The Evening Star TUESDAY, JUNE 9, 1874

Evening Star, Issue 3524, 9 June 1874, Page 2

The Evening Star TUESDAY, JUNE 9, 1874

If the principal thing to be aimed at in the education of young people is to fit them fer the work that they will have to do in after life, it would seem that it is of the highest importance that they should receive such training as will make them thoroughly able to write their mother tongue with force and elegance : in other words, it is before all things necessary that English children should he taught English. It i« hardly to be denied that this is seldom or never done. We have no doubt that most of our readers who hare much writing to do would bo ready to say, if they were questioned on the subject, that they acquired fer themselves, after leaving school, whatever skill they may now possess in English composition ; and that when they left school they were quite unable to write even decent prose. Of course, it is not intended to assert that no attempts to teach English are made ; on the contrary, a very great deal is attempted. A very considerable portion of a boy's time is allotted to the study of English, more even, we believe, than is really necessary. A boy is taught Orthography, Etymology including Derivation, Syntax, and Prosody; he is taught analysis of sentences and synthesis; he learns Latin, and Greek, and French; he criticises Shakespeare and Milton—in short, we might make quite a long list of subjects in which he has to be drilled, all being intended directly or indirectly to make him skilful in using his mother tongue—and the ■ esult is altogether unsatisfactory. We have known boys and girls who on leaving school could have told the exact meaning of such expressions as “Illative co-ordination,’’ “Tertiary predicates,” “ Pluperfect progressive potential who could have decided at a glance whether a danse was an enlargement of the subject, or an adverbial adjunct of the predicate ; who could have given the exact history of almost any word from the time it first came into existence till the present, who could have shown the exact shade of meauing of -ome Shakesperian word, which has never been employed for the last two centuries by anybody—we have known boys and girls who could have done all this and more, and yet if their lives had depended on it they could not have written a decent letter to a friend. The fact is that for the most part young people are, as we said, not taught to use English, but to know something about English. It is as if $ boy, who was required to use a spade, were made to learn Anatomy that he might know exactly which muscles would he brought into play in the operation of digging ; Natural Philosophy, that he might understand the nature of levers, and know to which class of them the spade belongs ; and Botany, Mineralogy, and Me allurgy that he might be able to give an exact account of the various processes through which the different materials composing the spade had passed. We are far from underrating the value of this sort of knowledge, but oar readers will allow that after the boy had mastered all these subjects he would be about as well able to do a good day’s work with the spade as he was when he commenced Yet this is exactly what is done with boys and girls who are learning English : they are not taught to wield the language, they are taught to know everything about words, except how to use them The natural method of teaching a bey either to dig or to write would be to set him to work at digging or at writing, to show him the best way of using his materials, and then to point out to him the errors that he might fall into, and the best way to avoid them. After the boy has become skilful in using his materials, it will be both beneficial and interesting to him to give him an insight into principles. To attempt to t ach a boy the theory of composition before he has mastered the practice is simply preposterous, a mere putting of the cart before the horse. It is not impossible to teach the theory before the practice—experience shows the contrary—it is merely useless. It is very doubtful, too, whether Grammar, Analysis, Derivation, and the rest of them are, after all, of as much use as is commonly supposed in giving people a command over language. We know many men and women who write excellent English, who could not tell the difference between an adversative and a disjactive conjunction, or say, for the life of them, whether a given verb belonged to the middle voice or was a neuter intransitive. At all events there are many who, though they know nothing about these matters, can write good English; while others who are aufait at them cannot. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that, while a great deal of time is given in our schools to such subjects as we have mentioned, very little is given to English composition, properly so called. If there are a couple or three spare half-hours in the time-table, possibly these may be devoted to “reproduction” or composition. but the subject js looked upon by toe many teachers as a matter of very little importance, and this, perhaps the most important of all the branches of school education, has probably less attention paid to it than any other subject whatever. It is true that there are many tfeachers who hold exactly the same opinion as we do about this matter, but there is very little encouragement for them take any great trouble about English composition. It is one of those subjects that do not pay. At examinations it generally holds quite a secondary place. If a piece of com position is set by an examiner, the work dene by the pupils is valued rather by the handwriting and fhe spelling than by the style. At an examination, a teacher may gain credit for having pupils well advanced in arithmetic, in geography, in grammar, but seldom is there much said about their English composition. We cannot help thinking that if the school authorities of this Province would canaider this subject as being of at least as great importance as any other, and would give credit to masters und scholars for their success in teaching and in learning it, they would effect a vast amount of good; they might even succeed in preventing the rising generation from feeling as their fathers and mothers did on leaving school—that they had still to go through what ought to have been the most important part of their school education.