ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 403, 14 March 1947, Page 31

ENGLISH IN SCHOOLS

THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH. By 1. A. GORDON. 4N.Z. Council for Educational Research. ]N his book on The Teaching of English, Professor I. A. Gordon, of Victoria College, sets himself to answer certain questions which every teacher of English has to face-questions relating to the general aim and scope of his teaching, and to certain details of organisation and method. My only qualification for reviewing such a book is that for something like half-a-century I have beén a student and a teacher of English. My reading in what is called, I believe, the "literature" of the subject-I mean books and pamphlets discussing methods of teachinghas been scanty, casual, reluctant, and, on the whole, unprofitable. I have muddled along in what seeméd to me the best way for myself, if not for others, learning something, I hope, on the way, and achieving just about the average degree of failure. I do not therefore presume to offer any general criticism of Professor Gordon’s more thorough and: methodical treatment of the teacher’s problems. I must confine myself to a few comments on some matters ‘of detail. It is a fact, as Proféssor Gordon says, that though in the last hundred years English has come to be a central subject in the school curriculum, the teacher in search of guidance can find no clear authoritative statement telling him what his subject is about. In his third chapter the Professor sets himself to supply this deficiency, "English is a threefold skill, the ability to express oneself in spoken or written speech ... to understand the speech of another . . . and to feel or appreciate the appeal o* literature." All that is clear enough, but does it get us very far? I am grateful, however, for one word-the word "spoken"-be-cause it gives me a chance of airing one of my own grievances. "Many women teachers are in despdir over their pupils’ New Zealand accent. Few men seem to worry about it." Well,,at the risk of setting myself down i$ a snob or a pedant, I am with the women. I cannot easily reconcile myself to Professor Gordon’s view that we should, and even must, accept the peculiar New Zealand modification of English vowel sounds. I am not objecting to dialect, but what I ask is that our speech should be manly on the lips of our men, and womanly on the lips of our women, and pleasant in the ears of all, and not a nasal whine or drawl or gabble. A man’s speech, after all, is a pretty good index of his liter-_ ary culture, of his sensibility to the beauty of words, and consequently of his appreciation of the music of poetry and of literature generally. The teacher who does not "worry" when his pupils turn

Blake’s "Little lamb who made thee?" into "Little emm him ade thee?" ought to find some other job. I am sorry that Professor Gordon has confined himself to the treatment of English as a school subject. I should have liked to hear his opinion of our syllabus for the University. Most of our teachers in schools have been through that syllabus or part of it, and have been required to spend more than half their time in the study of Old and Middle English texts. I hope the Professor is not one of those to whom Beowulf is "our great national epic." It has been ‘part of my own destiny to read and re-read that work with generations of students, and I grow yearly more confirmed in the belief that for me and for them, that task means sheer waste of time. You may call Beowulf an epic 1f you like: but it is neither "great" nor "national," unless a poem can be national in which England and the English are never mentioned. No! I say that students are merely wasting on a third-rate poem which has no connection whatever with English literature the time they should be giving to Virgil and Dante amd the great central stream of European literature. . . . But my allotted space is up. I have just room to offer Professor Gordon my congratulations and apologies.

F.

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