The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1895-11-25
ENGLISH LITERATURE.
Cow High School Boys and Girls Are
to Be Interested i'm 1t.

Some Practical Suggestions to school
Teachers.
IA Paper Read by Prof. Roberts of Colby Uni
verSlty before the Cumberland County
Teachers Convention.
The aim of the teacher of English
Literature is not to make his pupils wide
ly familiar with names and dates pertain
ing to books and writers. The aim of
the teacher of English literature is not to
insist that his pupils shall read certain
number OF books-as for example tine half
dozen on which candidates for admission
TO New England colleges must be ex-
amined. English literature is not a
disciplinary study in the same sense that
geometry and algebra are disciplinary
studies. The aim Of the teacher of Eng
lish literature is to get his pupils to love
good books, SO that when they get out of
school they will care for something be-
sides the daily paper, and will not care
at all for the New York Ledger.
Having stated the object of the study
of English literature, want to mention
ONE of the necessary qualifications of the
teacher
In the first place he must be an appreci-
alive reader of the best prose and the best
poetry. Not only must he be able to
enter into the mind of the author he is
reading, and 90 follow the authors train
of thought, but he must have a keen
sense of style-that subtle something
which in any sort of composition is the
stamp of value.
He must be able to read aloud we'll !;
and by reading aloud well, l mean read
ing intelligently and with expression.
He must read as if he understood and as
if he felt. The teacher ought every day
to give his class an
APPRECIATIVE RENDERING
of few lines of poetry or of bit of
prose. And he must have read good
deal. He must be saturated through and
through with the English classics-with
Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible
with Lord Bacon, with Addison and
Swift and johnson. | will not say he
should have read much of Wordsworth
and Tennyson and browning, and Long
fellow and Whittier and Lowell, and
Macaulay and Newman and Mathew
Arnold and Thackaray and Dickens and
Holmes and Hawthorne and Washington
Irving-for that goes without saying.
Again, the teacher of English literature
He must be full of contagious en-
thusiasn. 1t is of supreme Importance
that the study Of English literature shall
be made interesting-thati it shall never
become dull and dry and dead. If pupils
do not enjoy their work, do not look for
ward with pleasure to the recitation hour
and do not have a good time when it
comes, they are getting but little good
out of the study of English literature,
and may be getting great deal of harm.
! know a man who says he hates Milton
to this day because an early school master
made reading Milton SO tremendously
wea some.
a I'D the teacher Of English literature
should know when to keep silence and
when to speak. He should not always be
trying to cram his opinions down the in
tellectual threats of his pupils. He
should encourage them to think tor them
selves. Instead Of telling his pupils what
lines of poetry and what passages of prose
be thinks are best, he should try to find
out what lines of poetry and what
passages of prose they think are best. I
should not like to travel through the
fellow for n guide who would always be
pointing out the things l ought to admire
and then insisting that l should admire
them. A good many of us teachers are
SO charmed with the
SOUND OF OUR OWN VOICES.
that we want to do all the talking. We
forget that very often the really i'm
portant thing in teaching is not to tell
what we know, but TO find out what our
pupils know.
Having spoken Of the aim in the study
of English literature, and Of some of the
qualifications of the teacher. want
now to speak of methods of study
And, first, let us consider the study of
biography
1t is the custom in good many schools
to send the pupils TO the encyclopedias
for information about the life of the
author they are going to study. And the
biographical sketches the boys and girls
prepare from the material found there,
make pretty tiresome reading. They tell
when the author was born, when he was
married, when he died: they mention the
names of some of the books lie wrote. and
that is about all. 1t is not so much
wonder that the sketches are tiresome,
for it is rare thing that an encyclo-
paedia makes one acquainted with flesh
and blood man. The man has become
name. The heart and the brain and the
warm, rich life are lacking. The eneyolo-
paeoia is valley of dry bones.
Then, too, the biographical sketches
that appear in the English classics that
the various publishing houses are issuing,
are very often worse than useless For
the most part they are written by men
who seem to have no conception of the
actual
NEEDS OF BOYS AND GIRLS
in the high schools. Some of these
sketches seem like lectures that may have
been given before college classes, and
perhaps given with profitable results;
Others seem to be essays calculated like
Artemas Wards jocund and disou rsiye
preamble-to show what good education
the writer has. Not long ago 0gadin
publishing house sent me series of EngA
lish classics for examination. The pub
fishers hoped would be able to recon-
mend the series to the principals of our
fitting schools. The first hook examined
was Burke on Conc.liation," and II
want to quote sentence or two from the
SO called Introduction:
Perhaps the orossness of their