TEACHING ENGLISH.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9696, 21 January 1910, Page 3

TEACHING ENGLISH.

The Education Committee of the London County Council has been, giving serious consideration to thb question of the best methods of teaching the English language, which, for the great majority of its pupils, must be the sole, or at least the principal key to knowledge of every other description. The committee has instituted a series of conferences, at which many teachers and other persons of experience or authority have been invited to assist, for the general discussion of educationaljaroblems, and the reports of these conferences will from time to time be published. The first of them on the teaching of English has beei recently published; and the committee introduces it by a preface setting forth that the importance of instruction in the mother tongue is so great as to render this priority specially appropriate. In the main, the report discloses a praiseworthy desire to accomplislfgenuine improvements, to lead.cbildren to realise, that the speech of their forefathers is a rational treasure, that its construction" is eminently worthy of -study and com: rehcvion, an." thaljt is an approbate v.hMc i'jr the communication of the noli _t ihojghts and of the ci;a st conceptions. An sentence, wrote Cobtett, should he as clear as a pibbkd brook. It should not only not be liable to be misunderstood; it should not be capable of being misinterpreted. The language has suffered many things at the hands of carelss writers and speakers; and many of our greatest thinkers, notably JLocke and Dugald Stewart, have urged upon thei* contemporaries the importance or the necessity of studying it carefully and of using it correctly. It is of good omsn that this necessity, too long neglected in many of the seats of higher learning, should now be forced upon the attention of elerrentary teachers; ind it may be hoped that the London County Council will set an example that will ascend. It would be well, sajs the "London Times," if person? among the wealthier classes, who slur the pronunciation of English, or ignore the delicacies of its construction, would remember that the charms of Parisian silons, and the social and political influence of the ladies who presided over them, were alike largely traceable, as their ultimate sources, t) thi cultivation of the art of conversation and to the fact that every educated French woman knows French. We fear it would be impossible to say the same of English women and of English