The Vernacular
It is surprising to find that though Vives, in 1538, produced his School Dialogues for the purpose of teaching children to speak Latin, and though he regarded early and thorough acquaintance with Latin, both for purposes of speaking and writing, as the very mark and seal of a well-educated man, there was no learned man of his age who went so far in advocacy of the importance of the teaching in[xlvii] the vernacular of the pupil at a still younger age. As this constitutes one of the grounds upon which the pre-eminence of Vives as an educationalist would be rested, as for instance in comparison with Erasmus, it may not be altogether irrelevant to quote here the translation of a passage from the De Tradendis Disciplinis explaining Vives’ views on this subject.
“The scholars should first speak in their homes their mother tongue, which is born with them, and the teacher should correct their mistakes. Then they should, little by little, learn Latin. Next let them intermingle with the vernacular what they have heard in Latin from their teacher, or what they themselves have learned. Thus, at first, their language should be a mixture of the mother-tongue and Latin. But outside the school they should speak the mother-tongue so that they should not become accustomed to a hotch-potch of languages.... Gradually the development advances and the scholars become Latinists in the narrower sense. Now must they seek to express their thoughts in Latin, for nothing serves so much to the learning of a language as continuous practice in it. He who is ashamed to speak a language has no talent for it. He who refuses to speak Latin after he has been learning it for a year must be punished according to his age and circumstances.”[25]
So much for the pupil’s knowledge of the vernacular. Still more emphatically Vives speaks with regard to the necessity of a thorough knowledge of the vernacular by the teacher.
“Let the teacher know the mother-tongue of his boys, so that by this means, with the more ease and readiness, he may teach the learned languages. For unless he makes use of the right and proper expressions in the mother-tongue, he will certainly mislead the boys, and the error thus imbibed will accompany them persistently as they grow up and [xlviii]become men. How can boys understand anything sufficiently well in their own language unless the words are said with the utmost clearness. Let the teacher preserve in his memory all the old forms of vernacular words, and let him develop the knowledge not only of modern forms, but also of the old words and those which have gone out of use, and let him be as it were the guardian of the treasury of his language.”[26]