The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-06-28

From the Philadelphia Public Ledger.
 Prof Alois Brandl has renewed his as- serton that the average educated Ameri- can speaks English as correctly as the average educated Englishman. He thus maintains his position:
 ' Ludcrous' is the verdict which we'll known English pedagogues and others have passed upon my recent statement, published in the columns of the Stand ard, that the average educated American speaks English as well and as purely as the educated Englishman himself, and that as a result the Prussian ministry of education has had no hesitation in ex-
 tending the teachers exchange, which
 had found so little encouragement in England, to the schools of the United
 States. The German professor the En-
 glish say who has seen fit to pronounce
 such a view is obviously incompetent to judge. Probably when he compared the
 English of the English with the nasal
 sounds and vulgarities of "Americans,' ,' he was merely joking with us.
 By No Means Joking.
 "But l was by no means joking. Let
 me explain myself in full. The children
 in the board schools of West London
 were not themselves in any way to blame
 when they said as a body, ryne' for
 rain, 'twoice' for twice pawr' for power, 'deering for during, and so forth. They were following a law of nature irresist-
 ible to the child What rather surprised
 me was the fact that their teachers per- mitted them to yield to deteriorative cockney and dialect influences. Now, the
 London board school teachers, I should like to state, made a really excellent inn
 pression upon me as teachers both in regard to their enthusiasm and energy, and in their attitude toward the children, | half paternal and yet marked by de- 1 lightful spirit of camaraderie. Obviously they conscientously taught the children all that they had been taught them selves. It was not they, but the system in which they had been trained, which was to blame.
 "The system which I deplore is, in a word, the drastically exclusive cultiva- ton of the classical languages. In Eng land, for example, all examinations in modern languages-in which pronuncia- tion is surely an essential consideration
 are carried out by means of writing only, just as are those in Greek and Latin. Again, Cambridge has at the present day no chair of modern English. There is at Oxford a scholar who Is famous the world over for his knowledge of phonetics and of the history of the English lam guage-my venerated teacher, Dr. Henry Sweet. He, however, must content him. self with an unimportant back seat as a lector Finally, in the secondary schools modern languages are taught, with few exceptions, by men who have passed ex- aminationc-not in modern languages, but in the classics
 Wherein America Is Ahead. What in view of these conditions in the British schools, has naturally become of the teachers exchange between Eng land and Germany, in spite of the friend ly and energetic support given to the project by the British education depart ment? Why should it not, for once, be said in a newspaper when every tyro teacher of modern languages in the coun- try, every director in our high schools, knows it from personal experiencess Doz- ems of well-prepared German candidates pressed forward, eager to secure the ad- vantages which a year as exchange
 But what reception was shown them The English schools. with few doubly praiseworthy exceptions. were unable to find any use for our German teachers. The names of the German teachers who within three years were admitted to an English school might be told on the fin- gers of one hand.
 America is far and away ahead of England in the cultivation of the mother language, as, indeed, of all modern lam guages At Harvard the study of English is represented by staff of 19 members, which deals with it in its most various aspects. Philadelphia has most magnif- icent school of German. The writings