If fellows are out in the open and take athletics say at a certain time every-day; These fellows are in good health and allert in their lessons, while those who take no exercise are logy and soft. Organized athletics in a school bring the former, while if a school has no athletics every-thing goes more or less slipshod, and the fellows are more liable to get into trouble, because they are nervious from having nothing to do.
This is a little below the average of the papers rejected for entrance to college. It is not a fair sample of what the schools can do, but it is a very fair sample of what they often do not do. It was not written by a foreigner, nor, I judge, by a son of illiterate parents, since it came from an expensive Eastern preparatory school. The reader, marking with some heat a failure for the essay from which this paragraph is extracted, would not complain of the writer's paucity of ideas. His ideas are not below the average of his age. He would keep his wrath for the broken, distorted sentences, the silly spelling, the lack (which would appear in the whole composition) of even a rudimentary construction to carry the thought. Spelling, the fundamentals of punctuation, and the compacting of a sentence must be taught in the schools, for it is too late to cure diseases of these members in college. They can be abated; but again and again they will break out. It is the school's business to teach them; and the weary reader sees in this unhappy specimen but a dark and definite manifestation of a widespread slovenliness in secondary education, a lack of thoroughness which appears not only in the failures, but also, though in less measure, among the better writers, whose work is too good in other respects not to be reluctantly passed.
Again, it would be easy to place much of the blame for the slipshod writings of the undergraduate upon the standards set by his elders outside the colleges. Editors can tell of the endless editing which contributions, even from writers supposed to be professional, will sometimes require. And when such a sentence as the following slips through, and begins an article in a well-known, highly respectable magazine, we can only say, "If gold rust, what will iron do?"
Yes the Rot—and with a very big R—in sport: for that, thanks to an overdone and too belauded a Professionalism by a large section of the pandering press, is what it has got to.
Again, any business man could produce from his files a collection of letters full of phrasing so vague and inconsequential that only his business instincts and knowledge of the situation enable him to interpret it. Any lawyer could give numberless instances where an inability to write clear and simple English has caused litigation without end. Indeed, the bar is largely supported by errors in English composition! And as for conversation conducted—I will not say with pedantical correctness, for that is not an ideal, but with accuracy and transparency of thought—listen to the talk about you!
However, it is the business of the colleges to improve all that; and though it is not easy to develop in youth virtues which are more admired than practiced by maturity, let us assume that they should succeed in turning out writers of satisfactory ability, even with these handicaps, and look deeper for the cause of their relative failure.
Democratizing education and immigration the cause of poor quality of expression
The chief cause of the prevalent inadequacy of expression among our undergraduates is patent, and its effects are by no means limited to America, as complaints from France and from England prove. The mob—the many-headed, the many-mouthed, figured in the past by poets as dumb, or, at best, an incoherent thing of brutish noises signifying speech—is acquiring education and learning how to express it. Hundreds of thousands whose ancestors never read, and seldom talked except of the simpler needs of life, are doing the talking and the writing which their large share in the transaction of the world's business demands. Indeed, democracy requires not only that the illiterate shall learn to read and write in the narrower sense of the words, but also that the relatively literate must seek with their growing intellectuality a more perfect power of expression. And it is precisely from the classes only relatively literate—those for whom in the past there has been no opportunity, and no need, to become highly educated—that the bulk of our college students today are coming, the bulk of the students in the endowed institutions of the East as well as in the newer State universities of the West. The typical undergraduate is no longer the son of a lawyer or a clergyman, with an intellectual background behind him.
There is plenty of grumbling among college faculties, and in certain newspapers, over this state of affairs. In reality, of course, it is the opportunity of the American colleges. Let the motives be what they may, the simple fact that so many American parents wish to give their children more education than they themselves were blessed with is a condition so favorable for those who believe that in the long run only intelligence can keep our civilization on the path of real progress, that one expects to hear congratulations instead of wails from the college campuses.
Nevertheless, we pay for our opportunity, and we must expect to pay. The thousands of intellectual immigrants, ill-supplied with means of progress, indefinite of aim, unaware of their opportunities, who land every September at the college gates, constitute a weighty burden, a terrible responsibility. And the burden rests upon no one with more crushing weight than upon the unfortunate teacher of composition. That these entering immigrants cannot write well is a symptom of their mental rawness. It is to be expected. But thanks to the methods of slipshod, ambitious America, the schools have passed them on still shaky in the first steps of accurate writing—spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and the use of words. Thanks to the failure of America to demand thoroughness in anything but athletics and business, they are blind to the need of thoroughness in expression. And thanks to the inescapable difficulty of accurate writing, they resist the attempt to make them thorough, with the youthful mind's instinctive rebellion against work. Nevertheless, whatever the cost, they must learn if they are to become educated in any practical and efficient sense; the immigrants especially must learn, since they come from environments where accurate expression has not been practiced—often has not been needed—and go to a future where it will be required of them. Not even the Do-Nothing school denies the necessity that the undergraduate should learn to write well. But how?