Kansas Teacher from Topeka, Kansas • 15

1 THE. KANSAS TEACHER A Victrola adds new meaning to lyric poetry, and tho records giving extracts from great speeches and dramas aid the student to improve his speaking. Literary history can be taught far better with good maps of England, Europe, America and the great literary capitals. Ideas need a local habitation as well as a name. Each English class room also needs bulletin boards, bookcases, and filing cases for themes, clippings and pictures.

There should be facilities for presenting plays simply, for publishing a school paper, and for making posters and booklets to preserve and publish the inspirations of youthful genius. The scriptural warning not to keep one's light under a bushel is very pertinent here. Some form of delightful publicity is the only real reward for the effort of any artist, old or young. To accomplish these modern aims, to make our courses in English function socially, we teachers of English need laboratory equipment. We must pay the price of efficiency in effort, and the taxpayers will cheerfully foot the bills.

They want their children to be really educated for real life. So do we! If they understand, they will be generous, and the department of English will no longer be the "poor relation" at the educational banquet If wo bestow freedom of speech upon young citizens, wo deserve well of our country. purposefully to train our students to do precisely those things that they will need to do in later life. They should learn to write clear and pleasing letters, to make simple talks containing real ideas definitely expressed, to conduct themselves sensibly and courteously in all the ordinary social situations. No modern boys and girls are educated satisfactorily for dynamic citizenship unless they have formed the habit of reading good newspapers and magazines, together with some of the leading essayists, novelists, and dramatists of today.

Instead of entering a library in a shamefaced, helpless style, they should be able to find any book they want, and locate a given topic in" it. To make our pupils socially efficient in receiving and expressing ideas we need a good deal of time, and considerable equipment.for the English laboratory. So much attention is required for correcting individual faults and developing individual talents that crowded classes defeat our chief aims. In these rushing days of automobiles ceedingly hard to cultivate a taste for solid reading. Therefore we need a few beautiful editions of the older classics, in' large clear type, with good illustrations.

Oh, that we might consign to the flames the cheap and grimy editions with their wretched paper and painfully type! There should be also a well-chosen list of the late books, and plenty of the best magazines. THE CASE OF GRAMMAR By" Professor E. R. Barrett, State Normal, School, Emporia, Kansas. Grammar, first, is tho greatest aid to logical thinking Until expression is systematically organized thinking is quite likely to be slovenly, if no chaotic.

Grammar, if really taught at all, must require thinking of abstractions, accurate analysis, and systematic classification. As John -Stewart Mill says, "Tho structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic." Grammar helps, secondly, in orderly expression. Fot tho simple composition of grade pupils, technical grammar is not necessary, but it is next to impossible for a mora advanced student to get far in clear and forceful expression until he has learned something of tho science of sentence structure. This is the reason that the teacher of college Freshmen laments their ignorance of tho subject. In the third place, Grammar is a great aid in reading not in orally pronouncing words, but in interpreting tho thought of the printed page.

When tho reader is confused by the order of the words, ho usually clears tho matter up by hunting for subjects and predicate and the modifiers of each. He must decide whether certain words are nouns or verbs. Unless he knew some grammar there little help for the boy who wanted to know why "lap-wing flics walk across the desert" after reading the line from the Deserted Village, "Across tho desert walks the lap-wing flies." Browning's line, "Irks care the crop-full bird" is unintclligibje until the reader finds that care is a noun, the subject of the verb irks. Similar confusion often arises in reading simple prose, which the reader can clear up for himself if he knows grammar. But the science of language is one of the most obstruso of all sciences, and to try to force it upon tho children of ten or twelve years is little short of criminal.

To be sure, they may come to know man; nouns and verbs, some adjectives and a few adverbs; but this knowledge is of little practical value to them, Surely it is not More voluminous vituperation has probably been poured forth on the teaching of technical English Grammar than on that of any other course between the Kindergarten and the Ph. D. degree. Some condemn the content of the subject, others find fault with the method in which the subject is handled, and many complain of the character of the text books. It may be that all of these are deserving of some adverse criticism and are capable of much improvement.

But years of experiment and the unanimous testimony of those in the best positions to judge find the great cause of failure due to the fact that the subject is introduced too low down. That the teaching of the subject has been and is a failure is beyond question. In a recent conference of Kansas college teachers of English the general tale of woe that emanated from all quarters was that the college Freshmen were lamentably ignorant of the first rudiments of technical English grammar. A large per cent of them do not know the parts of speech. Few besides those who have had, in their high school days, thoro training in some foreign language know anything about such occult secrets as infinitives, adverb clauses, or participial phrases.

The few other high school graduates who seem to have learned a little of the science of the language they speak are those who have taken a six or eight weeks' "review" in English grammar in the" Senior year of their Normal Training course. As to "the use of technical Grammar there is a broad and general misconception. Most people, even among educational leaders, suppose that the only function of Grammar is to improve the student's speech. The mere knowledge of technical Grammar never has done this and never can do it. Superintendent Moore is eminently right in what he says elsewhere in this magazine about improvement in speech habits coming -only from drill.

But Grammar has another," if not larger and more important field..