Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/426

410 would be in a position to gauge the acquirements of American boys, and the domestic influences which have guided their development, if not they.

If the universities, by bringing pressure to bear on the secondary schools, can do anything to remedy this state of things they certainly should do it. If the principals are right, however, the outlook is not hopeful. Our own impression is that they are right, and that there is throughout the country a growing indifference to correct speech and a growing lack of appreciation of the higher uses to which language can be put. The testimony of the principals is enforced by that of a Western teacher, who writes to The Nation to explain the peculiar difficulties under which the schools labor as regards the teaching of English. The pupils, he says, have, out of school, been studying English for fifteen or sixteen years before they reach the high school. "They suppose themselves to be entirely competent, their habits of expression are fixed, and no two of them are alike. . . . The home, the very cheap newspaper, the street, have furnished them with their common speech; and, although the first may sometimes be all that can be desired, very often the balance of power belongs to the others. . . . Under favorable circumstances the teacher of composition is allowed forty-five minutes a day, for three years, in which, besides teaching something of the history of literature, he is to counteract influences that have fifteen years the start of him, and fifteen times as great present opportunity. The only remarkable thing is that, under such circumstances, he accomplishes anything at all."

The important thing is to have a right understanding of the situation, and the remarks we have just quoted are very much to the point. Large masses of people are apt to be rebellious in matters of grammar, and, in general, indifferent to established laws of speech. Language which they use for everyday purposes is, in their opinion, "good enough" if it serves those purposes. It is the coin of thought, and so long as it passes current they are satisfied, however clipped or debased it may be. There are no great literary monuments in the background, as it were, of the national consciousness which tend to keep language to a classic form. There is nothing, for example, which exercises at all the same influence upon us as a people as the Homeric poems and the works of the great dramatists—but particularly the Homeric poems—did upon the ancient Greeks. Even if we had any works which stood in something like the same relation to our national life, the printing press has made it unnecessary for us to enrich or burden (as we may consider it) our memories with any portions of such literature. When books were scarce, people had to make books of their minds, but in these days of public libraries no such drudgery as that is necessary; we want our minds for other things.

How powerless the public school is to hold the nation together in the matter of speech is proved by nothing more than by the fact that an ever increasing number of novels and tales of domestic production are written in "dialect." Occasionally we witness learned and most academic discussions as to whether a particular writer has got the "dialect" of a particular region in perfect shape. Poets of considerable note have labored to give currency to very degraded forms of speech. Children are encouraged to slur their words by having the conversation of other children who do likewise served up to them in story books. Public-school teachers themselves in many