, should 
 be treated with honor. A pupil's impression 
 of Pope, e.g., should not be suffered to remain 
 such as one gets from reading Macaulay's 
 essay on Addison ; nor should pupils be 
 allowed to imagine a moment that Macaulay's 
 own fame as a brilliant writer is to be snuffed 
 out by modern epigram directed against his 
 style or his historical accuracy. 
 
 High school pupils are always deficient in 
 a sense for rhythm, and so fail to appreciate 
 poetic form. Hence an important part of 
 the course in literature has to deal with verse 
 as such, temporarily leaving matter and con- 
 tent in abeyance. The five-foot iambic line 
 
22 
 
 is the material of which the great mass of our 
 verse is built. To study the nature of the 
 five-foot iambic is to lay the foundation for 
 appreciation of English poetry in general. 
 Blank verse, the heroic couplet, the sonnet, 
 are all made of five-foot iambics. Therefore, 
 if our time is too scant to enable us to do much 
 with poetics at large, we absolutely must pay 
 homage to this verse form, and make our 
 pupils chant it, scan it, dwell on it, till they 
 become skilled in running with its movement 
 and incapable of blundering on the accent. 
 It is solely a matter of training. Poetry is not 
 amorphous philosophy or narrative, and must 
 not be read with sole reference to sentence- 
 structure and punctuation marks. I am not 
 afraid of a little sing-song. To read verse as 
 / if the form were an indelicate matter, that 
 should be hidden as much as possible be- 
 neath the logical pausing, is not to imitate 
 the rhapsodists. One does not dance for the 
 purpose of getting there, or sing to make 
 known one's opinion. 
 
 Coming to the second element of the 
 English teacher's function, — instruction in 
 the language, — it must be said that it is 
 not possible to teach the mother tongue in 
 
23 
 
 any such way as to make the study yield the 
 peculiar mental discipline that comes from 
 drill in the forms of a more highly inflected 
 speech. The study of Latin or German 
 seems to me absolutely essential as a pre- 
 requisite to the secondary study of English. 
 French is much better than no foreign lan- 
 guage at all, and German is far better than 
 Latin. Of Latin, experience seems to me 
 to show that high school pupils are sure to 
 get too little to serve as an appreciable 
 quantity in the sum of their culture. Of 
 German they get a very substantial knowl- 
 edge. The near kinship of English and 
 German makes each language fruitfully illus- 
 trate the other to the youthful comprehen- 
 sion. For one thing, the presence in the 
 two languages of the same set of prceterito- 
 prcssentia verbs enables the German to 
 throw most valuable light upon the English. 
 English is inflectionless now, but was not 
 always so. The subjunctive, e. g., has almost 
 disappeared. It does not follow, however, 
 that the subjunctive forms being lost, the 
 verbs that once were in the subjunctive are 
 henceforth in the indicative. We have a 
 plenty of subjunctive locutions still. Mil- 
 
24 
 
 ton and Shakespeare had far more than we 
 have. Being often invisible to the eye, the 
 subjunctive in modern EngHsh is a more 
 subtle and elusive thing to find than are the 
 hypothetical modes in Greek and Latin. It 
 is an excellent high school exercise to detect 
 these essentially subjunctive relations in mod- 
 ern and in Elizabethan speech. Let the 
 pupil consider, e. g., whether / might be 
 admitted in All's Well, IV. v., 94, and / 
 might be admitted in Twelfth Night, I., i., 
 24, are to be parsed as being in the same 
 mode. I may be wrong, — it is many years 
 since I ceased to entertain respect for the 
 parsing business that once throve in these 
 grammar schools, — but I believe both these 
 verbs would have been parsed as being in 
 the " potential " mode. The ability to make 
 such distinctions as this is quite within the 
 competency of high school youth ; and it is 
 proper to say that whatever is clearly right, 
 inherently interesting, and fully within the 
 reach of youth making only wholesome 
 effort, the youth have a natural right to the 
 opportunity of knowing. 
 
 Some of the results of historical English 
 grammar, then, the English teacher ought to 
 
25 
 
 be able to communicate to his pupils, and 
 ought to communicate to them, in stimulat- 
 ing ways, leaving them half the journey to 
 make for themselves, and not systematically, 
 but as occasion serves. He should eradicate 
 the superstition of a " potential " mode. He 
 should teach how to distinguish between racy 
 idiom and ancient blunder. He should know 
 how to strike the right tone of relish and 
 insight in dealing with the uncouth forms of 
 Wyclifife's version, of the Paston Letters, of 
 Sir Thomas Malory, with the archaisms of 
 Spenser, and with the vulgarisms of Bunyan. 
 He should not forget what of good temper 
 and forbearance is due even to the innova- 
 tors who pronounce had rather and had as 
 lief ignoble forms that should give way to 
 the more parsable would rather and would as 
 soon. 
 
 One of the countless pleasant memories 
 that I connect with the days of my schoolboy- 
 hood is of analyzing sentences according to 
 the formulas of the late S, S. Greene. Now, 
 I cannot quite get over the feeling that that 
 analysis was a good thing for us boys. 
 Doubtless it was carried into absurd school- 
 masterly refinements, — for its author was 
 
26 
 
 notably a schoolmaster first, and a student 
 only at many removes from that, — and was 
 mechanical in its plan, and too little stimu- 
 lating to curiosity. Yet it was a good thing, 
 or the germ of one. Something we teachers 
 of English should surely do to nurse the 
 sentence sense, the great safe-guard of the 
 writer of English. The thought can be 
 uttered only in the sentence : the thought is 
 the sentence. The catesrories of the sen- 
 tence-structure are the categories of the 
 thought-process. The child constructs sen- 
 tences unconsciously ; the youth analyzes 
 sentences into their elements; the adult 
 studies the science of thought. The high 
 school graduate should be incapable of writ- 
 ing, with the outward forms of sentences, 
 groups ©f words that are not sentences. The 
 sentence-feeling in trained perfection might 
 almost be adopted as the goal of endeavor 
 in secondary English teaching. Then the 
 habit of viewing the sentence analytically 
 naturally begets the compl^entary habit of 
 viewing it synthetically; and the ability to 
 apprehend sentences of unusual length as 
 wholes facilitates the reading of such writers 
 as Milton, Clarendon, Hooker and Ruskin, 
 
27 
 
 and renders all reading of archaic matter 
 more fruitful and pleasing. In practice I 
 would confine the study of sentence analy- 
 sis to the nomenclature that is universally 
 recognized. Such whimsical technicalities 
 as Mr. Greene propounded had better be 
 avoided. 
 
 With regard to composition, the third of 
 the main functions assigned by present usage 
 to the English teacher, there would be much 
 to say did time permit. This subject has of 
 late been made prominent by the complaints 
 of the colleges. Even colleges that strenu- 
 ously refuse to admit on certificate, but insist ^-^ 
 on examining candidates, find themselves sur- 
 charged with poor writers, to teach whom the 
 very elements, the primary rudiments, of de- 
 cent writing, they must employ a force of 
 instructors, and so descend from the true 
 college function to do the work legitimately 
 belonging to the school. The great query 
 with regard to these belated youth is, — how 
 did they ever pass the examination in Eng- y' 
 lish and get into college. I am sure of 
 this, — that youth will write carefully and 
 neatly, as soon as they are convinced that 
 they must; and that they will absolutely \/ 
 
J 
 
 28 
 
 make no effort in this direction beyond the 
 point that they know will suffice. A young 
 man fitting for college is a busy person, and 
 economizes his effort and his time by keen 
 instinct. The coming examination he dis- 
 counts exactly. Girls you can work up to 
 beautiful zeal for nice work. Boys tie no 
 ribbons on their themes, they weep not over 
 censure, they sit not up nights to copy and 
 recopy in their anxiety to please you. The 
 examination is their goal, and whatsoever 
 is more than that cometh of evil. In the 
 very nature of things an examination works 
 two ways : it draws pupils up to its level, and 
 at the same time prevents them from rising 
 higher. Why do you set an examination, if 
 you mean to speak contemptuously of it as 
 a standard, and exhort learners to go beyond 
 its requirements ? An examination is a thing 
 to be passed, not at all to be surpassed. Those 
 who have passed the college examination 
 should of course have the college guarantee, 
 and be by the college protected against the 
 flings of a carping world. 
 
 The only thing to do in the matter of 
 compositions is to be exacting. If a pupil 
 can do excellent work in his other studies. 
 
29 
 
 but remains a sloven in his English writing, 
 — the case is hardly supposable, — refuse 
 him promotion. Other studies may be 
 merged and mingled together in an average ; 
 but English should be a category by itself : / 
 without good English not even the most bril- 
 liant scholarship should suffice. English 
 composition concerns the form in which 
 work is done in all departments ; and it is 
 perfectly just to insist as much upon pro- 
 priety of form as upon propriety of substance \ 
 and content. If a pupil writes upon a Sun- 
 day-school picnic, will you suffer a profound 
 respect in his mind for the matter of his 
 communication to dwarf all consideration for 
 its appearance ? Pupils usually know a good 
 deal more about how to write than they are 
 willing to reduce to practice. They must 
 have some spur to rouse them to an effort. 
 In preparatory schools the college examina- 
 tion tends to thwart the application of any 
 such spur. In other schools the stimulus 
 can be devised easily enough if all the teach- / 
 
 ers can agree as to its importance. 
 
 I was amused to see in a newspaper the 
 suggestion that pupils should be required to 
 write something very frequently. The fact 
 
30 
 
 is, in almost any modern school pupils are 
 writing about half the time. The daily 
 emptyings of the waste-baskets reveal lec- 
 ture-notes, reading-notes, first drafts, solu- 
 tions, memorandums, notes of request for 
 sundry permissions and exemptions, — in 
 fact, a deal of skimble-skamble stuff of in- 
 describable variety, — almost all of it compo- 
 sition. This, of course, cannot come under 
 the teacher's eye. It is vast in quantity, 
 utterly formless in execution. So constant 
 is it as an element of school life, that the 
 merely occasional composition stands no 
 chance beside it of exerting a determining 
 influence on the aggregate of habit which 
 the pupil is forming. 
 
 Evidently the thing to do in this case is to 
 diminish the amount of this illegitimate 
 scribbling. A girl told me that she wrote 
 one hundred and fifty pages of notes of 
 matter dictated by a teacher in the way of 
 lecture, and that her penmanship had been 
 pretty much wrecked in the process. She 
 had to write under stress and strain. She 
 acquired a certain habitual reckless gait and 
 pace, which now she cannot put aside. She 
 was too young for such an exercise. This 
 
31 
 
 taking of notes, I venture to say, is needless 
 in secondary education. Then if a pupil is 
 to read something and report on it, encourage 
 him to trust his memory and deliver himself 
 orally, without notes. Girls will copy out 
 pages of books to read to the class. When 
 the matter is historical or biographical, the 
 copying is not only superfluous, it is per- 
 nicious. The high school girl is Hke Ham- 
 let : when she is moved, her impulse is, " My 
 tables, meet it is I set it down." 
 
 The scribbling cannot, of course, be 
 wholly done away with, but it can be dimin- 
 ished in amount. Then all the teachers 
 should equally be teachers of composition. 
 Certainly, pupils compose for every teacher. 
 If the teachers are cultivated persons, they 
 surely know enough about good English. 
 Every exercise should be viewed for its 
 English as well as for its exhibition of 
 knowledge or skill. That one teacher 
 should be burdened with more than his 
 quota of compositions is wrong. This is no 
 special art, requiring peculiar knowledge. Is 
 there any high school teacher who is not a 
 lady or a gentleman ? Is there any such 
 teacher who would acknowledge himself less 
 
32 
 
 competent than the rest to observe and to 
 reprove faults in morals, faults in manners, 
 faults in spoken speech ? 
 
 The written matter that a pupil produces 
 in each department should, so far as is possi- 
 ble, come for censure before the teacher in 
 that department ; for censure both as to form 
 and as to content ; the content to have no 
 recognition or reward unless the form is 
 satisfactory. A teacher should be like a 
 royal personage, who receives no callers that 
 do not strictly observe the etiquette of dress 
 prescribed by custom ; and not a common, 
 familiar companion, for whom anything is 
 good enough. 
 
 Then the compositions on topics of a 
 general character, such as do not come 
 within the province of a special teacher, — 
 and there should, of course, be a good many 
 such compositions, — might properly be 
 divided equally among all the teachers. Or 
 the pupils might be apportioned to the 
 teachers at the beginning of the year. Sup- 
 pose there should be thirty-five to a teacher. 
 Each teacher would then have his class of 
 thirty-five in composition, and would soon 
 find out how many exercises he could have 
 
33 
 
 them write and he get time to supervise with 
 due care and deUberation. If each pupil 
 writes once a week, the teacher will have 
 seven themes a day to read, — an hour's 
 work ; though, as weekly themes would be 
 short ones, it might well be that he would 
 learn to read them at a little quicker rate. 
 
 Now let me say, — and my experience in 
 this matter is considerable, — that seven 
 themes a day is quite as much as any teacher 
 ought to undertake. I have settled down to 
 the basis of an hour for five, and even this 
 average I find is made possible only by the 
 fact that most of the themes require but 
 little attention. Seven per day, when the 
 exercises are short, is enough. Probably 
 some teachers would push them all forward 
 to Saturday and then make a grand crush of 
 them, with groanings and imprecations. But 
 that would be wrong every way. It is essen- 
 tial to give a written theme back to its writer 
 almost instantly. It is a fatal laches to let 
 days intervene between the theme and the 
 criticism. Seven themes a day will hurt no 
 one, but rather prove pleasing and useful 
 to many a teacher whose sense of form in 
 language is jaded and needs reviving. 
 
 1 
 
34 
 
 I am utterly unwilling to say a word in 
 favor of the plan now most in vogue, of im- 
 posing the composition work of scores of 
 pupils upon a single teacher already keeping 
 full class hours like the rest, and, like the 
 rest, having his daily preparations to make. 
 To style one an English teacher is not to 
 confer on one any special ability to resist the 
 hebetating influences of excessive work over 
 themes. The English teacher must protect 
 himself, and naturally will protect himself. 
 If he professes to be reading a great many 
 themes daily, it will be well to inquire how 
 he reads them, and how impressive he makes 
 his comment to the young writers. If the 
 results of English composition teaching are 
 unsatisfactory, something else must be done 
 than trying to squeeze more theme-reading 
 out of the English teacher. He reads too 
 many already. My agreement with Presi- 
 dent Eliot in his general reformatory ten- 
 dencies comes so near being unqualified, that 
 I regret the necessity of dissenting from his 
 plan for easing the English teacher. Presi- 
 dent Eliot's plan might be called a phase 
 of the ancient Lancasterian method. The 
 trouble with it would be that the monitors 
 
35 
 
 would surely sink into a low caste and be- 
 come helots. The English teacher himself, 
 no matter how scholarly and fine-mannered, 
 would at once become a pariah, were his 
 function to be confined to theme reading 
 and marking. Nothing will do but that the 
 themes be read by men and women for 
 whom the youth have the fullest respect and 
 regard. 
 
 I do not see how the teaching of English 
 writing is to be much improved except by 
 improving the tone of the schools ; and the 
 tone of the schools is to be raised only by 
 enlisting in the work all the teachers. The 
 fitting for examinations is an influence con- 
 stantly tending to debase tone. Where a 
 corps of teachers is unanimous and resolute, 
 all things are possible. 
 
 The main lines in which reform of compo- 
 sition teaching must move are then, ist, Re- 
 pression of irresponsible, destructive scrib- 
 bling ; and 2d, Enlargement and increase of 
 responsible, educative writing. Writing, to 
 have value as a factor in education, must be 
 the expression of a positive mental content 
 that is worth communicating and naturally 
 seeks utterance. It must have its oppor- 
 
36 
 
 tunity : it must not be driven and forced up 
 to high speed. Just what to do to prepare 
 for a college examination in English, I do 
 not know : the thing lies outside the domain 
 of pedagogic science. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 arV14826 
 
 To what end do high schools teach Englis 
 
 3 1924 031 672 748 
 
 olin.anx