Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/37

Rh English words should be studied to the extent that they aid in remembering distinctions in meanings. The pupil should obtain also some adequate knowledge of the history of English literature, and of its extent, its beauties, grandeur, and wisdom. At present students are admitted to the best American colleges, whose ignorance of their native language and its literature is positively shameful. The study of grammar should not begin until the boy is sixteen years old. At twelve or fourteen years old he may begin to learn to talk in another modern language, and may continue the study of this language to the end of his school course. These are enough subjects in language; the other modern languages and Latin and Greek should be left to the college course, as German, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew commonly are. In direct opposition to this method of procedure is the practice of putting boys into the grammatical study of languages at ten or eleven years of age, and its pernicious effect is well stated by Herder:

"The first color which our mode of thinking takes on never fades; alas for us if it is a disagreeable or an actually disfiguring one! The friend of humanity must sigh when he sees how, in the schools which parade the name 'Latin school,' the first young desire is wearied, the first fresh strength is restrained, talent is buried in the dust, and genius is held back until, like a spring too long bent, it loses its power. Who would ever get into the notion that the system of linguistic education is suitable for youth, if he only set himself outside of our habit of thought?—but how difficult it is to set one's self outside of it!"

The opinions of our pamphleteer on the study of languages are well worth quoting:

"The chief place in the German school of the future should be held by a course of instruction in the German language and literature which aims at so training youth that at the end of their school-years they shall be adepts in speaking, reading, and writing their mother tongue, and shall, besides being familiar with the copious vocabulary of the language, have become acquainted also with its literary monuments and imbued with the intellectual spirit of their nation. It is obvious that, in order to turn out such pupils, teachers are needed who know more than some Gothic and Middle High German, and it is also obvious that in order to obtain such teachers, those learned men should not act at the university who have lost the spirit in turning over the words, and who, moreover, pass off this spiritlessness for scholarliness.

"French and English also have large claims: first, because an acquaintance with these languages is absolutely necessary in many callings, and is always very useful to the educated; second, because the civilizations of the French and English peoples stand in the most intimate relations with ours; and, third, because he who has mastered these two languages no longer has the trammeled feeling that his path of life is confined to his native sod, but he can turn his steps to any part of