CORRESPONDENCE
THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—All schoolmasters and schoolmistresses will be grateful to you for your services to a great cause in allowing Mr. J. C. Stobart to talk at length on the teaching of English, but I was surprised to find myself selected as his scapegoat and "guillotined in distinguished company" (that of the old régime). My colleagues will be amused at that. Unfortunately Mr. Stobart is not a very skilful executioner. He tries to show that in my English Course I have followed the traditional methods in "thoroughly normal chapters." And yet he does allow that I am "trying to shake off a yoke which is not entirely congenial" to me. It is more than ten years since I shook off the yoke which he describes as uncongenial. "The traditional method," he says, "begins with the copybook and proceeds by way of dictation and formal exercises to its goal in the essay." I do not advocate the use of the copybook for the simple reason that copybooks insist on the Vere Foster type of handwriting, while I require from my pupils an artistic caligraphy which is opposed in every particular to the uniform ugliness of the old Board School and present Army Council standard.
Dictation I use most sparingly, though I certainly do prefer a boy to leave me with an elementary knowledge of punctuation and a slight acquaintance with the more normal forms of spelling rather than with a contempt for or slavish adoration of stops, and a phonetic system of spelling which is intelligible and phonetic to no one but himself. The reading that I advocate, both in my book and in practice, is not limited (has Mr. Stobart himself read all the books that I recommended as useful for boys?), and the text is never obscured with comment. Where did he get this false information from? To definite grammar I assigned four and a half pages out of 500, which exactly expresses my opinion of its importance. Having misrepresented me in every detail so far, Mr. Stobart proceeds to attack me on two sides at once. "If you ask the schoolmaster why he makes his English the dullest subject in the syllabus, he will probably answer that he is preparing for the London matriculation." I am both a schoolmaster and the English examiner for the "Matric." I will pay Mr. Stobart's first-class return fare from his home to Tonbridge and board him for a week if he will visit my English classes and at the end of his stay retain that word "dullest" in all sincerity. I cannot believe that it is only I who enjoy these English hours so whole-heartedly. I certainly should find them dull if I were proceeding on "traditional" lines, either in my book or in the class-room.... I am next taken to task for daring to teach observation and originality. Mr. Stobart rather rudely (I wish he would practise gentleness and love himself) calls my methods here "a generous diet of cold minced hash." It is "up" to him to prove it. The point is, do I or do I not achieve observation and originality by my methods? Come down to Tonbridge, Mr. Stobart, and I will let you judge for yourself.
When, therefore, you suggest that every boy should learn how to express himself freely and to read widely, I can only reply that every boy has been doing so with very great advantage for years. You cannot picture a Public Schoolmaster so zealous for the purity of his own tongue that he treats a misplaced "and which" or "unrelated participle" as a personal affront. You cannot have been inside a Public School class-room for "donkey's years." I can show you scores as devoted to our classics as Whitelaw was to Latin and Greek?—Yours, etc.,
S. P. B. Mais.
Tonbridge.