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THE HIGH SCHOOL COURSE IN ENGLISH.

FRANCES W. LEWIS, RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA.

UBLIC opinion has greatly changed during the past few years with regard to the importance of the study of English. Hardly recognized in our courses of study twenty-five years ago, it now receives in most schools equal time and attention with Latin and Science. We have at last concluded to agree with John Locke that "If a gentleman be to study any language it should be that of his own country." We have learned that there is no more effective evidence of culture and good breeding than a correct use of the English language and a wide acquaintance with good literature. We have discovered that a desire for information and a natural love of reading are insufficient, when wholly unguided, to lead the boy or girl to the higher paths of literature. And we have found by experience that in nine cases out of ten the chief value of a classical training has been in its aid toward a broader and fuller understanding of English.

The study of our own language offers the student at the outset one advantage which no foreign language can offer: no memorizing of paradigms and vocabularies is needful, the rules of grammar are reduced to a minimum, and the pupil starts out with a fair understanding of ordinary conversation and a reasonably broad vocabulary. He has all this previous accumulation as foundation for future work; hence he enters the English class in the high school with confidence, enjoying the feeling that here at least is something that is not all Greek to him.

This makes it possible to introduce him at once to a broad, rich and full literature. While students in the Latin or the modern language course are digging away at declensions and conjugations, or puzzling over French and German genders, the student of English may be enjoying the delightful word-pictures of Evangeline or the Lady of the Lake, or the quaint stories of the Sketch Book or Twice Told Tales. While the students of other languages still read their tasks with grammar and dictionary at elbow, the English students have been introduced to the leading writers in prose and verse of the grandest and most varied literature the world has ever produced. They have

delved into the treasure house of Chaucer's stories; have listened to Milton's mighty organ tones; have felt the eloquence of Burke and Webster, and have studied human nature with "Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child." They have danced around the world with Shelley's Cloud, and glided down to Camelot with the Lady of Shallott. They have listened in fascination to the tale of the Ancient Mariner, and have faintly caught a glimpse of the trailing clouds of glory in Wordsworth's matchless ode. They have gained a culture of the higher nature, an appreciation of the noble and the beautiful, that not even a familiar acquaintance with Cicero and Virgil, with Socrates and Plato could have given them, and they have gained it with infinitely less pains.

For the literature to which they have been introduced is beyond comparison above, the literature of classic times in its adaptation to the modern spirit and to the problems of to-day. As subtile in thought, it is immeasurably above it in sympathy; as keen in logic, it is immensely more practical and adaptable; as picturesque and imaginative, it is more thoroughly and genuuinely religious. For its influence upon the youth of the land it may be far more safely trusted and more confidently appealed to. It is the heir of all the ages; and whatever of good and truth any nation in the past has developed has in some fashion been embalmed in English literature for the benefit of the youth who will read.

It is therefore one main object of our schools so to inspire the curiosity and to educate the taste of our pupils that they will read with avidity, whatever else they do, and that they will know what is worth reading well enough not to waste their time on the ephemeral or the useless. Introduced during school life to authors who interest them, with eyes opened to real worth in literature, with the public library inviting them to enter, what is to prevent their gaining wider acquaintance in the same directions? The insincere, the flashy, the sensational have little attraction for them. They have been nourished on something better. No amount of spice will make boiled crow palatable to one who has been brought up on roast chicken.

The English course also furnishes an admirable opportunity for moral training. Certainly one of the most important ends

of school life is development of character. The pupils of our high schools are at a critical period of growth. They are beginning to feel themselves independent beings; their respect for authority and reverence for superiors is weakening; the will is asserting itself, though frequently in foolish and contrary ways, simply to obtain an opportunity for self-assertion; the ethical nature is awakening, but it acts in a suspicious and self-conscious fashion, and resents any attempt at dictation or pressure from without. To require pupils of this age to think in certain channels on ethical subjects, is likely to disgust them with all morality and to turn them in the opposite direction. They must have moral training constantly, line upon line and precept upon precept, but it must not take the name of ethics; it must not seem to be preaching; it must appear to come from within, to grow naturally out of the thought about other things, to be as scientific and as inevitable as geometry or physics.

The History course offers natural advantages for this sort of moral training, and the teacher may say daily, "Was it right?" "What was the underlying cause of these misfortunes?" "How may such evils be avoided?" and be sure that nine tenths of the class will give an ethical reply, and that that reply will react upon themselves and their classmates to the development of character and the formation of ideals of conduct.

Yet the English course if rightly managed may be quite as helpful in a different way. Although the critics tell us that literature is designed to please rather than to teach, it is fortunately true that the best literature, that most true to nature and to life, always does teach. It must contain the lessons that life teaches; and if we can help the boys and girls in every piece of literature they study to find those lessons, to appreciate the author's purpose, his attitude toward nature, toward fellow-man, toward God, we can hardly help their growing morally and gaining higher standards of duty and desire.

Hence the English course, not only because of the preparation it gives for the education of later life, but also because of its opportunities for character training, ought to be one of the strongest courses in the school. Especially ought this to be true when the pupils will in large majority finish their schooling with the high school. It is possible, where most of the

students will enjoy further study, to leave the higher and nobler lines of literature for the maturer years and the culminating polish of the college course. Even then there is enough to be done by the high school without encroaching on the sphere of the college, and the better the preparation for it the fuller the appreciation of what the college has to give. But where college is denied, and the student goes from school to the active work of life, he ought especially to be fortified for his encounter with the sordid and the mercenary, with the drudgery and monotony of life, by an acquaintance with a world of beauty and refinement into which he may escape in his leisure hours, and entrance into which will keep him from degradation of thought and blunting of feeling. For him, certainly, the English course should be made the strongest and most important course in the school.

But to be a strong course it must have strong teachers. The stream cannot rise higher than its source. We cannot expect good results from careless, indifferent, slipshod teaching. Give us the best and strongest teachers, where their work will tell most in after life, and see how quickly the English department will become the strongest in the school.

The study of English, moreover, should not be limited to a small part of the pupil's school life. It should be extended to cover the entire period, so that at every stage of development he may be open to its influence and may gain as much as possible by its means. He can easily afford a little less in the classics, fewer problems in mathematics, fewer experiments in science, rather than less English. The course should contain all that is required for college entrance, and should arrange those requirements so as to get the most possible out of them. It should also include much more in the way of literature and rather more formal rhetoric for those students not preparing for college. The needs also of the locality, of the several classes as classes, and of individuals who differ widely in characteristics from the class they happen to be in, should be considered in planning a course of English study which will do its very best for all concerned. Naturally the details of such an arrangement must vary greatly, but there are some principles of general value that should be observed everywhere. The nature of the subject and of the pupil makes them wide in their application.

pupil is plunged at the outWith limited vocabulary,

I. The work should be simple in the beginning, and should grow more difficult toward the end. In many of our high schools the set into work too difficult for him. childish thought and little power of abstraction, he is set to read that which is far beyond his thought and which has for him no interest. He makes it a task and conquers it after a time, if he does not meanwhile drop out of school in discouragement. He grows to it in time, and just when he is becoming capable of taking in some thoroughly abstract and philosophic thought he is given simple work that he feels is beneath him; it is child's play, not worthy of serious endeavor. The work set before him should really always be up to the limit of his powers, and very little beyond them. It may be wise to let him stretch his neck a little to reach the hay, but in that case it must be so attractive that there will be no question about his making the exertion.

II. The early studies in Literature should have a thread of narrative to render them attractive.

The story is always a source of interest. Pupils not mature enough to appreciate the plot construction or the dramatic unity of a fine novel or a great play, always enjoy the lesser stories, and can be interested in prose or even in poetry that is largely narrative. They may read the Alhambra, Lady of the Lake, The Ancient Mariner and Sir Roger de Coverly far more satisfactorily than they would read Webster, Gray or Goldsmith. The narratives from Chaucer and Spenser and the Idyls of the King would be better now than the abstract or the purely descriptive. Word difficulties are easily conquered if there is a story to be gotten. I have seen boys who on entering the high school had read all of Chaucer and Sir Thomas Mallory merely for their pleasure in the stories.

III. The early part of the course should have material for word study and sentence analysis to develop accuracy and closeness of discrimination.

While cultivating the taste and enlarging the vocabulary by pleasing reading we must also train thought power and lead to closer discrimination. This may be done partly in connection with the reading, by calling attention frequently to synonyms and requiring careful distinctions between them. Often a para

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