output to be quantified, and some of it gives time for more care in the choice of
words. But is it a gain to substitute a letter for a visit, to try to give written
precedence over spoken forms? Here again we violate the great law that the
child repeats the history of the race, and that, from the larger historic standpoint,
writing as a mode of utterance is only the latest fashion.
Of course the pupils must write, and write well, just as they must read, and read
much; but that English suffers from insisting upon this double long circuit too
early and cultivates it to excess, devitalizes school language and makes it a little
unreal, like other affectations of adult ways, so that on escaping from its
thraldom the child and youth slump back to the language of the street as never
before. This is a false application of the principle of learning to do by doing. The
young do not learn to write by writing, but by reading and hearing. To become a
good writer one must read, feel, think, experience, until he has something to say
that others want to hear. The golden age of French literature, as Gaston
Deschamps and Brunetière have lately told us, was that of the salon, when
conversation dominated letters, set fashions, and made the charm of French
style. Its lowest ebb was when bookishness led and people began to talk as they
wrote.
IV. The fourth cause of degeneration of school English is the growing
preponderance of concrete words for designating things of sense and physical
acts, over the higher element of language that names and deals with concepts,
ideas, and non-material things. The object-lesson came in as a reaction against
the danger of merely verbal and definition knowledge and word memory. Now it
has gone so far that not only things but even languages, vernacular and foreign,
are taught by appeals to the eye. More lately, elementary science has introduced
another area of pictures and things while industrial education has still further
greatly enlarged the material sensori-motor element of training. Geography is
taught with artifacts, globes, maps, sand boxes, drawing. Miss Margaret
Smith[7] counted two hundred and eighty objects that must be distributed and
gathered for forty pupils in a single art lesson. Instruction, moreover, is more and
more busied upon parts and details rather than wholes, upon analysis rather than
synthesis. Thus in modern pedagogy there is an increased tyranny of things, a
growing neglect or exclusion of all that is unseen.
The first result of this is that the modern school child is more and more mentally