Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/356

352 to the language of the past as preserved by the types. Albeit, we do not teach the language of Shakespeare or even of Addison, for the reason they have become archaic. What is taken as the best English of to-day contains a considerable number of expressions that are not found in Macaulay or DeQuincey, even when the matter dealt with is the same. We take as models English that is less than a century old. In some respects speech orally transmitted is more conservative than that which has been handed down in books; it represents a less advanced type of thought. The speech of the average man is not much influenced by books or by any printed matter. He repeats over and over again the formulas he learned in boyhood until language becomes his master rather than his servant. He does not reflect upon the speech he uses, but expresses the old familiar thoughts in the old familiar way; of other thoughts he has but few. At school he may have studied formal grammar, and wasted most of the time he put upon it. Grammar may give us an insight into the structure of a language, but it does not instruct us how to use it. If we take a boy into a shop, teach him the names of the tools and let him look on while others handle them without letting him do anything himself, he will never become a mechanic. Even if he has learned to manipulate the tools and machinery of a bygone era and refuses to change he is hopelessly handicapped. We can not discuss modern scientific themes with Bacon's vocabulary. There is an intersting passage in one of Herbert Spencer's essays that I have quoted more than once because it bears upon the matter of teaching the mother-tongue. Few men had a greater command of English and knew better how to make themselves understood than he. In "Facts and Comments " he gives his experience as follows:

This and much more to the same effect is interesting. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that the study of grammar is necessarily a waste of time. We might as well argue that because Franklin, Lincoln and others became masters of English without living teachers, schools are of no use. Spencer's remarks quoted above are followed by some logical and lucid directions as to the proper place of formal grammar in the ordinary school curriculum. If we learn to do by doing, we learn