The central Presbyterian. [volume] (Richmond, Va.) 1856-1908, 1877-11-14
STUDY OF ENGLISH.
BY PROFESSOR T. R. PRICE, UNIVERSITY OF
VIRGINIA.

VIRGINIA.
SIN almost all the high schools of Eng
land and the United States, the study of the
English language, so far as | can judge by
reading and experience, is either absurdly
dwarfed or altogether neglected. The cause
of this neglect is to be found in the history
of our education. The old schools of Eng
land still bear upon their schemes of study
the distortiDg Influences of that medieval
zine when the English was called and con-
sidered vulgar tongue, and when all the ef-
fective power of the school was applied to
forcing in upon the minds of the young the
use of Latin as the language of science and
literature. Hence, in defiance of all common
sense, by the instinct of an unwise conserva
tism, the English school-masters of the nine
teenth century, like the English schoOl-mas-
ters of the fifteenth, still go on, for the most
part putting Latin into the place of EogliSh,
and even excluding the mother tongue from
the range of school discipline. Thus it is
one of the strange anomalies, one of the sur
wing barbarisms, of English life, that the
same Eton boy, who, when he goes up to the
University, can write decent copy of Latin
verses, modelled on Virgil or Ovid, is wholly
unable to comprehend play of Shakspere,
or to write a lOVe-letter without giving proof
of his illiteracy And, in the high schools of
the United States, this fault of the English
school, this survival of medl@Valism has been
preserved and even aggravated. Here too
the child is forced into the study of the for
eign language, Latin chiefly for the boys and
French for the girls, long before he has been
taught and drilled and strengthened in his
knowledge and use of the English. Even
worse than this, an absurd theory has been
concocted as the apology for an absurd prac
tice. l know Of large and important schools
where boys are prepared for college and uni
ver8ity upon the grOtesque principle that the
Eoglish language can be learned, and best
!earned, from the Latin grammar. The ma
sural outcome of this nonsense is the shame
full fact that, among the graduates Of our
aigh schools, colleges, and universities, We
find hundred that have smstteripg Of
Latin, or French, or German, for the one that
has learned how to read English with intel
ligence or to write English with precision
As an examiner, l have found it to be the
rule that young men tOlerably familiar with
the elements of three or four foreign Ian
guages were intolerably ignorant of their
own. 1 have received numberless applica-
tons for places as teachers in schools and COL
eges from graduates of famous American
Universities that could not, even in simple
letter of application, avoid the absurdest
blunders in style, in grammar, even in spell
ing. Thus our American system of language
teaching is rotten at the core, and foul with
smears of illiteracy. We have broken the
sequences of nature. We have dislocated
the processes of the mind. By persisting SO
long in this error, by degrading the mother
tongue from its primacy in education, and by
yearly forcing hundreds of thousands of un-
trained minds into the linguistic studies for
which their ignorance of English leaves them
we have robbed our schools of
the largest part of their efficiency, and
brought down far below what it ought to be,