that marked deficiency here often debars from all other courses. Every careful
study of the subject for nearly twenty years shows deterioration, and Professor
Shurman, of Nebraska, thinks it now worse than at any time for forty years. We
are in the case of many Christians described by Dante, who strove by prayers to
get nearer to God when in fact with every petition they were departing farther
from him. Such a comprehensive fact must have many causes.
I. One of these is the excessive time given to other languages just at the
psychological period of greatest linguistic plasticity and capacity for growth.
School invention and tradition is so inveterate that it is hard for us to understand
that there is little educational value—and perhaps it is deëducational—to learn to
tell the time of day or name a spade in several different tongues or to learn to say
the Lord's Prayer in many different languages, any one of which the Lord only
can understand. The polyglot people that one meets on great international
highways of travel are linguists only in the sense that the moke on the variety
stage who plays a dozen instruments equally badly is a musician. It is a
psychological impossibility to pass through the apprenticeship stage of learning
foreign languages at the age when the vernacular is setting without crippling it.
The extremes are the youth in ancient Greece studying his own language only
and the modern high school boy and girl dabbling in three or perhaps four
languages. Latin, which in the eight years preceding 1898 increased one hundred
and seventy-four per cent. in American high schools, while the proportion
entering college in the country and even in Massachusetts steadily declined, is
the chief offender. In the day of its pedagogical glory Latin was the universal
tongue of the learned. Sturm's idea was to train boys so that if suddenly
transported to ancient Rome or Greece they would be at home there. Language,
it was said, was the chief instrument of culture; Latin, the chief language and
therefore a better drill in the vernacular than the vernacular itself. Its rules were
wholesome swathing bands for the modern languages when in their infancy.
Boys must speak only Latin on the playground. They thought, felt, and
developed an intellectual life in and with that tongue.[6] But how changed all
this is now. Statistical studies show that five hours a week for a year gives
command of but a few hundred words, that two years does not double this
number, and that command of the language and its resources in the original is
almost never attained, but that it is abandoned not only by the increasing
percentage that do not go to college but also by the increasing percentage who
drop it forever at the college door. Its enormous numerical increase due to high
school requirements, the increasing percentage of girl pupils more ready to
follow the teacher's advice, in connection with the deteriorating quality of the