What is English? Something definite for teachers

Front matter

a* 1U

WHAT IS ENGLISH?

SOMETHING DEFINITE FOR TEACHERS

Chapter I. Wha t English Is 15

II. Descent to Earth 29

III. Intensive Spelling 36

IV. "What Grammar Is All About 74

V. Teaching Grammar 96

VI. John Wilson !s Idea 115

VII. What Is a Comma? 128

VIII. Present Usage in Pointing 154

IX. Themes 1S9

X. Reading 219

XI. Odds and Ends 244

Introduction

A paraphrase of the Advertisement to The Vicar of Wakefield will serve to introduce this book. "A hundred doubts may be stirred by this manual, and a hundred things could be said to prove them groundless. But it is needless. A book may be useful with numerous over-statements, or it may be erroneous without a single emphatic remark. Such as' are fond of pulpit-banging will turn with disdain from the author's simple work-shop. Such as mistake suave wording for sound teaching will find no help in this kit of tools for a laborer, and such as have been taught to deride accuracy will laugh at one whose whole stock of advice is drawn from the facts of a long experience. "

English has until recently been considered above and beyond other subjects of the curriculum. Its function has been supposed to be the cultivation of insight into beauty, of charm and finesse in expression. Teachers have taken pride in the idea that their beautiful occupation had little ' to do with imparting facts to crassly ignorant minds; have felt little need of accurate knowledge or careful scheme of attack. Algebra, Latin, physics — these required a teacher to have definite information and to go about his instruction according to plans worked out through centuries of experience. But English — that demanded only hazy desire and the throb of inspiration. A large proportion of its teachers, in J?oth school and college, have been dilettanteish, amateurish, ignorant of fact, and scornful of system. They have professed horror at the notion that the main purpose of secondary English is to attack methodically the most rudimentary illiteracy. They have felt that such a proposal could come only from a mental blacksmith, and have thus made the mechanics of their art an almost unmentionable subject. But they have not denied the necessity of the gross mechanics, and in practice have done much good work.

Such a jumble of emotion and fact perplexes the novice. And there is another potent cause of perplexity — the experts in pedagogy. They occupy lofty positions, they thunder in conventions, they appal us with articles and books. Though they know nothing of the craft of teaching English, they tell us of noble aims: "Why instead of confining our students to English literature do we not make them acquainted with the first-class literature of mankind?" This from a prominent man in our oldest university. An even better-known man has written "authoritatively" about spelling. The only particles of information in his brochure are wrong in principle; there is hardly a sentence that presents anything concrete; the adjurations are mostly impossible to follow. Lest such violent language should seem the impertinence of a small man toward great ones, the reader is referred to an article in the Unpopular Review for July, 1916, "The Professor of Pedagogy Once More," written by a man who "for twenty years in several institutions has been nextdoor neighbor" to professors of pedagogy, and who "has on his shelves seventeen feet of pedagogic literature." This article is not savage or vindictive or satirical; it rather good-naturedly states such facts as these : ' ' Among the secondary school-teachers, of course, the professor of pedagogy is an oracle and a great man. And it is the secondary school to which, almost exclusively, he addresses his literature. . . . Few college professors would be so naive as to discuss their methods with a pedagogical expert. . . .

He knows, too, that only a sort of professional courtesy prevents them from frankly calling him a humbug. . . . His whole 'line of talk' reveals that he has never considered the question of dealing with responsible minds. . . . Their praises of the delights of literature and art have a curious way of suggesting, by the vagueness and generality of the terms, that these delights are being reported, rather than recalled from personal experience. ... In the teacher of experience, who takes the pedagogical courses as a condition of promotion, they excite only ridicule and contempt." Where can the novice look for counsel? He knows not what his objective is, nor what to do, nor how to do it, nor how to correlate the demands for literature and written composition and oral composition and spelling and grammar and "appreciation" and clear thinking and self-expression and sentence-structure and analysis of style — and so on, world without end. Inexperienced teachers perform one third of the English work in the high schools of the author's state, and probably that ratio holds for the rest of the country. They cannot rely on their texts for guidance as teachers of algebra can; and so rapidly have methods changed, that they may get only misdirection by recalling how they themselves were taught when they were in school. So there is a real use for a vade mecum which shall display what one man has observed, what he has found essential, how he drives at that objective, and what devices he has learned to employ. Such a guide may be wide of the truth in some particulars ; not all of it can be used by any one reader. But it is a coherent body of practice which is available until a teacher has had time to build up a codex of his own. Everything here presented is the result of experience — an experience based on acquaintance with the product of many schools in all parts of the country. Every one of the suggestions has been tested for at least five years and most of them for twelve ; some for eighteen. Hardly anything has been arrived at by experimenting with a preconception ; everything has been forced upon the author by observing what was effective with particular young human beings who sat on material benches in an actual class-room.

For the most part a colloquial style has been used. The author has thought it better to say "I" and "you" and "don't" and "tackle," because he is a practical workman who fears formality when he is talking about his trade.

After this volume was ready for the press the author read Eollo Walter Brown's How the French Boy Learns to Write. Mr. Brown's inquiries were scrupulously and fully made; the results are carefully compiled and temperately expressed. Here is an epitome of the judgment of the world 's most clearsighted, most literary nation on the teaching of its mother-tongue. It appears that the French boy, "not superior in intellect to the American boy, and not aided by some sort of magic in his native language, writes with sharper accuracy of thought, surer and more intelligent freedom." Yet France ' ' does not believe that the great body of boys should be trained in any special graces, has no idea of making a great body of literary writers. " l 'In the early grades the matters to receive chief attention are ordinary accuracy and conventional correctness.' ' Simplified grammar, especially "the functions of words in ordinary sentences," is carried purposefully through the whole school course ; teachers take the position that a boy's ability to express himself well "must eventually depend in large measure upon his skill in handling the sentence, and that this skill must come in part from deep-seated, long-established knowledge of sentence elements." France requires that every pupil in its secondaire schools "shall have his attention called to punctuation" from his eighth to his tenth years and shall be taught ' ' the principles of punctuation ' ' during the next two years. The success of these efforts may be gaged by one of Mr. Brown's experiments. A class of 28 French boys (aged 11 and 12) wrote from dictation a paragraph of English (64 words) which they had never seen before; 11 wrote without error. When the same paragraph was tried in American schools with 500 pupils of the same or higher grades, only 11 wrote without error — i. e., the younger French pupils were 18 times better. This is hardly so astonishing as a bit of evidence that the present writer can adduce : a set of twelve-minute themes, written at Cambrai for an American teacher of English at the lycee, mere class tests for idiom written by fourteen-year-old boys, written for a teacher who never had a word to say about punctuation — these show only two petty instances of carelessness with commas. France hag achieved in the schools, by the only possible method — patient and unrelenting care with fundamentals — what our best universities agonize over and can only partially attain. Anyone who is skeptical about the wisdom of What is English? will do well to read How the French Boy Learns to Write.

The most astonishing portion of this message from France is the answer to the question: "What is the objective in all teaching of the mother-tongue 1 ' ' Our American answer has been that there is a double objective : 1. (minor) some graces of style, 2. (major) stimulating a taste for good literature. But France says : ' ' It is the conviction of the great body of teachers, as well as the Ministry, that work in grammar, rhetoric, and literature is in most respects lost unless it contributes to the pupil's ability to give full, intelligent expression to his thought. Moreover, theories of teaching, and all the proposed changes in the course of study seem to be considered first in respect to their influence on this ability of the pupil. Expression is not the sole end, but in all the lower schools it is the primary end."

The voice of France speaks there. A voice is now being heard from American universities (see pages 17-22) that issues the same mandate to secondary teachers. It declares that originality without literacy is valueless. These voices must be heeded by one who would avoid failure. But the following of their counsel is a complicated task. It is the aim of this book to supply the knowledge necessary to success.

CHAPTER I

No inexperienced teacher needs to be told what algebra is, or Latin, or German. Among teachers and superintendents there is no discussion of what these subjects are, nor is there wide difference of opinion as to just how they must be taught. If a novice were suddenly told to take an arithmetic class, he would not need to consult about what he was to do ; his textbook would be in itself a sufficient guide. The long sets of problems, the careful grading of these sets from very easy to somewhat hard, the elaborate display of every step in working a new kind of problem, the wary and slow advance from one small difficulty to another — the whole plan of the book declares on every page that things which are simple to the teacher are perplexing to the child, that the teacher must take time and be thorough, that arithmetic is a long campaign in which the conquest of simple fractions is a huge operation.

But suppose the subject were new and that professors of astronomy, with little sympathy for children's minds, were furnishing the textbooks. Their brains have been engrossed with stellar parallax and the hyperbolic courses of comets. The result would be a preface explaining that "Arithmetic is an introduction to that noblest and most useful of sciences, to the science of quantity and arrangement, to the study of ideal constructions, and the discovery thereby of relations between the parts of these constructions. " The untrained teacher, trusting that the great savant knew his business, would dutifully require William and Susan to commit this precious truth to memory. Then he would begin with a lesson in subtracting decimals, quickly go through a page in long division, spend two recitations on fractions, devote three days to percentage, and so quickly proceed to quadratic equations and the plotting of curves.

This is exaggerated and sarcastic. Yet it comes much nearer to plain facts than any of. us realize. It represents all too vividly the plainest and most painful truth about English textbooks. Most of them have been written in a literary atmosphere as different from school-room necessities as astronomy is from simple decimals. Their prefatory remarks are hardly less astonishing than the bit of fiction quoted above. One author writes: "An artist does not paint a masterpiece without continual effort, changing, modifying, perfecting his work by degrees. Only constant rewriting will help you to gain the power of self-expression." That may be as true as the definition of mathematics, but it is like the astronomy of rhetoric. Another author says : "After matters of technique have become so easy for us that we need to give them little attention, we may seek for something original to say"; and again, "When these elements of literary construction are once understood, the problem of composition is merely that of their effective combination." This is sheer astronomy.

Listen to four illustrations of the hard facts of practice: (1) It is all but impossible in four years to train a whole class of bright boys to write ive shall or to avoid trys and crys. (2) A professor in one of our oldest universities testifies that all he can exact as an English requirement for the degree of Ph.B. is reasonably decent spelling and punctuation; that to insist on skill in paragraphing would mean the withholding of so many degrees that other departments would protest. (3) One of our largest universities, which organizes freshman composition very strictly, gives a passing grade for mere freedom from mechanical errors. (4) A great state university, which has a high standard for entrance, announces to schools, in order that they may not go astray in English work, that the only requirement of candidates for admission is "proficiency in rudiments"; that candidates are qualified if their writing "is devoid of interest, originality, or any other literary merit." Yet this university has to organize every fall a large class for freshmen who are incompetent in mere mechanics.

These testimonies (a whole bookful of similar ones could be gathered) are recent. Twenty-five years ago, when English was brand-new, such statements would have been heard with horror; for rhetorics dealt mostly with astronomy — that is, with qualities of grace and charm. Fifteen years ago such statements would have been a little better understood, but few teachers would have sympathized with them. Ten years ago it still required courage to make any such declaration ; it would have been likely to brand a man as mechanical, inartistic, soulless. The English-teaching world still directed its telescope toward the stars, still had that lofty literary ideal. Five years ago the harsh facts were beginning to be perceived. In 1909 the Princeton catalogue spoke only of examination questions on "subject-matter, structure, and style of these books." In 1913 a very significant addition was made : and his proficiency in English composition.

From every college in the country goes up the cry, "Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate." Every high school is in despair because its pupils are so woefully ignorant of the merest rudiments. A reformation is everywhere demanded. It is being brought about, and so rapidly that most textbooks are stranded in the idealism of a decade ago, and many teachers are floundering badly in the new conditions. It is hard to keep pace with the swift change ; hard to know what it is all about, or why our duties are preached to us in such contradictory terms. "Inspire ' ' is still the watch-cry ; ' ' drill in rudiments ' ' is soon to be the fact.

A bit of personal experience will show how times are changing. The first chapter of a draft of this book written three years ago had a legend in capitals: "This is not guaranteed wisdom; it is merely what I find it necessary to do. ' ' So much was it the fashion to denounce drill in rudiments that the book might have been less effective if it had spoken unqualifiedly. That fashion has so much changed now that I should feel no hesitation in saying, "This is guaranteed wisdom"; because every number of the English Journal, every talk with a college instructor, makes it plainer that English-teaching has been inefficient — sadly inefficient — and that we have had the wrong notion of our duty. In 1912, in the first number of the English Journal, a high-school teacher declared: "Everywhere the answer is the same. The colleges cannot sufficiently condemn our product. . . . Business men tell us that our graduates cannot write a decent letter."

One possible misunderstanding must be here stated emphatically. If it can be removed, this will be the most important paragraph in the book. I am not arguing that tries is of greater importance than a lively introduction to a theme. I am not arguing that a semicolon is better than emulating the charm of Stevenson. I have not the least feeling that mechanical accuracy is more blessed than graceful style. I do not think any less of George Meredith because he once wrote alright. I am not in any way or degree, anywhere in this book, instituting any comparison between two such utterly unlike things as knowledge of mechanics and literary skill. That would be as monstrous as to compare ditch-digging with painting a madonna. Knowledge of how to form plurals or to use commas is one of the unloveliest things in an ugly world. It gives me no joy whatever. But my lack of joy has nothing to do with the case. The sad fact of nation-wide experience for a quarter of a century is that our effort to teach charming English has not amounted to much, and that our failure to teach decent English is so scandalous that men point the finger of scorn at us. Our first and simplest and plainest duty is to teach decent English. Not the most seraphic of the astronomers of rhetoric ever opposed that idea. But we have thought this elementary part of the task so easy that it could be performed incidentally, as a sort of sideissue. Actually it is very hard, requiring careful approach, skilful handling, and arduous labor. That first task must be done first. This book denies none of the glorious possibilities that may lie beyond. Its purpose is to assert that what is of primary importance must have foremost consideration.

That is what English is today — the teaching of plain essentials of decent style. When it first became a college-entrance subject, it was generally defined as " power to appreciate literature." Examinations required the candidate to show some ability to criticize and appraise literary values. The attention of high schools was fixed on the reading of classics, on developing "insight," and on writing about books ' ' appreciatively. ' ' This kind of thing lasted through the 90 's and into the present century. How resultless' it all was may be judged from a paper written in 1905 by a Harvard examiner, in which he calls the fetish "that indefinable and vague quality." He would not have dared to utter those words ten years previously. Now he is not afraid to say: "So few possess literary appreciation' that after a careful search through the higher graded books of the spring and fall examinations of the last two years I have found no specimen to quote which possesses more than a semblance." This college instructor longs just as much as ever for the teacher who can "inspire the writer with something of the spirit that awakens the consciousness of literary appreciation"; but has to protest that as a matter of fact no such power has been evidenced on the Harvard papers.

Then he proposes a substitute: "To create and give utterance to his own ideas ; freer, more natural, and more individual expression; his individuality counts for everything." That has been the slogan in the twentieth century. All our texts and councils and addresses to conventions have had much to say of "expressing ourselves in a pleasing way." They have seldom failed to imply the scorn which this Harvard man put so fiercely: "Teaching this living, breathing English composition as mechanically as they do the unchangeable and rigid laws of science." Hence few teachers have dared to profess publicly that they paid any attention to mechanics. The word has been anathema. No, we have all been for pleasing self-expression.

But these glittering ambitions were all the while covering a most hideous reality, which it was not good form to discuss. The ugly fact of horrible illiteracy was not to be mentioned in our soulful circles. The Harvard man politely referred to it in his paper as "what the examiner ought not to find." Since it must not be named, he employed that delicate euphemism. He adroitly said, "The familiarity of the teacher with what I am talking about warns me to omit discussion. ' ' Even when he is ' ' tempted to present a few examples" of this unmentionable thing, he chooses blunders in diction and cases of wobbly structure. It is curious to see how very, very refined the world was in that by-gone age — for ten years is a historical epoch in the history of English.

Yet the Harvard man misrepresented a great body of university opinion. Colleges loathed and dreaded the slipshod preparatory work, but failed to insist that we should do with thoroughness the humble part of our duty. They failed because there was no agreement on the question of what English is. What they longed for was carefulness; what they were principally occupied with themselves, what they talked about before us, was "appreciation." We have all been confused, at variance, unguided. The colleges have misled us ; high schools, planning their courses for students who are not to receive further education, have assumed a college attitude, have fixed their attention on "appreciation" and "living, breathing composition."

If we were so eager to imitate when the model was "appreciation," we should be no less eager to imitate now that the model is "accuracy first." Very lately we have had the unabashed confession from four high-minded university instructors that they condition a theme in the first semester of freshman year for three misspelled words or one incomplete sentence.* They may be all wrong. This book has nothing to do with any discussion of whether they are right or wrong. It deals only with the present-day facts. And there is not the slightest doubt that these gentlemen fairly represent the sentiment of their age about carefulness in details. They say flatly that ' ' originality without literacy cannot in any place or under any circumstances be considered a meritorious quality in a college course in English composition." What do you suppose they would think about school themes ?

We have seen the three steps — literary appreciation, spontaneity, accuracy. Do not suppose that they are steps downward. Education in this country is not descending. Do not suppose that they show a conflict of purpose or any disagreement as to what real merit is. All sensible teachers must agree on what constitutes a good theme, do agree always that ability to apprehend literary values and to express

* See the very interesting article on ' ' Grading Freshman Composition" at the University of Illinois, in the English Journal for Nov., 1915.

oneself pleasingly are the only qualities that make writing valuable. These steps do not mark any change in a judgment that has never altered since Cadmus invented letters. They simply show a progressive realization of what cannot be obtained in school composition. All professors still prize and give credit for il appreciation' ' ; but they very seldom get it, and they cannot require it. All teachers still value spontaneity, and we get quite a bit of it ; but we have learned that it is not a curricular subject, that we cannot require it. What we can require, what it is dishonest and criminal not to require, is accuracy. It is frightfully wrong to stimulate a little spontaneity (!) in a few pupils while leaving all the pupils so ignorant of mechanics that their letters prove them to be uneducated.

Fifty years' from now the student of educational history will be puzzled to know what we thought we were doing in 1916. His unflattering comment will run about like this : ' ' Those teachers were not stylists — at least very few were. Why did the great majority suppose they could impart what they did not possess? They must have seen that only a small minority of pupils could achieve a graceful style; what did they suppose they were doing for the majority? Did they even flatter themselves that the minority's charm of style was due to instruction? And suppose this power to write pleasingly had been much more general, what was the prodigious exercise of it all about? Did teachers conceive that they were training up professional authors, or were they counting on private theme-writing as an enjoyment comparable to amateur painting or piano-playing? It is hard to see the similarity. Were they aiming at literary letters 1 Nothing is so affected and unpleasant. Why, then, all their parade of l perfecting the work by degrees'? What did they think they were doing?"

I, for one, am glad that I shall not have to answer those straightforward inquiries. English ought to be the greatest good to the greatest number. Perhaps we could see more clearly what we make it if we paid more attention to that future historian.

You may be surprised that we have so much to say about composition, for you know that themes are only one part of English. You would be excusable for thinking them a very small fraction. Glance through this list of the different things that English is. It represents graphically the impression we might get from reading a few dozen pedagogical articles, though it is shorter and less confusing than the reality would be. Small capitals indicate the topics that would stand out more prominently because of their frequency or the deep feeling with which they are discussed:

A love of liteeatuee, the college entrance books, supplementary reading, narratives and expositions, teach cleae thinking, grammar, cooperation with other departments, magazine reading, imitate Burke or Homer or Goldsmith, spelling, teach paragraphs by an analogy with geometry, stimulate refined speech, coach dramatics, prosody, analyze masterpieces, memorizing of

poems, INSPIEE A LOVE FOE CLASSICS, DON 't

tey to impose the classics, history of English and American literature, read to the pupils, teach effectiveness in writing, insist on precision in writing, don't look for precision, encourage charm and freedom, stimulate insight, declamations, oral composition, teach play-writing, choose a wide variety of reading, develop personality, cultivate sound taste in literature, have private conferences, much reading aloud by the pupils, argumentation, word analysis, have pupils correct the themes, the love of good reading, correct pronunciation, don't use annotations, teach criticism of the art of different authors, insist on theme outlines, coach debaters, refuse to be hampered by

NARROW COLLEGE REQUIREMENTS, busillCSS

English, dictionary work, encourage good

READING.

Perhaps some of these extra-curriculum tasks, like supervising dramatics or debating or journalism, may fall to your share. Nothing will be said in this book, however, about such matters, because local conditions vary extremely and because your own good sense can get little help from another man's advice. They are largely questions of your own talents and initiative. The whole mass of jumbled English reduces to three subjects, of which the first is how to read — called Literature. This is now the part of English that receives the largest share of attention, the part that may always take up the largest portion of time. It may in the future, when elements of composition are properly taught in the grades, occupy an even greater proportion of the schedule. But to this subject, in spite of its importance, I shall devote only one chapter. Handling literature is largely a matter of personality; advice about methods is likely to be futile; and the world is already full of good counsel about what to aim at. The second subject is how to speak — called Oral Composition. I am as sensitive as the next man to the horrors of our slovenly and clumsy vernacular, but fear that they are for the most part beyond the reach of schooling; because they are founded in infancy, are ingrained by home training, and are as deep and wide as any other social phenomenon that we find disagreeable. Written forms can be taught; they are a veneer put on by the school. But when we get beyond some superficial matters of syntax and pronunciation it is easy to overestimate what a school can achieve in changing habits of speech. The practical value of learning to compose one's thoughts for addressing a crowd is beyond all reckoning. Indeed this power is so unusual and so difficult of attainment that I fear some teachers deceive themselves as to what they are accomplishing. Even if I had their faith I should abstain from discussing Oral Composition for the same reasons that influence me to be brief with Literature: advice cannot guide very far in such a matter of personality, and plenty of advice is available.

The third subject is Written Composition. That is the necessity without which all else counts for naught. Parents are glad to have Thomas know some lyrics by heart, are pleased deeply if he acquires at school a fondness for reading Thackeray; but their gratification turns to ashes if Thomas's letter to his grandfather is barbarously spelled and punctuated. Business men may not be wholly indifferent to a knowledge of Sir Launfal, but they will not accept it as an excuse for unbusinesslike spelling and punctuation. Colleges are devoutly interested in having young people taught to read, but will not accept any amount of appreciation in lieu of some small measure of ability to spell and punctuate. With one common judgment the world insists on a modicum of knowledge about framing sentences.