University Bulletin 
 
 New Series, Vol. XIII [ No - 5 
 
 THE LANGUAGES IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 
 
 From the Proceedings of the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club and Classical Conference 
 held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 30, 191 1 
 
 HUMANISTIC PAPERS, SECOND SERIES, I 
 
 Reprint from the School Review, October, November, December, 191 1 
 
 •Boogmpb* 
 
THE LANGUAGES IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 
 
 From the Proceedings of the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club and Classical Conference 
 held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 30, 1911 
 
 HUMANISTIC PAPERS, SECOND SERIES, I 
 
 Reprint from the School Review, October, November, December, 1 9 1 1 
 
V* 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Place of Modern Languages in American Educa- 
 tion 3 
 
 Edward C. Armstrong, The Johns Hopkins University 
 
 II. The Aims of Modern-Language Teaching in the Second- 
 ary School 17 
 
 John S. Nollen, Lake Forest College 
 
 III. The Needs of Modern-Language Instruction . .22 
 
 A. F. Kuersteiner, Indiana University 
 
 IV. The Practical Value of Humanistic Studies . . .36 
 
 William Gardner Hale, The University of Chicago 
 
 V. The Place of Latin in Secondary Education . . 59 
 
 E. D. McQueen Gray, The University of New Mexico 
 
 VI. The Value of the Ancient Literatures in Life . . 64 
 James Bryce 
 
THE LANGUAGES IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 
 
 I. THE PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN AMERICAN 
 
 EDUCATION 1 
 
 EDWARD C. ARMSTRONG 
 
 The Johns Hopkins University 
 
 The change from wagon to railway, trolley, automobile, and 
 aeroplane, from letter to telegraph and telephone, from hand- 
 power to steam and electricity, are but a few of the externals 
 of an age of profound transition. The financial, political, social, 
 moral, and intellectual revolution that has accompanied the ma- 
 terial reconstruction is of equal magnitude and of more basal 
 import. No less radical is the alteration that has taken place 
 in the field of education, and here as elsewhere the static stage 
 has not been reached. All indications point to further changes 
 as radical as any in the past, and no man can with safety predict 
 the forms that will prevail. As a consequence, we may not 
 lull ourselves with the thought that what has been will be, nor 
 rest in the assurance that systems and methods should be main- 
 tained for the sole reason that they have till now sufficed. The 
 lessons of experience never cease to be valuable, but to be ready 
 for the morrow we must test them by the fundamentals, by the 
 sound educational principles that hold for all times and for all 
 surroundings. There is today an especially potent call for the 
 open mind. But an open mind involves mind as well as openness 
 — the receptiveness must be intelligent. All change involves dis- 
 turbance, discomfort, loss of time and energy, relegation to the 
 scrap-heap, along with the outworn, of materials that are still 
 serviceable. Changes can be justified only if there is a reason- 
 able basis for expectation that they will result in a sum-total of 
 ultimate gain. 
 
 Thus the question of determining the place of modern lan- 
 guages in American education is closely joined to the broader 
 
 "A paper read before the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club at Ann Arbor, March 30,1911. 
 A few copies of this Bulletin will be available for distribution. Those desiring a copy may 
 address (inclosing a two-cent stamp) Mr. Louis P. Jocelyn, secretary of the Michigan 
 Schoolmasters' Club, 541 South Division Street, Ann Arbor, Mich. 
 
4 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 question of the relation of American education to the chang-insr 
 structure of our country. What their place now is, and whether 
 it is justified, can best be determined by the history of our 
 studies. What that place should be in the future must be judged 
 on the basis of careful thought and cautious testing. What that 
 place will be depends on us — on our receptiveness, our intelli- 
 gence, our fidelity. 
 
 The undisputed right of the modern languages to more than 
 a precarious and incidental place in our curricula is not of long 
 standing. Looked upon, now as a trade equipment, now as an 
 accomplishment, they were ranked with commercial bookkeeping 
 and tables of foreign exchange, or with fencing and piano- 
 playing ; their fitting teacher, a German clerk in a counting-room 
 or the local dancing-master. When taught in our schools, these 
 subjects were held in scant esteem. Latin and Greek looked 
 down on them in cold disdain, and the highest dignity which 
 could be hoped was that a teacher of the ancient languages should 
 add them to his subjects as a pastime. Such was our rank but 
 a generation back. When a call was issued in 1883 for the con- 
 ference of modern-language teachers that resulted in the estab- 
 lishment of the Modern Language Association, one of the 
 leading university presidents said to the prime mover of the 
 conference: "And will you not have my Chinese laundryman 
 address you? He is past-master in one of your living languages." 
 In 1886 the first periodical devoted to modern languages was 
 issued, and its initial number appeared with but one name on the 
 subscription list. No need to be ashamed of or to regret these 
 inauspicious beginnings. It is well that every step of progress 
 had to be earned, every advance in esteem to be merited. Not 
 through inherited position, not by favoritism, it must be then by 
 the merit o'f the cause that the quality of the teacher and his 
 courses and the rank and dignity of the subject have grown so 
 mightily. The Modern Language Association counts eleven hun- 
 dred members : the Publications of the Modern Language Asso- 
 ciation, Modern Language Notes, Modern Philology, The Journal 
 of English and Germanic Philology, The Romanic Review, come 
 monthly or quarterly to our desks; the earlier professorship of 
 
PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION 5 
 
 modern languages in college and university has been replaced 
 by separate teaching for German and for French in almost all 
 cases, and for Spanish or Italian in many instances; German or 
 French, or both, are now taught in all the leading secondary 
 schools. And the strife between the ancients and the moderns 
 no longer exists. Our aristocratic elder sisters do not send us 
 to the nursery for our bread and milk when there is company 
 to dinner, nor are they now unwilling that we should have young 
 admirers of our own. They have not only ceased to snub us, 
 but are glad to join forces in vieing with the attractiveness or 
 the athletic young cousins who have opened up bakeries and 
 cabinet-makers' shops on the ground floor, whose energy and 
 aggressiveness are an excellent stimulus, but whose moving in 
 makes us all sit close and taxes the resources of the house. Con- 
 ceits aside, classics and modern languages are a great source of 
 strength each to the other. It is they of the classics who have 
 set the example which serves as a constant guide in developing 
 the effectiveness of language as a discipline; while we perhaps 
 have been able to throw light on the essential problem of asso- 
 ciating language with life, of aiding the pupil to feel that lan- 
 guage is more than a declining, conjugating, parsing, and 
 scanning machine. Not that this has ever been the attitude of 
 the representative teacher of the classics, but our greater oppor- 
 tunity for contact with the life behind the languages we teach 
 enables us to point more readily the way to prevent its being the 
 attitude of the pupil. 
 
 In the light of these facts, it is far from excessive to main- 
 tain that the rapid and substantial advance of modern-language 
 work in America in the past thirty-five years demonstrates its 
 vitality and usefulness and gives fine promise. The foundations 
 are laid: what ought the superstructure to be? Is it in us to 
 build for the future ; to distinguish permanent values from quick 
 and showy returns? Our subjects have an assured place in 
 American education; we must give our thought and energy to 
 its being the proper place. I should like to consider for a while 
 the essentials of modern-language teaching -if -that place is to 
 be attained. 
 
6 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 The living languages have a concrete utility — a commercial 
 value that can be demonstrated and that has been an impetus in 
 their extension in the schools, even though it is nothing like so 
 manifest here as in many other countries. Small need to argue 
 with a Swiss that he should be a polyglot, when he can hardly 
 walk out of a morning to stretch his legs without coming in 
 contact with at least three languages ; when the material pros- 
 perity, not only of many individuals but of the very nation, 
 hinges upon making captious travelers comfortable in half a 
 dozen tongues. The part the schoolmaster played in preparing 
 the victories of the Franco-Prussian War or in rendering possible 
 the commercial strides of the empire has been an ever-present 
 object lesson to Germany and to the adjacent nations. But in 
 the United States we have remained walled off, not alone by 
 mighty oceans on the east and west, by commercial barriers on 
 the north and south, but by our absorption in the development 
 of a great country not yet peopled. Now we are learning that 
 trade is a world-question ; that permanent prosperity depends 
 on outlets in the markets of all nations; that when we compete 
 by letter or in person for our share of commerce we must be able 
 to write or talk, as do our rivals, in languages the buyer can 
 understand, and that we must know enough of his habits and his 
 modes of thought to find common bases of interest. While we 
 slept, or read David Harum, or discussed the baseball score, the 
 rich trade of South America has gone to other bidders. This is 
 no negligible factor, no unimportant detail, and yet — and yet — 
 if that be the ground of our teaching languages, we should plan 
 our courses in the schools somewhat in this order: Portuguese; 
 Spanish; Chinese; Tagalog; and we should make the chief aims: 
 commercial letter-writing; phrases of barter; the terminology of 
 poker, pinochle, or whatever game it be that international drum- 
 mers affect. And, after all, still keeping the practical stand- 
 point, what proportion of the pupils of an average high school 
 would ever find occasion to put this equipment into service? 
 Viewed still more broadly, is education in language to be meas- 
 ured by the power to rattle off set phrases in a foreign tongue? 
 If so, we shall never be able to cope as educated types with the 
 
PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION 7 
 
 flunkeys of any cosmopolitan hotel. It is not thus that we meas- 
 ure educational values. The broader contact with world-inter- 
 ests that comes from a study of foreign languages and the 
 knowledge of the languages themselves is of importance and 
 value from a commercial standpoint; but if this be the sole or 
 even the main aim of their study they fail to justify themselves, 
 not alone in their cultural value, but even from a practical point 
 of view. The school of commerce or the Berlitz school can do 
 this work more effectively than we, and doing it alone for such 
 as have need or wish for it can save us from burning up the 
 house each time we wish to roast a pig. 
 
 If, in our general school system, a widespread teaching of 
 the modern languages cannot be justified by their commercial 
 value, no more can it be defended merely and alone on the ground 
 of their utility as spoken media. Pleasant as it may be, and 
 helpful withal, for the American to converse with the native in 
 his own tongue when he journeys across the water, we who have 
 taught know all too well that, in the time it is possible to allot, 
 the average pupil will not learn to speak German or French. 
 The best that can be accomplished, and the most it is wise to 
 aim for under our present system, is to give him a solid founda- 
 tion in the structure of the language and a facility in reading, 
 and along with this to accustom his ear to the sound of the lan- 
 guage when spoken — a hearing knowledge rather than a speaking 
 knowledge — so that if opportunity offer for him to practice the 
 speech he may at least be equipped to utilize this opportunity 
 wisely and successfully. This we owe to our pupils ; to the over- 
 whelming majority of them, to those who will never have this 
 opportunity, we also owe that the courses shall not be shaped 
 to the use of the minority at the cost of the others. 
 
 The vitality of the modern languages as a subject in the 
 American school depends on none of these externals, but must 
 find its source and determine its ultimate measure on the basis 
 of the two old, unchanging, and unchangeable factors of educa- 
 tion : the value as a training for the mind, as a discipline ; and 
 the cultural value. These are the fundamentals ; the practical 
 values already mentioned are the accessories ; not to be exagger- 
 
8 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 ated, not to be neglected; hurtful if they replace, but valuable 
 \f brought into proper relation to, the essentials. 
 
 But, says the critic, you are repeating the reasons advanced 
 for the study of the classics, and on which the classics are wag- 
 ing a fight of uncertain outcome to hold their own in our educa- 
 tional system. Can we not choose a better strategic position than 
 this, which seems at present to be resulting for them in few vic- 
 tories and some reverses? I answer deliberately: No! As sub- 
 jects with a commercial, concrete value easily measured in dimes 
 and dollars, easily applicable in later life to business ends, the 
 languages cannot vie with the natural sciences, cannot even vie 
 with history or social science, cannot vie, I may add, with bread- 
 making or carpet-laying or gas-fitting or clothes-cleaning. Our 
 opportunity lies in joining forces with the defenders of the 
 classics for the maintenance of education in its full meaning as 
 distinguished from technical and business preparation. The 
 natural sciences have educational value as a discipline, but are 
 inadequate on the cultural side; historical, political, and social 
 science have cultural value, but are inferior to language as a 
 discipline. The languages combine the two values as does 
 nothing else. It may be that we live in an age and a country in 
 which the tendencies are against a full appreciation of our atti- 
 tude; the more potent then the demand that we stand unitedly 
 and aggressively for the things of which our youth have need. 
 We might relax our watchfulness in a nation of idealists, or 
 there make way, without loss, for the physicist or the chemist ; 
 here we are needed, and here we need, as nowhere else, to stand 
 for the best we represent. If we do our duty and if we measure 
 up to our mission the outcome is not doubtful. We are at the 
 flood-tide of the conditions that have turned our people to the 
 material side of life; to build for and to help shape the coming 
 conditions is our opportunity, and can alone be our justification. 
 The study of the classics has lost, at least relatively, some of its 
 extension : is there no connection between this fact and the 
 decline, which we hear so loudly deplored, of accuracy and of 
 style in the English written in our schools? Has not England, 
 where the classics better maintain their rank, a superiority over 
 
PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION Q 
 
 us in this? And in measuring the causes of the increased 
 pressure on the classics as a subject in the schools, we must not 
 forget the competition of the modern languages. Our develop- 
 ment has meant that they must share their space with us. After 
 all, if Greek has largely disappeared, and if Latin has failed 
 to strengthen its hold, the total of language work in our schools 
 and colleges is far greater than it was a generation back, and it 
 is safe to say that the students are giving at least as large a pro- 
 portion of their time to language study as they then did. The 
 question thus becomes whether we of the modern languages are 
 properly fulfilling, shall properly fulfil, our part of the work. 
 There is no obligation on us to seek to impinge further on the 
 space the classics have occupied. Viewed merely from a selfish 
 standpoint, our work is lightened and rendered more effective 
 by all the Latin and all the Greek the pupil studies. There is 
 obligation on us, and on the teachers of the classics as well, that 
 we shall unitedly work to attain the educational ends that we 
 believe language study serves ; and upon us there rests the duty 
 of serving these ends as effectively as they. If it be true that 
 the students' grasp of English is showing diminution, it lies 
 with us to question gravely whether we of the modern-language 
 group are accomplishing the part we have assumed in language 
 work as effectively as the classic teacher. 
 
 So far as regards cultural value, the study of the speeches of 
 modern Europe affords opportunities that are equal to the best. 
 The broadening influence of contact with the thought of other 
 nations through the medium of the original language lies, first, 
 in the close connection between thought and its form of ex- 
 pression. Each people has its own sequence of ideas, its own 
 stylistic forms, its own shadings of vocabulary. Attempts at 
 literal rendering give only translations devoid of artistic quali- 
 ties and incapable of renewing in the reader the impression the 
 writer is seeking to transmit. Truly good translation, on the 
 other hand, involves the thorough recasting of the foreign form 
 of expression, and, while the result may be a correct rendering 
 of the thought, expressed in excellent English, such an interpre- 
 tation is a triumph for the translator rather than for the trans- 
 
IO THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 lated. Goethe seated at our side, speaking in flawless English of 
 today, would be a wonderful table-companion, but could never 
 carry us out of ourselves into a new realm of thought and feel- 
 ing as can the Goethe of Weimar. 
 
 The second great opportunity for culture from the study of 
 foreign languages consists in the insight this study gives, not 
 alone into the literature, but into the life, the social structure, 
 the art — into the whole civilization of those who think and 
 feel in other ways than we, and whose thoughts find expression 
 in other words and in other acts than ours. Here is where Ger- 
 man or French, Italian or Spanish, is a priceless domain. Much 
 as the archaeologist has learned, familiar as we are with many 
 details of the life of the past, our knowledge of the nations that 
 have ceased to be cannot compare with the insight we can gain 
 into the civilization of our neighbors; and the power to make 
 our subjects living, vivid realities is mightily augmented by fa- 
 miliarity with habits and surroundings and by nearness in time 
 and place. The man of culture is not merely he who knows the 
 thought, the feeling, the art, the life of others; though possessed 
 of the widest knowledge, he is still narrow who interprets all 
 things in terms of his own attitude, who remains ever — how hard 
 this to escape! — the center of his universe. The hall-mark of 
 culture is the power to see with the eyes of others, to compre- 
 hend even where we do not acquiesce, to interpret not in our 
 terms but in the terms of him who speaks. A man of culture, 
 taking his Don Quixote from the table, becomes straightway a 
 Spaniard of the olden days. Let another try to read, Don Qui- 
 xote remains a keyless puzzle, or is solved in terms of a Sam Jones 
 or a Coxie. A man steeped in French thought and life is likely 
 to find, when speaking in French, that the substance as well as 
 the form of what he says is at times altered: that he is thinking 
 and speaking from the French point of view, and is saying things 
 it does not come to him to say when his medium is English. 
 When in Paris do as the Parisians do is a safe precept only if 
 we choose the right Parisians as our models ; but when in Paris, 
 whether in body or spirit, look if you can on things Parisian 
 through the Parisian's eyes. The acquisition of power of self- 
 
PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION . II 
 
 detachment, so difficult to attain, so contrary to the spirit of 
 provincialism, of chauvinism, is furthered in no way better than 
 by an intimate knowledge of peoples who reject much that we 
 accept and accept much that we reject; yet who live in our day, 
 have the same general material, moral, and intellectual problems 
 to face, and are meeting them at times not so well, at times 
 better than we. This is a kind of contact with things new which 
 adds not alone to our resources but to our resourcefulness. 
 , - There is a further broadening effect of language that carries 
 with it far-reaching results when the languages are those of our 
 contemporaries. Small-minded confidence in superiority over 
 those who do not speak and act and think as we is bred of 
 ignorance and cannot long resist the admiration which comes 
 with a knowledge of the best in their literature and life. And 
 on this follows a diminution of the hostility between nations and 
 a strengthening of the forces that are at work for peace. Keen 
 international rivalry for political and commercial supremacy 
 cannot but continue to occasion enmities, but every pupil whom 
 we bring to understand the language and the thought of a foreign 
 country gives an added impetus to the growing spirit of friendli- 
 ness and conciliation. 
 
 Now, .granted that the study of the modern languages has 
 the requisites for satisfying this, the cultural requirement in edu- 
 cation, what is its fitness as a discipline ? No one would question 
 that it furnishes valuable training for the mind, that it develops 
 the reasoning powers; but is it at all to be compared in this 
 respect with the study of the classic languages? Many will be 
 disposed to agree with Mr. James Bryce, who, in a recent ad- 
 dress at the Johns Hopkins University, gave the preference to 
 the languages rich in inflections. Still, I believe it is not too much 
 to maintain that French or German, when properly taught, may 
 be made as effective a discipline for the mind as Latin or Greek. 
 A rich inflectional system does undoubtedly furnish an excellent 
 basis for drill in grammatical relations, a drill all the more valu- 
 able as an incentive to thought because it is lacking in English 
 and thus forces the pupil to acquire forms of analysis to which 
 he is unaccustomed. Yet, on the other hand, while the differ- 
 
12 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 ences of the modern European languages from the English are 
 often of a type which does not so quickly show on the surface, 
 they are none the less innumerable, and the very fact that in 
 many cases they do not disclose themselves at the first glance 
 is an aid, in the hands of a careful teacher, to training in accurate 
 thought. The opportunity for this training begins with the first 
 lesson in pronunciation. It remained wholly unutilized under the 
 old system of teaching, when the foreign sounds were simply re- 
 placed by their nearest English equivalents, and when such 
 sounds as have not even a faint reflection in our language were 
 explained by incorrect descriptions or crude directions such as 
 these: "The French u has a sound precisely agreeing with that 
 of the German modified u" ; "To pronounce French u, start as 
 if you were going to say oo and quickly say ee." How many 
 times, as a boy, I strove to put these directions into practice, 
 invariably ending up with an English u or an English el Today, 
 proper instruction in pronunciation begins with an analysis of the 
 speech-organs for each sound, accompanied by constant illustra- 
 tion and practice ; next moves on to explanation and practice in the 
 methods of syllable-building and stress; and can then be readily 
 extended to the word or the word-group. Such clear and simple 
 treatises as Nyrop's Manuel phonetique du frangais parle furnish 
 a guide to the teacher, while the charts of German and of French 
 sounds prepared in accordance with the system of the International 
 Phonetic Association provide the essential classroom apparatus. 
 The inculcation of new sounds by a study of the positions of the 
 speech-organs is not only the sole way to teach correct pronuncia- 
 tion to such pupils as have passed beyond early childhood, it is 
 also a valuable training in applying the powers of observation 
 and analysis to a set of activities which the individual, in spite 
 of the fact that it is he who is performing them, rarely observes, 
 and which he can interpret correctly only after attentive and in- 
 telligent effort. 
 
 Again, while it is customary to consider the French as poor 
 in inflections, comparison of similarities and differences between 
 the French and the English offers a field limited rather by the 
 inflexibility of our thought than by a real absence of inflection 
 
PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION 13 
 
 in the French. It is easy to see that homme, singular, and 
 hommes, plural, are identical in sound, and it is in itself a valuable 
 drill to teach the pupil to distinguish between mere eye-differ- 
 ences and those which have a real existence in the spoken word ; 
 but it is misleading to teach that "man" and "men" are alike 
 homme[s] ; "man" is un homme, "men" is des hommes; "the 
 man" is V homme, "the men" is les hommes. The un, des, le, les 
 are inflections just as are homin-em, homin-es. Similarly, in je 
 chante, tu chantes, il chante, elle chante, the je, tu, il, elle are 
 inflections, as is shown by the fact that if we really desire to 
 express the pronoun subject it must be done in some other way. 
 II chante is not "HE sings," but chanter, third singular present, 
 and we have to depend on the context to determine whether the 
 subject is "he," "it," or a phrase or clause following the verb. 
 The Old French, which had more flectional suffixes, did not need 
 to express such a je, tu, il; it could say simply chant, chantes, 
 chantet. In the modern French, when we are aiming really to 
 express a pronoun subject we do it by saying: moi, je chante; 
 je chante, moi; c'est moi qui chante, etc. French is not stricken 
 with inflectional poverty; it simply has replaced, in a number of 
 instances, suffixes by prefixes, prefixes which are in the writing 
 still detached but which are none the less prefixes. The Latin 
 suffixes -0, -as, -at, etc., probably arose by the merging of what 
 were in the first place detached words. The French future tense 
 arose in the same way, and je chanterai was originally cantare 
 habeo. Similarly enlever, "to carry off," shows a merging into 
 one word of elements that still remain separate, for the written 
 language at least, in the exactly similar s'en aller, "to move off." 
 It is only a superficial observer, however, who sees in in- 
 flections the sole or even the main opportunity for language drill. 
 They are valuable for this purpose ; but they tend, when not in- 
 telligently handled, to become a mere mechanical exercise. It 
 is the broader fields of syntax and word-signification that offer 
 the most numerous and the most alluring occasions for training 
 in exact thinking. Syntactical study is never simple and never 
 easy, but it does not need to be dreary or dry. The psychological 
 processes which lead the French to employ the expletive ne; to 
 
14 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 substitute the historical present or the present perfect for the 
 narrative past tense, or the present for the future; the reasons 
 which have caused the imperfect subjunctive to fall into disuse or 
 which determine the placing of the adjective before or after its 
 substantive — these and similar questions give to syntax a reality 
 and a vividness that must appeal to the teacher and through the 
 teacher can be made to appeal to the scholar. 
 
 Most fruitful of all as a training to exact thought is the study 
 of words. In English we group a variety of actions under the 
 term "to walk" : it is used, for instance, in the meanings "to ad- 
 vance on foot" ; "to advance on foot at a deliberate pace" ; "to 
 go on foot"; "to come on foot"; "to move on foot for recrea- 
 tion," etc. That is to say, in English we have chosen as central 
 idea the method of locomotion, joining with it now one, now 
 another connotation which we leave to be determined from the 
 context. The French group these ideas differently, distributing 
 out the various ideas we have assembled around "going afoot" 
 into the other classes where they also belong. It therefore has 
 no inclusive verb "to walk" : the method of locomotion is what 
 it usually leaves to be determined from the context. "He walks 
 up to me" is "he comes to me" ; "I walk up to him" is "I go 
 to him," and so on. It is in consequence impossible to translate 
 "walk" into French without analyzing from the context the pur- 
 pose or the accessories of the walking; just as it is impossible to 
 translate into English the French se promener, "to take recreation 
 by moving from place to place," without first stopping to determine 
 whether the mode of motion is walking, or riding, or driving. 
 This illustration is nearer to being typical than it is to being ex- 
 ceptional. Except for the names of simple and concrete ideas, 
 word-values rarely coincide in different languages. The sum- 
 total of the thought may be the same, but the sentence will be 
 made up of materials of different shape, size, and texture. Ac- 
 curate translation from English into a foreign language or vice 
 versa involves not alone careful analysis of the foreign speech 
 but of the mother-tongue as well. 
 
 Phonetics, inflection, syntax, and word-meaning can be util- 
 ized at all stages of the study of a language. No less important 
 
PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION 1$ 
 
 is the analysis of style, but it can be successfully undertaken only 
 with students who pursue their language-work to a point of con- 
 siderable advancement. It is perhaps here that we have the most 
 to learn from the language-teaching in the French schools. Their 
 teaching of style, whether Latin or French be the subject-matter, 
 through the analysis, in their courses on text-interpretation, of 
 the modes and methods of composition as shown in the best 
 writers, plays no small part in the remarkable facility the French 
 show in expressing themselves clearly, accurately, and in good 
 form — a facility notable in our youth, as a rule, only by its 
 absence. In our graduate French work at the Johns Hopkins 
 University we are endeavoring to develop this type of study, so 
 that the teachers we send out may go forth adequately equipped 
 in this regard. Thus much I may already say, at an early stage 
 of the experiment: the students, while finding this work pe- 
 culiarly difficult by reason of its newness to them, have entered 
 on it with zeal and are enthusiastic over its possibilities. 
 
 In the foregoing discussion of the opportunities offered by 
 the modern languages for the forming of trained thinkers I 
 have restricted my illustrations to French because of my greater 
 familiarity with that subject. Those who are working in German 
 can readily supply as potent examples drawn from that language. 
 In fact, the problem is not whether the modern languages furnish 
 sufficient and satisfactory material for study that shall meet the 
 highest cultural and disciplinary standards; it is rather how, in 
 the time at our disposal for teaching these languages, we can 
 find a place for giving to the pupil even a small part of the 
 wealth of training for which they furnish so abundant opportu- 
 nity. We deal with a subject-matter capable, by its variety and 
 richness, of being rendered the most useful and the most absorb- 
 ing in our curriculum. 
 
 The goal is inspiring. Do we at present ever attain this goal ? 
 Alas, the knowledge and wisdom and faith the teacher needs, 
 whatever his subject, so far exceeds the best we have, the best 
 that many of us can hope to have ! More practical and more es- 
 sential is the question: Are we aiming for this goal? Are we 
 utilizing our present equipment to the best of our ability? Are 
 
1 6 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 we enlarging it in every possible way? Are we endeavoring to 
 give the pupils, in so far as it is practicable, familiarity with the 
 modern languages in their written and spoken form, insight into 
 the civilizations that are reflected through them, training that 
 comes from their analysis? It is for each of us to answer for 
 himself and to himself. But this much can be said : The rewards 
 of teaching are not such as lure men and women of low ideals 
 or material aims; life is a treadmill to the routine teacher, a 
 nullity to the teacher who is no idealist. There is ground for 
 faith in our teachers. We are full of defects — who knows that 
 we are not as often disappointing to our pupils as they are to us? 
 — but in no profession is there a greater devotion to the work 
 for the work's sake, a greater desire to do the work well for the 
 reward that comes in the sense of work well done. With this 
 spirit directing the body of our teachers, we may have confidence 
 that the gain in intensiveness in the teaching of the modern lan- 
 guages is destined more nearly to keep pace with their present 
 rapid extension in our schools. The power lies within our grasp 
 of aiding to form a new generation broader in culture, clearer 
 and more exact in thought; not alone more comprehensive in 
 their grasp of languages, but masters of the written and the 
 spoken word of their own language as they could never have been 
 without our aid. May it be granted to us to have a share in 
 bringing this to pass! 
 
II. AIMS OF THE TEACHING OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 IN THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 1 
 
 JOHN SCHOLTE NOLLEN 
 Lake Forest College 
 
 We all agree that the ideal of the course of study in a foreign 
 language is a "practical command" of the language: which 
 means, of course, a good pronunciation, the ability to under- 
 stand the spoken language, and conversational facility in its use, 
 the ability to read intelligently and to write correctly. To these 
 accomplishments we should add familiarity with the literature 
 and the life of the people whose language is being studied. 
 
 It is quite evident that for the American secondary school, 
 with its maximum course of four years, this ideal is quite unat- 
 tainable. The practical question is how much of the ideal we 
 shall be willing to surrender. 
 
 We Americans are exceptionally conservative in our educa- 
 tional practice and policy. We have in recent years seen the 
 exploitation of many "methods" and "reforms" which were 
 guaranteed to reconstruct our modern-language teaching, but 
 the actual effect of all this agitation upon the practice of our 
 schools has been comparatively slight. Meanwhile, the language 
 teachers of Germany and France have actually been bringing 
 about a revolution in their methods and their results during the 
 last few years. Vietor's little pamphlet, Der Sprachunterricht 
 muss umkehren, had an electric effect in calling the attention of 
 German teachers to the inefficiency of the old routine, and the 
 need of an immediate change of aim and emphasis in the teaching 
 of modern languages. Vietor and the other reformers insisted 
 that the spoken language must be made the basis of modern- 
 
 1 Outline of a paper read before the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club at Ann Arbor, March 
 30, 191 1. 
 
 17 
 
1 8 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 language teaching, and particularly that a correct pronunciation 
 of a foreign language must be gained by the persistent use of a 
 scientific phonetic method. There is no question that the efforts 
 of the reformers have brought about remarkable results in the 
 teaching of English and French, especially in the reformed 
 schools of Germany. These results have been possible because 
 the courses in the German secondary schools are usually six- 
 year courses at least, and because the teachers in the German 
 secondary schools are thoroughly trained specialists. The em- 
 phasis upon the spoken language in both Germany and France 
 is fully justified by the great value that the command of the 
 spoken language has in these countries. 
 
 It is quite evident that the situation in the secondary schools 
 of the United States is very different from conditions in the 
 European countries. In the vast majority of cases, our sec- 
 ondary-school courses in German and French are two-year 
 courses; the maximum, naturally, is the four-year course; and 
 even a one-year course is not infrequent. Furthermore, the 
 secondary-school teacher in the United States is in general very 
 inferior in equipment and experience to the teacher in France 
 and Germany. Again, the ability to speak a foreign language 
 has comparatively little actual value for the great majority of 
 secondary-school pupils in this country. 
 
 Conditions being what they are, I am convinced that in this 
 country the widest and the largest utility will be found in the 
 ability to read the foreign language. 
 
 How, then, does the study of modern languages differ from 
 that of the so-called "dead" languages? For our purposes it 
 does not differ so widely as is usually supposed. The differences 
 are mainly these: that a reading knowledge can be gained far 
 more rapidly in a modern language than in an ancient language, 
 and that in the case of the modern language it is, of course, pos- 
 sible to vivify the teaching of the language of literature by the 
 use of the colloquial tongue. 
 
 Next in order of importance to the ability to read a foreign 
 language I should place a really good pronunciation, so that the 
 student may be able to body forth concretely the language he is 
 
MODERN LANGUAGES IN THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 19 
 
 reading. Next to this I should place the ability to understand 
 the spoken language, and last of all (under circumstances ob- 
 taining in the United States) the ability to write and to speak 
 the foreign language. 
 
 There can be no question, I think, that to the great majority 
 of high-school pupils the language of German or of French litera- 
 ture is far more important than the "living" language of spoken 
 intercourse. In the ardor of their attack upon the old regime 
 the phonetic reformers have usually overshot the mark; in their 
 insistence upon the primary importance of the colloquial tongue 
 they are apt to forget that the language of literature is just as 
 truly and completely a language as that of colloquial intercourse. 
 The written or printed symbol is no less a symbol than the sound 
 it is intended to express, and it would be both unscientific and 
 practically absurd to deny the immense and preponderant value 
 of the printed symbol in the development of our civilization. 
 And, furthermore, our age is, above all others, a reading age. 
 You remember the eloquent passage, "Ceci tuera cela," in Vic- 
 tor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, in which the author celebrates 
 the gradual and irresistible triumph of the printed page over the 
 mediaeval art of Gothic architecture. The , printed page has 
 overwhelmed not only the symbolic language of the Gothic ca- 
 thedral, but also in these latter days the more closely related arts 
 of oratory and conversation. Far from being a mere "fossil," 
 as Henry Sweet pretends, the language of books has become the 
 principal and almost exclusive storehouse of the riches of our 
 modern culture. We are therefore not merely making a con- 
 cession to the crudeness of our educational machinery in empha- 
 sizing the primary importance of the ability to read a language ; 
 we are rather emphasizing that which has after all the greatest 
 educative value in the subject we are discussing. 
 
 Referring now to the limitations imposed by practical condi- 
 tions, we must make a difference in the aims of the teaching of 
 modern languages in our secondary schools according to the 
 preparation of the teacher, according to the constituency of the 
 school, and according to the length of the course. 
 
 The great bane of language teaching in this country is still 
 
2 o THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 the ill-trained teacher. So long as the present decentralized and 
 irresponsible lack of system in the management of our schools 
 continues we shall make but slow progress in improving this con- 
 dition. In any case, however, we may demand that the instructor 
 should be conscious of his own limitations and should not at- 
 tempt to teach what he cannot himself do. This warning seems 
 so self-evident that it should not be necessary to insist upon it. 
 My experience as a high-school visitor, however, has taught me 
 that there are at present a great many high-school teachers of 
 French and German in this country who do not meet this ele- 
 mentary requirement of self-knowledge, and in very many 
 instances I have heard teachers undoing, by the solecisms of their 
 spoken utterance, the grammatical training they were at the same 
 moment attempting to impart. Unquestionably our American 
 teachers in general are weakest in phonetic training and in the 
 power to handle the spoken language. For teachers who are 
 weak at these points the only allowable method is a strict "read- 
 ing method." Fortunately, even such teachers may feel that if 
 they succeed in giving their pupils the power to read ordinary 
 German or French intelligently they will be giving them that 
 which is after all of greatest value in the teaching of a foreign 
 language. 
 
 The constituency of a school may call for special emphasis 
 upon conversational ability. In such a case it is legitimate for 
 the school, so far as in it lies, to supply the public demand, but 
 it will be well for the teacher to remember that the pedagogical 
 value of conversational facility in itself is comparatively low. 
 We all know that "linguistry," even of the most expert kind, 
 is not necessarily a mark or a guarantee of culture. 
 
 The length of the course offers us our next practical con- 
 sideration. 
 
 Two years should be the irreducible minimum of a high- 
 school course in a foreign language. The one-year course in 
 the high school is an absurdity. Even in the case of the two- 
 year course, the limitation of the time necessarily reduces the 
 phonetic and grammatical basis of the course to a minimum 
 and lays the stress heavily upon the reading of texts. This result 
 
MODERN LANGUAGES IN THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 21 
 
 is indicated the more clearly by the fact that usually the shorter 
 course is in the hands of comparatively ill-prepared teachers. 
 
 In the four-year course a well-trained teacher may properly 
 give the class scientific phonetic training as the basis of its work 
 in pronunciation, make large use of the spoken language in the 
 classroom, develop the grammatical relations of the language 
 in a more leisurely way, with much use of induction and of repe- 
 tition, and develop freie Reproduktion, first spoken and then 
 written, in the class. Yet the main object even here must remain 
 to give the student a mastery of the German and French of litera- 
 ture, and an acquaintance with some specimens of good lit- 
 erature. In no high-school course is there any proper place for the 
 traditional "composition" that means dictionary translations and 
 the solving of puzzles. 
 
 Some acquaintance with the life of the foreign people whose 
 language the student is learning should be gained through the 
 choice of appropriate reading-matter, which is now being sup- 
 plied in good quantity, by the use of pictures, of the stereopticon, 
 and, wherever possible, of the moving-picture, which marks a 
 great advance in the art of placing concretely, before young 
 people especially, the living realities of many countries. 
 
 Finally, the modern-language teacher should keep in mind 
 all the possibilities of correlation of his work with that of the 
 other language departments in the high school. The lack of uni- 
 formity in terminology and in method between the allied depart- 
 ments of our schools is one of the great practical absurdities of 
 our educational system, and very much remains to be done in 
 our high-school teaching to emphasize the essential unity and 
 congruity of all our human interests. 
 
 I cannot refrain in a final word from recommending to high- 
 school teachers the reading of two books: The Practical Study 
 of Languages, by Henry Sweet, and The Teaching of German 
 in Secondary Schools, by E. W. Bagster-Collins. Sweet is an ex- 
 cellent representative of phonetic reform, and Bagster-Collins is 
 eminently sane and American in his practical suggestions. 
 
III. THE NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 1 
 
 V 
 
 A. F. KUERSTEINER 
 Indiana University 
 
 In speaking of the needs of modern-language instruction we 
 must distinguish between college teaching and high-school teach- 
 ing, for the problems in the two cases are quite different. It is 
 strange to hear people talk about the natural method and the 
 direct method, and other methods intended for the young, and 
 wonder why the college teacher does not employ them. The 
 fact that when men and women get beyond a certain age their 
 memories have grown weaker, their powers of imitation less ef- 
 fective, while their desire to reason about things has grown 
 stronger, seems to be entirely overlooked. In the teaching of 
 any subject the element of age is of great importance, and it 
 is unwise to discuss a method unless you first indicate clearly at 
 what age you expect to have the method applied. Among all 
 the subjects ordinarily taught in our schools this observation 
 is particularly applicable to languages, for two reasons : first, 
 because memory is called on to a greater degree than in any other 
 subject; and second, because in the case of languages we are try-' 
 ing to teach an art and not a science, which is true of no other 
 subject except manual training and English composition. 
 
 The study of languages, then, calls primarily for memory 
 and for imitation; it is reasonable, therefore, that it should be 
 pursued at an age when memory is still strong and imitation still 
 comes easy. This seems so simple a principle that one wonders 
 why it is not followed in our American schools. One wonders 
 why the Americans, who pride themselves on their practical 
 good sense, follow the tremendously wasteful system of teaching 
 the elements of modern languages in both the high schools and 
 the colleges. And I say wasteful, not merely because of the dupli- 
 cation of work, but chiefly because we make a student waste 
 time in acquiring, by dint of hard work and wearisome hours, 
 what he could have learned much more easily and in much 
 
 ' Read at a meeting of the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club, March 30, ion. 
 
NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 23 
 
 shorter time in his high-school course. In other words, the 
 American college is compelled to do work which does not belong 
 within its domain, work which no European university would 
 think of making a part of its regular curriculum. 
 
 I know the answer of many high-school men: "We sympa- 
 thize with what you say, and if all our graduates, or even the 
 majority of our graduates, continued their education in the 
 colleges and the universities there could be little doubt about the 
 course we ought to pursue. But remember that the immense 
 majority of high-school graduates do not enter college, that we 
 must train them for practical life, that what they will need is 
 not language, but mathematics, science, and manual training." 
 Let us grant, for the moment, the utilitarian theory of public 
 education, and let us ask ourselves : How many pupils that do 
 not go on with their school education have any use for algebra 
 in after-life, how many for Euclidian geometry? Does anyone 
 venture to assert that a high-school pupil learns enough of 
 physics, or of chemistry, or of botany, to enable him to become 
 a mechanical engineer of even a low grade, or a chemist, or a 
 florist, or a good farmer? When we come to manual training 
 the case is different. It is possible, in a high school, to train a 
 boy who has mechanical aptitude to become a good carpenter, 
 joiner, smith, or any other kind of skilled mechanic. 
 
 You see the utilitarian theory of education would call for 
 little beyond manual training, English composition, and book- 
 keeping. English literature the boy or girl does not need. A 
 man can make a very comfortable living without any knowledge 
 of Shakespeare and Shelley. And so in constructing our high- 
 school course we come back to this principle : that the most practi- 
 cal things are those which best train the mind and hand, and 
 contribute most to the enjoyment of the finer things of life. And 
 what are the things which best train the mind? Don't get 
 alarmed ; I am not going to outline a high-school course. Even 
 if I wanted to, I should not do so, as I feel under too great a 
 disadvantage. I shall confine myself to calling your attention to 
 a few statements which have recently come to my knowledge. 
 You all remember the Committee of Ten appointed by the Na- 
 
24 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 tional Education Association in 1892, and how it toiled to con- 
 struct model high-school courses. I was told by a man who 
 labored with this committee that it was interesting to note that 
 when the subject of languages came up each language man was 
 eager to have his particular language taught in the high school, 
 but when the sciences were discussed the science man, as a rule, 
 was perfectly willing to have one of the other sciences taught in 
 the high school, but preferred that his own science be begun in 
 college. To this I may add that there is at least one department 
 of science at Indiana University which would prefer to have its 
 students come to it without having taken the high-school course 
 in that subject. The reason assigned is that most high-school 
 pupils are not sufficiently mature to study the subject, and that 
 they come to college with ideas which have to be unlearned. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge, the principal of Birmingham University, a 
 school especially strong in its scientific and commercial branches, 
 stated last year that the most crying need of the University was 
 a chair of Greek, and a few months later Professor H. A. Miers, 
 an eminent scientist and principal of the University of London, 
 declared that the best preparation for the study of science was 
 the study of languages. Surely, following the lead of such au- 
 thorities as these, we are justified in laying down the principle 
 that where, in a high school, authorities have the choice of adding 
 an elementary language or of adding an elementary science, 
 language should have the preference, while in the college the 
 opposite rule should hold. 
 
 But what has all this to do with the needs of modern- 
 language instruction? You have perhaps already answered the 
 question. The most urgent need of modern-language instruc- 
 tion is more time. I believe that in the high-school course lan- 
 guage instruction should predominate, as it does in the corre- 
 sponding schools of Germany and of France. I believe, too, 
 that the Committee of Ten was right when it said that "any 
 large subject whatever, to yield its training value, must be pur- 
 sued through several years and be studied from three to five 
 times a week." Every language that is studied in the high 
 schools should be studied at least two years, but preferably three 
 
NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 2 5 
 
 or four years. Even four years is a short enough time. To me 
 there is nothing more discouraging than to scan the schedules 
 of French lycees and German Gymnasia and see six or seven 
 years given to a language, while we, the practical Americans, 
 indulge in that most impractical delusion of trying to learn a 
 language in two or three years. To be sure, the high-school 
 course is only four years long; but some voices have been raised 
 advocating the shortening of the grammar-school course by two 
 years and extending the high-school course to six years. Is 
 this only an iridescent dream? Here, I believe, is a chance for 
 some progressive school superintendent in a progressive city to 
 make himself and the city famous; but I am afraid to put off 
 discussing the needs of modern-language instruction until that 
 city reveals itself, lest the modern languages with which I am 
 acquainted may by that time have become ancient. 
 
 Modern Languages is the subject of my story, but I beg you 
 to believe that I have no quarrel with Latin. I am a believer in 
 Latin; I hope that my children will willingly accept its yoke 
 when their time comes to take it up. I hope, too, that the teach- 
 ing of Latin will by that time have improved so greatly that they 
 will be able after a study of four years to read it with some 
 degree of fluency. Surely this is not an excessive demand. But 
 I also hope that before that time the modern languages will have 
 been placed on an absolute equality with Latin. And by equality 
 I mean two things : first, that elementary French and German 
 shall be banished from our college course just as elementary 
 Latin is; and second, that pupils shall be given the same oppor- 
 tunity to study French and German as they now have to 
 study Latin. Where a pupil now has the option of studying 
 four years of Latin, three of German, and two of French, as 
 is the case in a few of our high schools, he ought to be allowed 
 to study four years of French, three of German, and two of 
 Latin; or four years of German, three of Latin, and two of 
 French; and so on through the various possible combinations. 
 You see I do not believe it desirable to begin two languages at 
 the same time. This is, I believe, the principle followed in most 
 high schools and colleges. Now it is sometimes argued that 
 
26 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 inasmuch as Latin is chronologically the first it ought to be 
 studied first; that of the three languages under discussion it is 
 the most highly inflected, and that for this reason, too, it ought 
 to come first, since such a course will render the study of other 
 inflected languages easier. Then, too, Latin is the basis of 
 French, and so the pupil who has studied Latin will be greatly 
 aided in his study of the modern language. But there are just 
 as many and just as good arguments for the opposite course. 
 To go from the simple to the complex is good pedagogical doc- 
 trine ; hence it is better to study the less highly inflected languages 
 first and then take up Latin. The chronological argument has 
 by itself little weight, although the fact that Latin is at the root 
 of French and of a great deal of our own language is worthy 
 of consideration. And yet, when we remember that the majority 
 of French words no longer have the meaning which they had 
 in the original Latin and that many words of the classical Latin 
 have left no progeny behind them, the advantages of such a 
 course dwindle to small proportions. 
 
 Let us, then, have the modern languages studied side by side 
 with Latin in generous competition with each other, for only in 
 this way can each of them come to its own. The cost of such an 
 arrangement need not be greater than the present one. The high 
 school that now has three teachers devoting all their time to Latin 
 and German can just as well have one teacher of Latin, one of 
 German, and one of French. Once there is true equality estab- 
 lished among the languages, the adjustment in the number of 
 pupils is likely to follow. This adjustment may take some time 
 and be accompanied by some annoyance, but the results will 
 amply justify the trouble. 
 
 I beg your pardon for dwelling so long on this one point, 
 but the point is worthy of consideration, for it involves not 
 merely the success of modern-language instruction but an im- 
 portant educational principle as well. Much could be said on 
 the desirability of instruction in modern languages, but with this 
 I am not at present concerned, and I refrain from pursuing this 
 line of thought lest I be led too far away from my subject. I 
 proceed, therefore, to speak of some of the other needs of 
 modern-language teaching. 
 
NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 27 
 
 In discussing these other needs we shall not assume that the 
 ideal just mentioned has been realized, but we shall recognize 
 existing conditions. To begin with, we must recognize the du- 
 plication of the work done in the high schools and in the colleges. 
 And yet, while the duplication exists, there should be a line of 
 cleavage. In the high school the linguistic side should be empha- 
 sized, in the college the literary side ; in other words, each should 
 attempt with its students that which its students can do best. 
 The high-school pupils are hardly ready to appreciate the master- 
 pieces of a foreign literature; the college students have, with a 
 few exceptions, passed beyond the best period of linguistic en- 
 deavor, and should hasten to study some of the great literature 
 which awaits them. The high-school pupils can enter more 
 readily into the spirit of the language, and will, therefore, when 
 they are ready to study the literature, read it with a keener zest. 
 They should try to understand the present, they should confine 
 themselves to the language of today, and what literature they 
 read should be recent. In this I am afraid I may not have your 
 assent, but the longer I think of this subject the more firmly con- 
 vinced I am that in the high schools nothing previous to 1830 
 should be read. By these restrictions I should not wish to ex- 
 clude modernized versions of tales and legends. But I should 
 exclude the classic drama, both of France and of Germany. It 
 may be argued that high-school pupils enjoy Schiller's Wilhelm 
 Tell and Moliere's Bourgeois gentilhomme. But the student of 
 German or of French who should imitate the language of Wil- 
 helm Tell or of Le bourgeois gentilhomme would not be follow- 
 ing good models. Imagine a person saying, Ich will sein ein 
 freier Mensch, in imitation of Wir wollen sein ein einzig Volk 
 von Brudern. Or, suppose you imitate Monsieur Jourdain's cor- 
 rect seventeenth-century French and say, Apportez-moi mon 
 chapeau et me donnez mes gants. In either case you are guilty 
 of a solecism. The high-school pupil's time should be spent in 
 reading and learning correct modern French and German. He 
 should not be allowed to read language which he may not imi- 
 tate. The same objections hold against poetry. Only a few 
 simple selections, in which the word order is not violated, should 
 be studied. A few songs may profitably be learned, but rather 
 
28 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 as an expression of the national spirit than as models for imi- 
 tation. 
 
 For the college student, on the other hand, the problem is 
 quite different. If he has studied French or German thoroughly 
 in the preparatory school he is ready to study the literary master- 
 pieces, and whether their language be archaic or not no longer 
 matters. If he begins the foreign language in college, the lin- 
 guistic side need not be emphasized, save for the exceptional 
 student, and the content of the literature should be his main ob- 
 ject. I beg you to notice that I mentioned the exceptional college 
 student. He should be given a chance. Experience has taught 
 me that every year, out of one hundred and seventy-five to two 
 hundred beginners, there are a few students ( four or five, some- 
 times only two or three) who have real linguistic ability and good 
 minds. It is from such as these that high-school teachers of 
 language should be trained. If put in a class by themselves, they 
 can, without giving more time to the linguistic side than the 
 other students give, be trained to write the language acceptably, 
 to speak it fairly well, and to understand easily the spoken word. 
 Such a course entails from two to four extra hours a week on 
 the department undertaking it, but such an expenditure of energy 
 and money will surely be found to be worth while. 
 
 Since it is to the high schools that the modern languages 
 must look for the future, let us consider what ought to be ex- 
 pected of the teacher of German or French in a high school. 
 I suppose we should all agree in chorus that he ought to be well 
 prepared. But what constitutes good preparation? That is 
 the question. It will depend on what the teacher should be ex- 
 pected to do. 
 
 First of all, the teacher should have a good pronunciation and 
 should have had some instruction in phonetics. He should know 
 enough about phonetics to understand its application to teaching, 
 and not just enough to want to teach his pupils all the little he 
 knows. The high-school boy or girl does not need instruction in 
 theoretic phonetics. He does need, however, to be taught how 
 to produce the various sounds, and to be told at the proper mo- 
 ment to open his mouth more, to lower his tongue, to draw back 
 
NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 29 
 
 his lips, and so forth. He needs careful instruction in pronuncia- 
 tion at the very beginning, for if he does not learn to pronounce 
 correctly at the outset he never will. It is the one thing that 
 cannot be put off, for every word that he is allowed to pronounce 
 badly is a step backward. True, this instruction in pronuncia- 
 tion is more important for French than it is for German, because 
 French sounds have almost no equivalents in English, and be- 
 cause French orthography is farther removed from the phonetic 
 ideal than German orthography. But let us not imagine that 
 the teacher of German can neglect his phonetics. A high-school 
 instructor, speaking enthusiastically about Wilhelm Tell, once 
 said to me : "How beautiful is the line, Es lachelt der See, er ladet 
 zum Bade." This is enough to make a German's hair stand on 
 end ; and yet with two slight alterations the pronunciation would 
 have been tolerable. Doubtless there are teachers of French who 
 sin just as badly. But the point is that teachers of German must 
 not believe too implicitly in the phonetic character of German 
 spelling. 
 
 The instructor should be able to speak the language he 
 teaches. It is interesting in this connection to note that in the 
 foreign-language classes of the Reformschulen of Germany the 
 language taught is also the medium of instruction. At least, 
 that is the principle by which the reformers are guided; "but," 
 says Dr. Max Walter, one of the leaders in the movement, "we 
 don't want to make a hobby of the principle. If the explana- 
 tion by means of the foreign language becomes too involved the 
 German word is used, and the pupils are even permitted in this 
 case to jot down the German word in their notebooks." Farther 
 on in the same lecture he says : "The speaking of the foreign 
 language is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, and this 
 end is a more rapid penetration into the foreign language and a 
 better understanding of it." The French, with their tendency 
 to carry everything to a logical conclusion, have gone still farther. 
 In the government schools the use of French in the German and 
 English classes is strictly forbidden, and that, too, from the very 
 beginning. I hasten to add that this ministerial decree is not 
 entirely satisfactory to the teachers, since they find it extremely 
 
30 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 difficult to avoid the native tongue in the elementary stages. The 
 fact remains, however, that foreign-language instruction is 
 carried on without the use of the native tongue, and that in the 
 advanced classes this instruction is very good and very satis- 
 factory. In Sweden, too, the direct method, as it is called, has 
 many enthusiastic and successful followers. It has been intro- 
 duced likewise in Switzerland, where I was fortunate enough to 
 visit the classes of one of its most successful exponents, Herr 
 Alge, of St. Gallen. 
 
 Perhaps you think what the Europeans can do we can do 
 also. But can we? There are a few factors which must not 
 be forgotten. To begin with, the European children start their 
 first foreign language at the age of nine or ten; that is, four or 
 five years before our pupils enter the high school. Then they 
 devote six periods a week to the work, and they keep at the same 
 language for at least six years. Finally, let it be remembered 
 that the American child is not required to work so hard as the 
 European child. It is obvious that with such differences of con- 
 ditions we cannot accomplish as much as the Europeans. 
 
 What can we accomplish without changing our school sys- 
 tem? If the teacher can speak the foreign language, he can be^ 
 gin in the first year, after the pupils have acquired a small 
 vocabulary, to give simple explanations in German or in French. 
 The number and extent of such explanations can be gradually 
 increased, until by the end of the second year three-fourths of 
 the recitation is conducted in the foreign language. In the third 
 year the last vestiges of English should disappear from the 
 teacher's use, and in the fourth year the pupil will hear nothing 
 but French or German in the classroom and will be called on to 
 answer in the foreign tongue questions on the texts read. 
 
 Such a plan involves, however, other changes. The number 
 of pages of text to be covered by the class will probably have, to 
 be reduced. This will not mean a reduction in the vocabulary 
 acquired by the pupil, but an increase. For while the pupil will 
 see fewer words he will remember more of those that he sees 
 and hears used. The grammar work of the first year will be 
 much the same as at present, but after the first year the grammar 
 
NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 3 1 
 
 should be based on the texts read. This is, of course, nothing 
 new to many teachers in the East and to some in the West. 
 
 But most important of all is the preparation of the work by 
 the teacher. The plan of every recitation must be carefully 
 worked out, and the teacher must see to it that in the apparent 
 lack of system the pupil receives systematic training. He must 
 go back over his notes constantly and see what things he has 
 emphasized in the past and what things remain to be emphasized. 
 It is not sufficient to confine oneself to imitation of the text with- 
 out emphasizing the grammatical side. Such imitation easily 
 becomes mechanical. The pupils must be constantly called on to 
 express "this" in the singular, in the first person, in the future, 
 in clauses after verbs of saying; they must be called on to com- 
 plete sentences by inserting the correct form of a noun, ad- 
 jective, verb, pronoun, and so on, according to the language 
 taught. The vocabulary, too, will need constant watching. Have 
 we come across this word before? Did it have the same mean- 
 ing? Notice this idiom. Have we had another idiom involving 
 the same noun, adjective, or verb? Here is a verb. Can you 
 mention any compounds formed from this verb? Again, much 
 will depend on the language taught. These questions, too, are 
 to be asked in the foreign language. 
 
 Another exercise of great value is telling stories and then 
 having the class tell them again, either orally or in writing. Now 
 and then some of the Gouin series may be introduced, but to 
 teach the whole language by this method I believe to be impos- 
 sible, on account of its killing monotony. 
 
 Now all this means an enormous amount of work for the 
 teacher, at least during the year that a course is given for the 
 first time. But even after the first year the amount of preparation 
 required is very great. For this reason the German advocates of 
 the direct method found themselves compelled to petition for a 
 smaller number of hours of teaching for instructors in foreign 
 languages. I may add that I have some inkling of the work in- 
 volved, for I have tried off and on all of the things above out- 
 lined, except the building up of a vocabulary. 
 
 What results may we expect from this combination of the old 
 
32 
 
 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 method and the direct method? We may expect the pupils to 
 read ordinary French or German prose directly without trans- 
 lating it; to understand the spoken language easily; to write 
 simple, but correct, German or French; and the brighter pupils 
 will surely be able to speak the foreign language well enough to 
 be readily understood. 
 
 It is obvious that translation will not be an important part 
 of the course here outlined. Translation from the foreign lan- 
 guage into English should not be entirely abandoned. An occa- 
 sional and unexpected call to translate will prove a healthy 
 stimulus to the pupil who is disposed to shirk an assignment, but 
 translation from English into the foreign language should be 
 gradually abandoned after the first year, and completely dropped 
 after the second. One of the things that I have had to learn, and 
 I confess it took me a long time to learn it, is that in order to 
 speak a foreign language we do not need so much to learn how 
 to translate such and such a word or phrase as to learn what a 
 Frenchman or a German would say under given circumstances. 
 The German, bitte, and the French, je vous en prie, are not trans- 
 lations of "y° u ' re welcome"; they are the expressions that a 
 German and a Frenchman use when you thank them. "Sleep 
 well," a young German said to me repeatedly on parting from me 
 for the night. Now "sleep well" is a correct translation of 
 schlafen Sie wohl, but it has, nevertheless, a foreign sound. 
 Every teacher of language knows that one of the ideas that it 
 is hardest to get out of a pupil's head is that every word must 
 have a corresponding word to translate it, especially in translat- 
 ing from English into the foreign language. Imitation of the 
 foreign text is, therefore, greatly to be preferred. 
 
 I beg you to notice that I have no desire to pose as the in- 
 ventor of a new method. I wish merely to indicate that the 
 time is coming when we must make different demands on our 
 language teachers; when the ideal teacher will be one who not 
 merely has a clear understanding of the foreign language but can 
 also speak it readily ; and when the goal on which we fix our eyes 
 will be the ability on the part of the pupil to read without trans- 
 lation, to understand the spoken language easily, and to write 
 
NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 33 
 
 simply and correctly. But let me, lest I be misunderstood, state 
 as emphatically as possible that I do not believe in making the 
 ability to speak the language the chief aim. The chief aim should 
 be to give the pupil such a grasp of the language that he can read 
 with zest and understand readily; and only because I believe 
 that this can be best accomplished through the spoken language 
 do I favor the use of the spoken foreign language in the class- 
 room. Let it be remembered that it is possible for one to learn 
 to speak the language of every day without having the ability to 
 read literature. I have come across several cases where young 
 men and women who had been in the Philippines had "picked 
 up" a knowledge of ordinary spoken Spanish and were more 
 helpless before a Spanish literary text than a person who had 
 studied the language for only a year at home. Last fall a young 
 man who had lived in Paris for two years came to Indiana Univer- 
 sity. He spoke French fluently, though not correctly; but when 
 set to read Le gendre de Monsieur Poirier he floundered about 
 helplessly. You see there must be discipline of the mind as well 
 as of the memory and of the imitative faculty, and where, as in 
 the case of the purely conversational method, this discipline is 
 lacking the instruction is worthless. And I use the word "worth- 
 less" deliberately. If, on the other hand, the brighter pupils 
 learn also to make themselves understood in the foreign language, 
 then so much the better. 
 
 But where are the teachers to come from who are to do this 
 work? Some of them already exist. The plan I have proposed 
 is by no means a new one. In large part it is already followed by 
 a number of teachers, though I know of none who carries out 
 the plan as a whole. Still, I should not be surprised to learn that 
 such teachers exist. But it is certain that the majority of foreign- 
 language teachers would scarcely be ready. This the Europeans 
 found out, too, when they began to shift to the direct method. In 
 some instances teachers were sent to the foreign country at the 
 government's expense. While in Paris the last time I met a 
 young German and a young Swede who had come in that way. 
 Perhaps some of our states will follow the European example. In 
 a few of our universities traveling fellowships for language men 
 
34 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 already exist. I hope the day will soon come when the state uni- 
 versities of the West will also be able to offer such prizes. Then 
 there are the exchange teachers whom the Prussian government 
 receives from us and sends to us through the agency of the Car- 
 negie Foundation. Let us hope that the day is not far off when 
 a similar exchange will take place between our country and 
 France. 
 
 Once the ideal of the foreign-language teacher who can speak 
 the language he teaches is before us, it will be the duty of the uni- 
 versities to furnish the requisite training, not only on the lin- 
 guistic side, but on the pedagogic side as well. And I believe 
 it is desirable that this pedagogic training be done by the language 
 departments themselves. Let the stress on method not be too 
 heavy. Let the goal be set before the student, let him be shown 
 the various ways that have been proposed to reach that goal — in 
 other words, let him study methods ; but at the same time let him 
 exercise his own ingenuity and individuality in the attempt to 
 reach that goal in his practice teaching. It is a mistake for the 
 professor to map out for his students a model course Method 
 is important, but it is not all-important. This statement cannot 
 be made too often. Teachers sometimes ask the question : What 
 can we do to make the work interesting? The question is a 
 legitimate one, but in some instances it almost amounts to asking : 
 By what method can I teach with interest what I don't know? 
 The all-important thing is that the teacher have a well-trained 
 and well-stored mind and — above all — that he keep on storing it. 
 
 And this leads me to my last point. The teacher should be 
 a constant reader of the literature whose language he is teaching. 
 This seems so self-evident a proposition that you may wonder 
 why I should make it. But I beg you to ask yourselves how many 
 teachers of Latin read widely outside of their college course and 
 outside of the things that they teach. During the four years that 
 I taught Latin in a high school there were two of my Latin col- 
 leagues in the same school and one in another high school of the 
 same city who read Latin constantly. Among all the other ten 
 or eleven teachers who were giving instruction in Latin in the 
 high schools of that city I could not discover one who gave evi- 
 dence of ever looking into a Latin book which was not on his 
 
NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 35 
 
 teaching schedule. I do not know whether that particular city- 
 is worse than others in this respect, or whether things have 
 changed materially since 1894, but I do know that I have since 
 then met other teachers of Latin whom I suspected of the same 
 delinquency. And I will whisper into your ear that I have met 
 even teachers of modern languages who did not seem to be very 
 diligent readers of German or French literature. But whatever 
 the facts may be, it is evident that wide reading is desirable. No 
 dictionary, however excellent, can take its place. The teacher 
 who can give an interesting talk of a minute or two on some word 
 or expression, who can tell at length a story which is merely indi- 
 cated in the notes or which the notes do not mention but which 
 bears on a passage that the class is reading, or who, if he can 
 do nothing else, can point out that a certain story or a certain 
 passage is famous, has a great advantage over the teacher who 
 cannot do these things, has a power of stimulus and inspiration 
 which he could not otherwise have. But that is not all. In- 
 creased familiarity with the language means increased facility in 
 reading, which in turn means an increase of intellectual strength ; 
 and this intellectual strength that comes from contact with the 
 masterpieces of a literature means capacity for better work, 
 means the stimulus which comes from new ideas, the germina- 
 tion of other ideas within oneself — means a broader and more 
 cheerful spirit. And a teacher whose enthusiasm for the litera- 
 ture of his language has kindled in his pupils a desire to read that 
 literature, who has occasionally given them a peep of the prom- 
 ised land, has done inestimable good. If, moreover, by the invest- 
 ment of a hundred dollars, some hundred volumes of German 
 and French literature within the mental grasp of the pupils can 
 be included in the school library, and the pupils be started on 
 the road to reading foreign literature, the teacher will have 
 reared unto himself a monument more enduring than bronze. 
 
 As I come to the end of my discourse I begin to wonder 
 whether I have not been carrying coals to Newcastle, or perhaps, 
 in an assembly like this, I should say owls to Athens. But even 
 if this be the case I shall not grieve. I know from my own 
 experience that a restatement of a question is often useful, and 
 so I hope I may be forgiven if I have said many trite things. 
 
IV. THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 1 
 
 WILLIAM GARDNER HALE 
 The University of Chicago 
 
 Two characteristics mark the attitude of our day toward 
 educational matters, the first a widely diffused interest in 
 such things in general, the second a great scepticism with 
 regard to the value of this and that in detail. The spring- 
 ing up of new universities, the multiplying of teachers' asso- 
 ciations, the establishment of new journals for teachers, are 
 among the evidences of the first of these characteristics. Of 
 the second, no evidence is needed. The air is full of slurs upon 
 one and another phase of collegiate or high-school study. They 
 come from every quarter. If you will watch the daily papers 
 at commencement time, you will see that few of our commence- 
 ment orators, if imported from the outside, fail to point out, 
 somewhere in the tide of their eloquence, that the ardent young 
 graduate is about to plunge into a cold world in which book- 
 learning does not count. If the orator neglects this fertile 
 theme, the editorial writer of the local paper is likely to repair 
 the omission the next morning, and to insist that young men 
 ought nowadays to be so trained that, when they get out of 
 school or out of college, they can make a living. And if these 
 gentlemen single out any particular kind of studies as exhibiting 
 the perfection of inapplicability and uselessness, it is likely to be 
 the most distinctive of the humanistic studies — the once en- 
 throned Greek and Latin. 
 
 One finds it, of course, natural that, in this general question- 
 ing, the things which have been pre-eminent in the past should 
 
 ' This paper was prepared, many years ago, for the writer's students at Cornell University. 
 It has been read, since then, before a number of associations, the last of which was the 
 Michigan Schoolmasters' Club ; at the request of whose officers it is now published. 
 
 36 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 37 
 
 be subjected to the fiercest examination, and not surprising 
 that, under the well-known behavior of human thought, 
 the presumption should seem to be against them, rather 
 than for them. That which has been, has had its day — such is 
 the easy conclusion of the unregenerate human mind. That 
 which, in the cases that arrest our attention, does not work, is 
 bad — such is the equally easy conclusion of the human mind at 
 a stage of partial illumination. No kind of proof is more dan- 
 gerous. The question has always to be asked, Is the evidence 
 fairly complete? Everyone knows of Bachelors of Arts who 
 have not the art of making a living. But everyone knows of 
 Bachelors of Arts who make a very good living indeed, and, on 
 the other hand, everyone occasionally witnesses lamentable fail- 
 ures on the part of men who were fortunate enough to start in 
 life unincumbered with Greek and Latin. The method of proof by 
 the count of heads is an interesting one, and would be fruitful 
 enough, if it could be carried far enough. If it could be shown, 
 for example, that there is a clearly larger percentage of failure 
 among men who have had the collegiate education than among 
 those who have not, or among those who have had Greek and 
 Latin than among those who have not, then something certainly 
 ought to be done in the way of reform. So far as my own 
 experience goes, the fact would seem to be the opposite. But 
 such views are necessarily personal. Every man judges by the 
 heads he happens to notice, with results to his own satisfaction. 
 We must try a safer way, not a new one — there is none — but a 
 good one. It consists merely in the patient examination of 
 familiar ground, and, above all, of our points of view. 
 
 Let us, then, putting aside personal standards of opinion, 
 and possible local standards of prejudice, start from the funda- 
 mental question, What is education, and how is it related to the 
 college curriculum? 
 
 First, let us recognize distinctly that a college education 
 does not work miracles. It is a good, but imperfect, means 
 of developing an imperfect creature. At the end of it, a 
 
38 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 young man does not spring forth full-armed and capable, 
 like Athena from the brain of Zeus; but he has won, or 
 may have won, certain things. These things fall into five 
 classes: first, the power of seeing that which is, and inferring 
 from it that which must be; second, the power of expressing 
 himself with correctness and force; third, a body of interesting 
 and useful information; fourth, mental horizons — the intellec- 
 tual background of the man's life; fifth, something still more 
 precious, which I beg to be allowed to leave for the moment 
 unstated. The first, the power of clear seeing and clear think- 
 ing, is the result of what is known as "discipline," and may be 
 excellently obtained from humanistic studies. You see, and 
 must wonder at, my courage. For a long time, no advocate of 
 classical education has been safe from ridicule when he has 
 urged the disciplinary value of the study of Greek and Latin. 
 That claim is so old as to sound absurd. Curiously enough, 
 exactly the same claim is made for their subjects by our friends 
 and colleagues of the natural sciences, and, coming from this 
 new quarter, is listened to with the respectful attention which it 
 deserves. By and by, that too will be an old story, and then 
 we shall have a fairer attitude toward the whole matter, and a 
 recognition that whatsoever study, in itself not too easy, pre- 
 sents phenomena to be observed, and inferences to be drawn, 
 affords so good a field for discipline, of one kind or another, that 
 the question of the choice should turn rather on other considera- 
 tions. Leaving this topic for the moment, then (I shall return 
 to some aspects of it a little later), let us consider the remaining 
 four — the acquisition of the power of expression, the acquisition 
 of a body of information, the acquisition of an intellectual back- 
 ground, and the fifth, from which the curtain has not yet been 
 drawn. 
 
 With regard to the acquisition of the power of expres- 
 sion, I fancy few words are necessary, so far as the ma- 
 jority of humanistic studies, those that deal with litera- 
 ture, are concerned. It is obvious that they are in their very 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 39 
 
 nature fitted to develop this power, since a considerable part of 
 the work in them is devoted to a study of the form of expression 
 of the original, and a re-expression of the same ideas in the 
 mother-tongue. The importance, likewise, of the acquiring of 
 this power is universally conceded. It would be sufficient to 
 refer to the position taken by the Leland Stanford Junior Univer- 
 sity, in the matter of a requirement in English. That university 
 holds that one study is as good and as dignified as another, and 
 that, in consequence, no study should be required, the choice of 
 his course being left wholly to the student. With illuminating 
 inconsistency, however, the University requires English of every 
 student, both before and after entrance; and, since the aim of the 
 Leland Stanford University is avowedly practical, we are bound 
 to suppose that back of this requirement lies the conviction that 
 the power of expression in the mother-tongue is of prime prac- 
 tical importance. 
 
 We come next to the matter of the body of interesting and 
 useful information acquired in school or college. Before we 
 take this up, however, we must draw a sharp line of demarca- 
 tion, and be willing, in looking at prevailing systems, to spend 
 a few minutes in seeing them in their historical place and con- 
 nection. 
 
 There are two distinct kinds of education, corresponding 
 to two distinct aims. There is, on the one hand, the edu- 
 cation that aims to prepare the young man or young woman 
 to do, with intelligent skill, certain things, more or less 
 manual, through . which a livelihood may be obtained — the so- 
 called industrial education. The race among the nations of the 
 civilized world turns, to a very important degree, upon the 
 opportunities afforded to their young men of "practical" tastes, 
 as the misleading phrase is, to learn, under skilled instruction, 
 the things which in our country are mostly learned in the hap- 
 hazard school of raw labor. Closely allied to this, but requiring 
 a higher stage of intellectual development, and offering oppor- 
 tunities of brilliant careers to the most gifted, is the technical 
 
40 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 education, the outcome of our splendid material civilization, 
 and the pledge of splendors yet to come. To this, also, I 
 concede every claim but one. It is impossible to overrate the im- 
 portance either of the industrial or of the technical training, so 
 long as your method of urging that importance is not by assert- 
 ing the uselessness of other things, belonging to a wholly differ- 
 ent aim and wholly different kind of life. 
 
 At the opposite extreme from the industrial and technical 
 lies the so-called liberal education. It arose, or rather arose 
 a second time, in the Rebirth of Europe, which began some 
 six centuries ago. At the root of it lay a growing senti- 
 ment, to which the name of Humanism came later to be 
 given. The sentiment, the idea, are substantially the same 
 today as then, and we shall clear our conceptions of education 
 by seeing what the essential nature of this movement was. 
 
 The slender thread of intellectual life had been carried 
 on from Roman times by the churchmen and expounders 
 of the law; and, through the former in particular, the 
 Latin classics had been preserved, while the ability to write 
 a certain kind of Latin had all along been a necessity to both 
 classes. Knowledge of the Greek tongue, however, had wholly 
 disappeared from western Europe. I shall not attempt to trace 
 the causes of the movement which led to the beginnings proper 
 of the illumination. There was, of course, no sudden appear- 
 ance in the world of something wholly lacking before. Nature 
 does not work by leaps. But there was one man in whom the 
 new spirit was so pre-eminently strong that he is beyond ques- 
 tion the father of modern thought — the poet Petrarch. 
 
 Brought up to be a lawyer, Petrarch was trained in the 
 Latin of his time, and his enforced taking of holy orders 
 in his desire to lead a literary life doubtless was a still 
 greater help to him in his study of Latin writers. This 
 study was, of course, not due to the influence of any "college 
 fetich," to use a phrase made famous by Mr. Charles Francis 
 Adams : it was the result of a serious passion. In his authors, 
 and especially in Cicero and Virgil, Petrarch found that which 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 41 
 
 was food to his soul. A journey to Rome wrought upon him 
 that indescribable spell which it has produced since upon a Goethe 
 and a Winckelmann, and which it produces upon every traveler 
 of today that carries a soul with him. A visionary and en- 
 thusiast, a lover of the wild and romantic in nature, Petrarch 
 established himself some time later in the solitude of Vaucluse, 
 where he led for four years a life of study, devoting himself to 
 Roman literature and history, and preparing for his Latin epic 
 poem Africa. The fame of his writings brought him the laurel 
 crown at Rome, which he received upon the Capitol, with solemn 
 ceremonies, in the year 1341. The oration which he delivered 
 is notable in the history of the human spirit. His text was the 
 words of Virgil, from the third Georgic, verses 291-92: 
 
 Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis 
 
 Raptat amor: 
 
 "But, as for me, the sweet love of Parnassus 
 
 bids me hasten on through steep and desert 
 
 ways." 
 
 The ceremony was not new. Others before Petrarch had been 
 similarly crowned, in other cities of Italy. But Rome, though 
 she was now the seat of neither emperor nor pope, was still, in 
 the imagination of men as in their memories, the mistress of the 
 world. It was fitting that, upon the spot most solemnly associ- 
 ated with her ancient grandeurs, the man who was to evoke 
 again the life of art and science should deliver his defense of 
 letters, and summon men once more to the heights of Parnassus, 
 so long deserted. Upon the Capitol at Rome, antiquity that day 
 passed on its wealth to the emerging spirit of the modern world. 
 In the next year, Petrarch attempted the study of Greek, 
 having for his teacher a Calabrian, long resident in Greece, 
 the first of those Greek scholars who played so important 
 a part in the new life. Petrarch began, as he himself 
 tells us, with great alacrity, but the difficulty of an entirely 
 strange tongue, and the early departure of his teacher, cut short 
 his purpose. Yet he divined the value of Greek, and it was 
 
42 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 partly through his encouragement that a younger friend and 
 intimate, Boccaccio, prosecuted the study, and helped to make 
 it possible for others to prosecute it. It is worth noting, as we 
 pass, that our modern classical studies begin with the two first 
 great names in modern literature. Classical education is not, as 
 is so often said, descended from Mediaevalism. It is descended 
 from the revolt against Mediaevalism. 
 
 The study of Greek did not get on very fast at the 
 outset, and Petrarch says in one of his letters to dead 
 authors, as we should call them, now that Andrew Lang has 
 reinvented them — a letter addressed to Homer — that there were 
 at that time not above ten persons in Italy who knew how to 
 value the old father of the poets; five at the most in Florence, 
 one in Bologna, two in Verona, one in Mantua, one in Perugia, 
 but none at Rome. This seems a slow beginning; but in the 
 fifteenth century, when the movement was fairly started, the 
 "Revival went on with marvelous rapidity. There was an ardent 
 study of Greek and Latin, a hunting-up of manuscripts and a 
 copying and disseminating of them, a writing of expositions, 
 of grammars, of histories, of compilations of antiquities. 
 Popes, princes, bankers aided the new activity. The lecture- 
 rooms of the Italian universities were crowded with eager hear- 
 ers. The spirit of a new crusade, a crusade of the intellect, had 
 come upon the world. Then followed, with the invention of 
 printing, the rapid multiplying of classical texts. The new 
 activity spread to France, Germany, and England. The profes- 
 sors of rhetoric, as they were called, expounded, in crowded 
 lecture-rooms, Greek and Roman grammar and philology, re- 
 ligion and customs, numismatics, philosophy, mythology, law, 
 and institutions — the classical curriculum of today — with means 
 of investigation imperfect as compared with ours, but with a 
 zeal as great as would that ours were ! This was some hundreds 
 of years ago. We are doing the same now. Why should we 
 occupy ourselves, in this busy new world, with the things that oc- 
 cupied men when the continent in which we live was unknown ? 
 
 Another question must be asked and answered first. What 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 43 
 
 was the spirit that animated the Revival? For if that 
 spirit is still the true one, then, no matter how old it may 
 be, we should only be going astray from human nature by 
 departing from it. It was the spirit which recognized the dig- 
 nity and power of man — a conception vastly different from that 
 which had obtained in the Middle Ages. Hence its name of 
 Humanism. Unconscious at first what its mission of disinte- 
 gration and reconstruction was to be, it exercised human judg- 
 ment upon life. It looked with fresh interest upon this world. 
 It read a great and hopeful lesson in that which humanity had 
 accomplished in Greece and Rome before the coming of Chris- 
 tianity. It longed to become again creative, as antiquity had 
 been creative in the still visible remains of art and literature. 
 
 The movement was not, mark you, an attempt to save 
 the old, but the bursting forth of new life which found its 
 food and inspiration in a great past. It threw off the bur- 
 den of what was false in the religious and political concep- 
 tions of the Middle Ages. It was a revolt against asceticism, 
 or the belief that God intends His children to be happy only in 
 the hereafter. It was a revolt against mysticism, and in favor 
 of rational inquiry. It went too far, like many another good 
 impulse in the development of man, and in parts of Europe, 
 especially in Italy itself, came near to return to the paganism 
 on which it fed. But it was essentially sound; and out of it 
 was born the Reformation, as truly a fruit of the Classical 
 Revival as was the classical curriculum itself. Out of it, too, 
 was born modern science. For the first break with mediaeval 
 science came through the works of medicine, medical botany, 
 and anatomy, translated and edited from Hippocrates, Galen, 
 and Dioscorides by Italian, French, German, and English physi- 
 cians. 
 
 To put the matter briefly, then, the humanistic spirit, first 
 showing itself clearly in Petrarch, asserted the dignity of man, 
 the interest of this world, and the right of free inquiry. And 
 with these assertions went a passionate love of the highest prod- 
 ucts of the human spirit, namely, literature and art. 
 
44 
 
 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 Then we are ready to say why we are occupying our- 
 selves with the same things as these professors whose voices 
 have been still these hundreds of years. It is because their 
 animating purpose corresponds to an eternal fact. Man, and 
 the records of his spirit, then constituted, and must for- 
 ever constitute, the object of supremest interest to man. 1 
 do not mean that there are no other objects of interest. We are 
 invested, as a race, with a boundless desire to understand the 
 world in which we find ourselves. The habits of the ant, O'f 
 the flower, of the bee, of chemical reagents, of moving forces, 
 find men in abundance to study them with the zeal of investi- 
 gators, and students in abundance to learn from these investi- 
 gators. But the claim that any of these things, the ant, the bee, 
 the chemical reagent, is a more worthy object of interest, or an 
 actually more interesting object, than the human mind, is a pre- 
 posterous one. I haven't a word of complaint for the man who, 
 for himself, finds the ant-hill or the bee-hive a more attractive 
 product of life than Hamlet or Faust or the Idyls of Theocritus. 
 But if such a man says, or if his students say, that for the great 
 mass of young people these things are intrinsically more inter- 
 esting, then I have only to answer that, in the nature of things, 
 that which is of the greatest and most permanent concern to the 
 average man must be the character, behavior, and accomplish- 
 ments of the most highly developed and richly equipped of this 
 world's products,^namely, mankind — the object of humanistic 
 studies. Pope allowed himself a poet's overstatement when he 
 wrote "the proper study of mankind is man." But what he 
 meant was substantially true. All those studies, then, that enable 
 us to understand the mind and heart of man will be of interest 
 to men in a non-technical education. Among such subjects is 
 obviously history; and, happily for us, while the materializing 
 tendency of our wonderful outward civilization has attacked 
 everything else that deals with the past, it has, nevertheless, 
 with salutary inconsistency, not felt that we could completely 
 understand the America of today by beginning with the Phil- 
 ippine War, or with the Civil War, or with the War of 1812, 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 45 
 
 or with the Declaration of Independence, or even with the 
 Landing of Columbus. Not a whit wiser is it to suppose that 
 the study of any phase of human activity can begin with that 
 which today is. The present can be seen justly only in the 
 setting of the record of the race; and there is no record more 
 authentic — no record so intimate and so vital — as literature. 
 The study of this constitutes the gentler discipline, in which 
 the tastes of many are likely to meet. Secondary to it, but 
 only secondary, is the study of the workings of the human mind 
 as seen in logic, and in the expression of thought in words, or, 
 in the terms of the schools, in rhetoric and grammar ; and hardly 
 secondary, even, is the record of the appreciations and visions of 
 the human mind, as seen in art. 
 
 I have for the moment dealt with the question of the 
 value of humanistic studies by referring to the intrinsic in- 
 terest of such studies. I come now to another point of view, 
 and, at the same time, to a perversion of judgment from 
 which we, in this country and this age, are especially liable to 
 suffer. It is said, and said too often without prompt contradic- 
 tion, that the study of mathematics and of the natural sciences is 
 practical, is useful, while the study of literatures, of systems of 
 speech, of art, is ornamental, having nothing to do with getting 
 on in the world. Let us look more narrowly at this assertion. 
 An admirable, and, to my mind, an indispensable training is given 
 through the mathematics of the school or the college. But, unless 
 we are to be engineers or surveyors, what are we to do later with 
 our higher algebra, our solid geometry, our trigonometry, our 
 conic sections ? The simple fact is that the mathematics of daily 
 life consists of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, 
 with perhaps a little cancellation — in short, the mathematics, not 
 of the college, nor yet of the high school, but of the grammar 
 school. So, too, we get interesting and valuable knowledge, 
 knowledge of which every student should have some share, in the 
 study of physics and chemistry. But unless we are going to be 
 mechanicians • or manufacturing chemists, upon what is our 
 knowledge of physics or chemistry going to be brought to bear in 
 
46 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 daily life ? / know, as well as the physicist, that the falling mass 
 will crush me, and I get out of the way, though I no longer re- 
 member how to calculate its striking power. My fire warms me as 
 it warms my friend, the chemist, though I have forgotten, thirty 
 years ago, precisely how the invisible gases behave in combustion ; 
 and that fire would warm me, even if I had never known. 
 I can use the telephone as well as another, though I couldn't pos- 
 sibly make one or even repair one. I travel by cars as well as 
 any professor of mechanical engineering, though such a professor 
 could probably run the engine, while I should need a little pre- 
 liminary training. And when I say "I," I might as well say 
 ''you/' o r people in general who do not devote themselves to the 
 technical work of life. The average untechnical man in the world, 
 whatever he is finally to do, is distinctly the gainer by the study of 
 mathematics and the study of chemistry and physics, and he may 
 find in those subjects that which will prove to be the very food 
 of his natural individual appetite. But the claim that he will find 
 mathematics, physics, and chemistry of practical use to him in 
 daily life, is baseless. For the average untechnical man, the prac- 
 tical things are far more subtile than these. Putting aside, as 
 necessary to acquire, no matter what one studies, the mechanics 
 of the mind, namely, the power of accurate observation and 
 accurate reasoning from that which is observed, the things which 
 will help a man to get on in the world, outside of the manufactory 
 and the patent office, are: a knowledge of and ready sympathy 
 with men; quickness and flexibility of mind; and the power of 
 expressing himself accurately and forcibly. A student of the 
 course of electrical engineering in Cornell University, a man of 
 excellent ability, said to me at his graduation, that, while he had 
 got from his scientific studies the means of making an immediate 
 living, yet many of the men in the courses in arts and philosophy, 
 who had entered at the same time with himself, had out- 
 stripped him in ways that he could apprehend — had grown away 
 from him — and that, to just this extent, he felt handicapped in 
 the race of life. That was a dim recognition of the practical 
 value of the so-called unpractical studies, even in the case of a man 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 47 
 
 who will mostly have to vie with men no more liberally educated 
 than himself. 
 
 In all that I have thus far said, I have used the word 
 "science" as covering the natural sciences, in distinction from 
 the humanities. This is the commonly accepted meaning 
 of the word in this country. It is often pointed out that 
 the usage is an unfortunate one. I wish to point this out 
 again today, and then to call attention to certain things that fol- 
 low from a juster conception. 
 
 Webster defines science as "knowledge duly arranged, 
 and referred to general truths and principles on which it 
 is founded, and from which it is derived." I should like 
 myself to define it, more simply, as ordered knowledge. 
 Briefly, we may say that science deals with facts, and the reasons 
 for those facts ; or, more briefly still, with facts and principles. 
 No narrower definition would anywhere be accepted, or, indeed, 
 is anywhere accepted. But it is obvious that this is too broad a 
 definition to be limited to the range of the natural sciences. 
 Wherever there are facts, there may be a recording of those facts, 
 and an attempt to understand their relations. Political economy, 
 then, though it deals with the behavior of man within a certain 
 field, and not with nature outside of man, is a science. Sociol- 
 ogy, which likewise deals with the behavior of man within a cer- 
 tain field, aims to construct a science. History, which deals with 
 the facts of man's experience within limits hard to fix, is a sci- 
 ence. Comparative philology, which deals with the forms or the 
 syntax of several languages, and attempts to detect the operation 
 of principles through which they have come to be what they are, is 
 a science. The study of the history of a literature, if it aims to 
 trace the development of that literature, and the principles that 
 have governed the development, is a scientific study. So is the 
 study of Greek philosophy, or of Greek art. So is the 
 study of Roman law, or of Roman administration. Further- 
 more, it is obvious that the aims and methods which I have in- 
 dicated are the aims and methods which have long governed 
 all humanistic study whatsoever, so far as the things studied 
 
48 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 can possibly fall within the reach of scientific method. The 
 American Journal of Philology is as much a scientific journal 
 as is the journal that bears the name Science. Moreover, the 
 spirit of man, with whose behavior the humanities deal, is in 
 reality just as much a part of nature as is his body, or as are 
 chemical reagents, or the forces which physics measures. 
 Strictly and fairly, then, every study that deals with the record- 
 ing and explaining of facts is a branch of natural science. Long- 
 established usage, however, is hard to overthrow. The unhappy 
 antithesis which the philosophers have, for over two thousand 
 years, been setting up between man and what they called nature 
 has so controlled nomenclature that we must accept the meaning 
 now attaching to the latter word, and must be content, therefore, 
 to divide the body of science into two parts: the humanistic 
 sciences and the natural sciences. 
 
 Let us utilize the distinction by pointing out certain facts 
 and drawing certain inferences. 
 
 First: In the ordinary conduct of human life, whether in 
 our business or in our other relations with the world, we are 
 governed by considerations which do not admit of an abso- 
 lutely certain correctness of decision. We see reasons on 
 both sides. Perhaps they appear to be evenly balanced. Per- 
 haps they seem a little stronger, perhaps they seem a good deal 
 stronger, on the one side than on the other. In every case, how- 
 ever, where any question at all arises, it is by probabilities that 
 we are governed. Nor can we solve our problems by applying 
 the actual test of experience before taking our step ; for it is only 
 the actual taking of a step, one way or the other, that provides 
 us with experience. 
 
 Now the process by which the student of the humanistic 
 sciences arrives at conclusions is of a precisely similar na- 
 ture. In endeavoring to discover the reasons for facts 
 which he has recorded, or which others before him have re- 
 corded, say in French syntax, or in Latin syntax, he has first to 
 divine a line of proof. Often, after grasping clearly the nature 
 of his problem, he is sorely baffled to see along what path to 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 49 
 
 look for evidence — to divine what phenomena would afford evi- 
 dence. And, when he has seen this, and reached his evidence, it is 
 generally not of a one-sided kind. He has to balance indication 
 against indication, and thread his way through complicated con- 
 siderations to an ultimate probability, great or slight. Nor is 
 this true of the more advanced questions only, with which the 
 graduate student may come to occupy himself. It is true, in 
 substance, of all the work in the humanistic studies ordinarily 
 done in the classroom of college or school. The schoolboy who 
 is working out the meaning of a page of Greek or Latin for to- 
 morrow's lesson, if he has been rightly trained, is working in 
 the same way. In trying to see what his author means, he is 
 going through a process of repeated balancing of considerations. 
 A given word has, in most cases, a number of possible meanings. 
 How can he tell which meaning his author had in mind in speak- 
 ing or writing that word ? A given case, a given mood, may have 
 two or three or a dozen differing forces. Which force did his 
 author mean in this particular case? In order to decide, the stu- 
 dent must look for all the possible evidence on the page before 
 him, and then balance the various possibilities in the light of this 
 evidence. The process of learning to read Greek or Latin is, in- 
 deed, when properly taught, a process of acquiring the power of 
 rapidly feeling possibilities, and of rapidly weighing them. 
 
 The processes of the study of the natural sciences, on 
 the other hand, are, in a large degree, of a different kind. 
 Some of the great inductions of science, to be sure, have 
 been reached by procedure of a similar character. The theory of 
 evolution, for instance, has never been proved by absolute evi- 
 dence, nor, in all probability, does it admit of absolute proof or 
 disproof. The atomic theory, the glacial theory, rest on the bal- 
 ancing of evidence, and belong accordingly to the same class with 
 the larger generalizations of political economy, of history, of 
 linguistics. But the ordinary work in natural science, as per- 
 formed in our schools and colleges, proceeds in a large degree by 
 definite and incontrovertible tests. The very merits claimed for 
 it, as against the classical training, by such men as the late Presi- 
 
50 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 dent Francis A. Walker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 
 nology, lie in the fact that its results do admit of definite tests. A 
 hypothesis is laid down. An experiment is then performed, 
 which, if rightly devised, will absolutely settle the question one 
 way or the other, or, if it does not go so far, will at least com- 
 pletely eliminate one conceivable explanation ; after which, other 
 experiments will follow, until an absolute result is finally reached. 
 This is admirable, and no complete education, in my opinion, can 
 afford to dispense with it. But it is not the sort of thing that one 
 has to do in practical life, and it therefore does not directly pre- 
 pare one for that life. It is, in a word, a less practical training, 
 for the average man, than the training given by political economy 
 or Greek. If you must be guided by practical considerations in 
 the choice of studies, then, unless you are going into technical 
 work, the methods of humanistic science will serve you better in 
 daily practical after-life than the methods of natural science. 
 And, of all humanistic sciences that can have their place in the 
 curriculum of the schools, the science that is brought to bear in 
 the reading of Latin and Greek is the most effective, because, it 
 demands, in a higher degree and with a greater constancy than 
 any other, delicate and exact observation, and the rapid weighing 
 of large ranges of possibilities. 
 
 I come now to the fifth possible acquisition to be gained 
 from education. I remarked, a few minutes ago, that the aims 
 and methods of all studies have long been scientific, so far 
 as the things studied could possibly fall within the reach of 
 scientific method. This reservation is of the gravest importance, 
 and is fraught with far-reaching consequences, the moment one 
 comes to weigh the question of educational values. For there is, 
 in human life, a great field with which science has nothing to do, 
 and can have nothing to do ; and to this field a large part of cer- 
 tain humanistic studies belongs. The student who is reading the 
 Persians of Aeschylus proceeds by a scientific method — largely 
 unconsciously by this time, if he has been rightly trained — to 
 find out what his author says. But the effect upon him of that 
 which his author says is something of a wholly different kind 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 51 
 
 from any recognition of scientific fact. It is the incalculable 
 effect produced by noble passion and perfect expression. It is 
 precisely this incalculable element that constitutes the supreme 
 virtue of the study of literature and art — not because it is incalcu- 
 lable, but because it belongs to the finest issues of human life. 
 It has no counterpart in science. It is not a matter of the recog- 
 nition of law. It is a matter of spiritual and aesthetic perception. 
 It cannot be defined. You cannot put it under the microscope. 
 People have tried so to seize and study it, but never with success. 
 Arnold rightly says: "The mark and accent of beauty, worth, 
 and power in poetry of a high quality cannot be defined." And 
 the same is true of prose, the moment it goes beyond the stage of 
 being a mere vehicle of communication. Literature, then, has 
 something to offer, real but unmeasurable, which science has not — 
 nay, which even history has not in the same degree; for Aris- 
 totle's observation, quoted by Arnold in the same paper, is pro- 
 foundly just, that the superiority of poetry over history consists 
 in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness. Now 
 it is not the man of letters alone that recognizes that literature 
 has something to give which is not included in the realm of 
 science. Among the few masters whom we all venerate is Dar- 
 win. Darwin's scientific sense and power are not to be impeached. 
 They grew with him to his latest years; but poetry, which had 
 once formed some part of his mental life, became, as he himself 
 tells us, less and less intelligible to him. Many men might say 
 the same thing with contempt. Darwin was too good a man of 
 science to do this, for he recognized that the love of noble litera- 
 ture is an actually existing fact, and a means of great and high 
 pleasure. Shall I say that the most serious difficulty in the way 
 of sound and just judgments in the matter of educational values 
 lies today in the fact that many men of the natural sciences, and 
 not a few men of the humanistic sciences, fail to recognize that 
 which the great master saw? The scientific sense, as such, has 
 nothing to do with these matters, and possesses no perception for 
 them, whether that scientific sense belong to a chemist, a biolo- 
 gist, a political economist, or a Latinist. This is the main reason 
 
52 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 for the failure to recognize the value of literary studies, and the 
 consequent tone of superiority to such studies, too frequently be- 
 trayed by the man of science. There are most able and excellent 
 persons, business men, doctors, lawyers, professors, who are with- 
 out the sense for literature, just as there are most able and excel- 
 lent men who are without the sense for music. A second reason 
 is our unhappy modern narrowing of the student's preliminary 
 training, in consequence of which many a man who possessed the 
 latent sense for literature failed to have it developed, or even to 
 know of its existence, because his training, at least beyond the 
 rudimentary stage, had been in science only. My own sympathy is 
 deep on both sides. I know no reason why the satisfactions of the 
 scientific sense should be left out of any man's life; I largely, in 
 my own field, live in them. But I also know no reason why the 
 satisfactions of the imagination and the love of perfect literary 
 form should be left out of any man's life ; I could not live happily 
 without them. The tendency of our extremists in education is 
 to narrow the intellectual life. Narrowness is better than dissi- 
 pation, but there is something between these two vicious ex- 
 tremes. Education need not be a failure if, instead of aiming at 
 unfolding one of the two capacities of the human intellect, 
 it aims at unfolding both. 
 
 We have now recognized the distinctive character of cer- 
 tain humanistic studies, and are ready to consider what might 
 look at first blush to be a severe test of the value of those 
 studies. The university which today represents the extreme 
 of modern educational theory, as I have already said, is the 
 Leland Stanford University. In an article on "The Educational 
 Ideas of Leland Stanford," published by President Jordan in the 
 Educational Review, September, 1893, there are two succinct 
 statements of the purposes of the University. One is in the words 
 of the president: "The whole gift is devoted to education pure 
 and simple, without any hampering clause, and with no other 
 end in view than, through the extension of knowledge, to help 
 humanity." With regard to this pronunciamento, I have only to 
 remark that, if Mr. Stanford had no other end in view than the 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 53 
 
 extension of knowledge, no matter how well ordered it might be, 
 then he meant to leave a large and precious part of the intel- 
 lectual life unprovided for. I somewhat fear that the condition 
 of things at the university which he founded must for some time 
 be largely that which President Jordan's formulation of its pur- 
 poses portends. But the founder himself, whether consciously 
 or unconsciously, enunciated a larger aim, in words quoted in 
 the same article. It is by these words that I am willing that the 
 claim of the value of the humanistic studies should be weighed. 
 They are as follows : "I would have this institution help to fit 
 men and women for usefulness in this life, by increasing their 
 individual power of production, and by making them good com- 
 pany for themselves and others." The statement is full of homely 
 sense. It was clear to Mr. Stanford's practical mind that even 
 the getting of a living does not fill the full field of the word 
 "practical." The aim of our labor is undoubtedly to acquire that 
 which will make life desirable, to increase the rewards of life — 
 the praemia vitae. But Mr. Stanford saw that the pleasures of 
 food, of warmth, of a well-cushioned chair, of convenient 
 methods of locomotion, were not the only praemia vitae. He 
 would train us so that we should be good company for ourselves 
 and others. Well, then, if I am to be good company for myself, 
 who forbids me to be so trained that I may understand, and, un- 
 derstanding, may watch with keen interest, the working of the 
 Zeitgeist of this century, as it shows itself in the ways and tem- 
 per of these United States, of this Canada, and even of England, 
 of Germany, of France, of Italy, of Spain? Who forbids my 
 finding pleasure in studying the ways and temper of the peoples 
 who, a century ago, were shaping our present civilization for us? 
 Who forbids me the keenest pleasure in the ways of the rich life 
 and thought of Athens, of Alexandria, of Rome, which, two 
 thousand years ago, were helping to make our present life? Who 
 forbids me to enjoy reading my novelist, my poet, my philoso- 
 pher, against a background of a large and varied experience of 
 life — gained in part by travel, if possible, but in immensely greater 
 part through the records which life has left in history, literature, 
 
54 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 and art? In the case of another man, you certainly have not told 
 me all I wish to know, when you inform me that he is able to 
 make ten thousand a year, or fifty thousand, or even some un- 
 mentionable larger sum. I still desire to know what he practi- 
 cally gets out of life; what his pleasures are ; how much of human 
 activity is a sealed book to him. When he has done his 'day's 
 work, does he find anything that belongs to him in the books 
 which the world holds precious ? If he lives where it is possible 
 to see something of art, does he know good painting and good 
 sculpture, and feel their charm? Would he, to apply Mr. Stan- 
 ford's further test, be good company for me? Is he an 
 interesting person, whose way of looking at things I should 
 like to know? Does he understand what one means by 
 "the intellectual life"? Is he a money-maker alone, or a fine in- 
 telligence? Life is not a system of manufactures, except for 
 those who have to spend themselves in making our garments, 
 grinding our flour, and planning and building our engines. It is 
 a sum total of the working of subtile forces — a sum total made 
 good and desirable by the untechnical things, first, of course, 
 honorable living, and, on a plane lower than that alone, breadth 
 of interests and sympathies, backgrounds, outlooks, intellectual 
 tastes, appreciation — all those things which belong to the content 
 of the much-abused but essentially sound word culture, the bring- 
 ing of oneself to the best that one can be. It was because of the 
 value of the falsely called unpractical things that Mr. James Rus- 
 sell Lowell, himself a great exemplar of a liberal education, said, 
 when President Walker asked the faculty of Harvard College, 
 many years ago, what their notion of a university was, "A univer- 
 sity is a place where nothing useful is taught." As he explained 
 in his Harvard Oration of 1886, he did not mean that stu- 
 dents were to be tied to this or that, or that any subject should 
 be denied them, to which a strong natural bent might lead; but 
 that the day should never come when the weightier matters of a 
 language, namely, such parts of it as have overcome death by 
 reason of the beauty in which they are incarnated, such parts 
 as are universal by reason of their civilizing properties, their 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES $5 
 
 power to elevate and fortify the mind, should cease to be pre- 
 dominant in the teaching given at the university. "Let the 
 humanities," said he, "be maintained undiminished in their 
 ancient rights. Leave in their traditional pre-eminence those 
 studies that are rightly called liberal; those studies that kindle 
 the imagination, and through it irradiate the reason ; those studies 
 that manumitted the modern mind ; those in which the brains of 
 finest temper have found alike their stimulus and their repose, 
 taught by them that the power of intellect is heightened in pro- 
 portion as it is made gracious by measure and symmetry." 
 
 Let me now sum. up, in a spirit of moderation, but without 
 disguise, the claims which I have made, and in consequence 
 of which I believe that, in the advance of education, there 
 is no danger that humanistic studies will pass permanently 
 into a secondary place. It has been seen that a young man 
 or young woman, natural capacity being granted, may acquire 
 five things in a college course: discipline; power of ex- 
 pression; information; outlook; the sense of the noble and 
 beautiful in literature. The first acquisition, the training of 
 the mind to accurate action, I have maintained, may be had from 
 humanistic studies, and have conceded that it may be had from 
 scientific studies. My own view is that both kinds of discipline, 
 for different reasons, are necessary, and that something of both 
 should therefore be prescribed in that part of education which 
 serves as the foundation for specialized elective work. The sec- 
 ond acquisition, the power of expression, is obviously, as has 
 been said, to be had in larger degree from humanistic studies, 
 and in smaller degree from scientific. As regards the fourth ac- 
 quisition — to pass the third for the moment — I am entirely will- 
 ing to make a concession, which, however, is rather apparent 
 than real. The outlook which a man should have upon life is 
 certainly incomplete unless he has learned to see nature from 
 something like the point of view of modern science. But, in the 
 first place, I have asserted that the study of natural science 
 should form a part of every education, and I will gladly add 
 that it ought to begin in childhood. And, in the second place, 
 
56 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 it is clear upon an instant's thought that no man who devotes 
 any part of his time to reading is in danger of passing through 
 life untouched by the spirit of this study. Our newspapers, our 
 monthly magazines, are full of it; while one would not get far, 
 even if these were safer guides than they are, by trusting to 
 them for his conception of ancient life and thought. 
 
 With regard to the third acquisition, that of the infor- 
 mation one carries away from college, a point is often 
 scored, with supposed telling effect, against humanistic studies, 
 and especially against the study of the classics. It is said 
 that a man forgets even how to read his Greek and Latin. 
 Undoubtedly he often does, sometimes, perhaps, for the reason 
 that he has never learned. But what an unthinking world it 
 is! I would challenge any ordinary professional man who has 
 been out of college for fifteen years to deduce the formula for 
 the parabola or the ellipse. Much rather, I fancy, would a man 
 attempt to read again some once familiar page of Horace; and, 
 badly as he might fare in trying to get the meaning out of a 
 page of Cicero at sight, he would in most cases come off better 
 than if he attempted to solve at sight a problem in spherical 
 trigonometry. In point of fact, the information gained from 
 humanistic studies does not suffer by comparison with any other 
 in respect of its subsequent fate. But the greater fact is that what 
 one carries away and really keeps, outside of mental habits and 
 the power of expression, that which lasts longest of all is not 
 information at all, but the fourth and fifth items of our count — 
 outlooks, horizons, backgrounds, appreciation — the power, to 
 use Arnold's words about Sophocles, "to see life steadily, and 
 see it whole." This has its immense value for the man himself — 
 for his mental sanity, and his enjoyment of life; and it has its 
 immense value for the man in his relation to his fellow-workers. 
 
 I infer, then, that when one comes to count the sums total 
 of acquisition conferred respectively by the humanistic and the 
 scientific training — discipline, power oTexpression, information, 
 outlook, appreciation — the advantage, for the average untechni- 
 cal man, lies with the former. 
 
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 57 
 
 Is this a solution in the air? Have we been spending 
 an idle hour in dreams? What are the facts of experi- 
 ence? Here, then, we are driven back, in spite of our pro- 
 test, to the test of fact. But let us trust our impressions in the 
 large, rather than our memory of this or that man. What is it that 
 gives the lawyer, the physician, the politician, the man of busi- 
 ness his power of carrying others in the direction in which he 
 wishes them to go? What makes the leader? Undoubtedly in 
 part his skill and special knowledge in that particular thing 
 which he has elected to do. What next ? We are pitted against 
 one another in business and professional life, and in social life. 
 Temperament will tell, and physique will tell. But what comes 
 next after these is not a knowledge of physics and chemistry, 
 of astronomy, of biology. If facts are wanted, the facts of his- 
 tory, of literature, and of art will go farther in the life of the 
 untechnical man than the facts with regard to the processes 
 which fill the air of our cities with the smoke of manufactures. 
 A knowledge of the constitution of Athens under Solon, re- 
 mote as it is, is as likely to come a propos as is a knowledge of 
 the constitution of molecules. But the most practical thing of 
 all — to say it for the last time — is none of these. It is the power 
 of seeing rightly, and in its broader relations, what other men 
 see less rightly and more narrowly, and of so expressing oneself 
 that they shall see it. It is the power of thought and feeling. 
 This is obvious enough in the ordinary life of a community, but 
 it is startlingly obvious in the great crises of national life. The 
 two most potent forces which this generation of Americans has 
 seen, the forces which, more powerfully than any others, have 
 determined the courses of human life in remote places and for 
 remote times, have been, not the steam engine and the electric 
 circuit, but love of country and hatred of the oppression of man 
 by man — sentiments quite as likely to be fostered in the young 
 student's breast by the Persians of Aeschylus or the Epic of 
 Virgil as by Puckle's Conic Sections or Williams' Chemistry. 
 
 And yet — let me say once more — you must not mistake 
 me. I believe in conic sections and in chemistry as de- 
 
58 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 voutly as I do in Greek and Latin, and, wherever any man 
 says they shall not be taught in universities with the utmost 
 freedom, and on terms of perfect equality with the inherited 
 curriculum, I am with the mathematician and the chemist and 
 against him. But my reason is, not the unthinking claim 
 that a knowledge of these things can be brought to bear in 
 the daily life of a professional man or a business man, while 
 a knowledge of history, of literature, or of art cannot, but 
 that the human mind has a right to whatever its natural 
 tastes and aptitudes demand. Let us have industrial schools 
 for workmen — Heaven knows that we need them ; let us 
 have technical schools to train up directors of great works 
 and possible inventors; and let us have the liberal education, with 
 great range of individual choice, for the other careers. Let us 
 grant with all our hearts that, in the dye- factory, a knowledge 
 of chemistry is practical and a knowledge of Greek unpractical; 
 but let us not delude ourselves, or suffer others to delude us, 
 with the popular fallacy that the same thing holds in the office 
 of the lawyer, the doctor, the editor, or the business man. Let 
 us not turn from the worship of a college fetich to bow down 
 before a fetich of the market-place. Let us not believe that the 
 day is coming when man is to be defined as a manufacturing 
 animal, and the leading university is to be the one in which, in 
 popular phraseology, nothing useless is taught. 
 
V. THE PLACE OF LATIN IN SECONDARY EDUCATION 1 
 
 e. d. McQueen gray 
 
 The University of New Mexico 
 
 No unprejudiced observer of our system of national educa- 
 tion can deny that the position of the Latin language in the sec- 
 ondary school is far from satisfactory. At the beginning of the 
 expansion movement in our national education the general aim 
 was still a cultural one and the classical scholar enjoyed as such 
 the respect of the community and shared in the direction of the 
 national scheme of education. At the present day conditions 
 have almost completely changed. The popularization of the 
 natural sciences and the application of scientific discoveries to 
 the arts and industries have given a new impetus and direction 
 to education and brought prominently forward as necessary parts 
 of the scholastic curriculum subjects heretofore unknown or dis- 
 regarded, while the rapid spread of national education has filled 
 the ranks of the teaching army with a preponderating mass of 
 educators who, keenly alive to the needs of the class from which 
 they have sprung and zealous in their endeavors to meet these 
 needs with thoroughness and efficiency, are either ignorant of or 
 indifferent to classical learning in general and loath to admit the 
 educative force of the study of the Latin language. The law 
 of relative exigency, applied from the standpoint of practical ef- 
 ficiency as the object to be aimed at in education, has forced Latin 
 into the background, and the study of the language is regarded 
 as a side issue, not to be seriously considered among the educa- 
 tional problems of the present day. 
 
 /Now, practical efficiency is a splendid possession. It includes 
 many precious things : health of body and mind, high aims, firm- 
 ness of purpose — all the various qualifications which go to the 
 making of the good citizen. But practical efficiency as it appears 
 to be understood by our educational directors does not represent 
 so inclusive an idea. It seems to be interpreted in our national 
 
 1 Read before the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club, Ann Arbor, March 30, ion. 
 
 59 
 
60 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 scheme of education as the fitness to seize and turn to personal 
 advantage opportunities of a practical sort, and to be concerned 
 rather with the production of an efficient human machine than 
 with the wise development of the human mind. The results of such 
 an interpretation present themselves in many different forms ; and 
 one of them is a decrease in the exercise of intellectuality 
 wherever tangible benefit to the user does not appear to be thereby 
 promoted. This is distinctly noticeable in respect to our use of 
 the English language, which has shown during the last three or 
 four decades, and particularly during the last fifteen or twenty 
 years, a distinct tendency toward deterioration. 
 
 In this regard I quote from a bulletin written by myself and 
 published last December by the University of New Mexico : 
 
 We use words out of their proper connotation ; we jumble together and 
 misapply metaphors and phrases; we misplace the parts of speech, turn ad- 
 jectives into adverbs, nouns into verbs, and vice versa; we deprive the lan- 
 guage of its natural point and emphasis by our failure to distinguish delicate 
 gradations of meaning and by our habitual exaggeration in speech. In short, 
 we frequently appear to handle the language cleverly but unintelligently, as 
 people who have learned it by rote rather than reason. Our newspapers and 
 magazines are filled week after week and month after month with an exhi- 
 bition of extravagant, flamboyant English, which could not but appear 
 ridiculous or tragic, contemptible or pathetic, to an educated reader, were it 
 not that the eye. and ear of the educated reader have been rendered compara- 
 tively dull and callous by the reiteration of the affront. And to set against 
 this our acknowledged deftness and pertinence in allusive word and phrase 
 and all the mental dexterity of our literary craftsmen — a mere demonstra- 
 tion of our national quickmindedness — is beside the point; just so might one 
 accused of a serious misdemeanor defend himself by exhibiting his skill at 
 parlor tricks. The truth is that our "hurry-up" temper and impatience of 
 restraint and control of all kinds are leading us toward the use of our 
 language merely as a vehicle for expression of a "practcal" sort, and to do 
 that is to use it unintelligently, to degrade it from its high estate; and the 
 moment when the degradation of the language begins is a critical moment 
 in the history of a nation. 
 
 And this, be it noted, does not apply merely to the uneducated 
 class or to the semi-literate journalist or magazine writer. It 
 includes the large majority of the educators in our public schools 
 and many of the professors and instructors in our colleges and 
 universities at the present day. Again I quote from the bulletin : 
 
LA TIN IN SECOND A R Y ED UCA Tl ON 6 1 
 
 Of course, if we are agreed that this, the so-called "practical" use, is 
 the proper end of the language, then no argument is possible, and we must 
 be content to take our place among the nations accordingly, as a people lack- 
 ing in some of the finer qualities of civilized folk. But if we admit that 
 language is something more than an expedient vehicle to meet the call of 
 the moment and the need of the hour ; that it has grown with the passage of 
 years to be a treasure-house of human thought in its amplest, deepest, highest 
 expression ; that the language of a people is the sublimate of the thought and 
 deed of the race throughout recorded time and in very truth the liveliest 
 epitome of its history; does not then this native English of ours come into 
 our hands, not as a mere ephemeral possession to be squandered or con- 
 served as we will, but rather as a heritage bequeathed to us by generation 
 after generation of men whose lives, shining through it, have helped to make 
 it the speaking monument that it is to the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon people? 
 Does it not become a bequest of a solemn, even sacred, character? And are 
 not we, its trustees, bound in honor so to employ this inheritance of ours 
 as to hand it on in our turn not a whit impoverished or debased, but even 
 richer, nobler, and more glorious through our stewardship? And admitting 
 this, as admit it we must, since denial would plainly be as futile as dishonor- 
 able, then must we not next admit that it is our duty to see that our youth 
 shall be taught really to understand the language we are placing in their 
 hands, so that, knowing it for what it is, they may be fitted to use it as it 
 deserves ? 
 
 Now I hold that the present deterioration in our use of the 
 English language, which no thoughtful observer can fail to note, 
 and which all fair-minded persons unite in deploring, is directly- 
 traceable to the neglect of the study of Latin; and it is to the 
 connection of Latin with the study of English itself that I wish 
 to call your attention. 
 
 I must tell you frankly that in my opinion Latin cannot on 
 its own merits establish any claim to be an essential part of our 
 national education. The teacher of Latin who grounds his plea 
 for the language on the basis of classical scholarship, the training 
 of "a scholar and a gentleman" and so forth, is fighting a lost 
 battle; he is a "pagan suckled in a creed outworn." We have 
 passed all that; we are living in another day. Pure scholarship 
 in some form or other will persist throughout the changes of 
 national life; but it is, as such, no longer a material part of 
 national education. 
 
 But the claim for Latin as a factor in national education lies 
 
62 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 
 
 deeper than this. It is the true interpreter of the English lan- 
 guage; the key to a real understanding of our native speech. 
 What can he know of English who only English knows? And 
 who can really know English unless he knows it through Latin? 
 The road to a proper appreciation of English lies directly through 
 Latin, and the claim for Latin as a part of our national education 
 must rest on this foundation. The youth of this nation have as 
 much right to be taught to know English through Latin as they 
 have to be taught algebra, geometry, or history — possibly an even 
 greater right, since all humanizing studies must be correlated 
 with, and find their common focus in, English, and through 
 Latin alone can English be fitly comprehended. 
 
 But to establish this right the whole system of teaching Latin 
 must be altered. We must no longer content ourselves with 
 trying to teach the pupil to translate Latin into English ; but we 
 must teach him from the very first to read English into Latin. 
 Herein lies the real value of the study of Latin. A student who 
 learns to translate his own language into another finds that he is 
 gaining in a very simple way a knowledge and mastery of his 
 native tongue which he cannot otherwise acquire. Taught Latin 
 from this point of view, the student not merely acquires in the 
 easiest fashion possible a thorough knowledge of the character- 
 istics of the Latin language, but he gains a knowledge of his 
 own language that no other system of teaching English is capable 
 of conferring. 
 
 This then is the stand for the teacher of Latin to take, if he 
 is to recover for his special study the position which it now has 
 lost. Far more than that; he will rescue his native language 
 from deterioration and abuse. If he takes his stand as maintain- 
 ing the right of the student in the public school to gain that 
 knowledge of his native tongue which Latin alone can give, and 
 will reconstruct his teaching to that end, he can render a service 
 to his country of an almost incomparable sort, by restoring the 
 perception of the finer qualities of our native tongue to a nation 
 which is rapidly losing it. This is the great opportunity which 
 lies before the teacher of Latin in the public schools; and the 
 present moment is essentially a critical one. 
 
LA TIN IN SECOND AR Y ED UCA T10N 63 
 
 Possibly the teacher of Latin may think that such a system of 
 instruction as I have recommended is a counsel of perfection, 
 which only the most highly trained educators can follow. This 
 is far from being the case. It is really much easier and simpler 
 to teach the pupil to translate English into Latin, proceeding 
 from one known content to another which has been explained 
 through it, than to attempt teaching him to translate Latin into 
 English. The study hour, instead of being a weariness of the 
 flesh, will become an exhilaration of the spirit, and the moment 
 the student begins — and he begins very early — to perceive that his 
 study of Latin from this new point of view leads to a fuller knowl- 
 edge of his native language, from that moment will he begin to 
 feel a zest and interest in his work which heretofore have been 
 very generally absent. In this regard I speak from experience. I 
 myself (and instructors working with me also) by adopting this 
 method have frequently prepared students previously unac- 
 quainted with Latin to pass public examinations requiring a 
 knowledge of the language equal to that obtained in four years 
 of high-school work, in less than six months. There is in fact 
 no difficulty about it : it is the natural and proper method of 
 teaching any foreign language; and if the Latin instructor will 
 adopt it he will find his pupils telling him that they are not only 
 acquiring Latin with ease but are learning more about the struc- 
 ture of English in the Latin classroom than in any other. 
 
 This then is, I maintain, the great opportunity now before 
 the teacher of Latin in the secondary school; and the place of 
 Latin in secondary education is first and foremost that of the 
 interpreter of the English language and the key to its appropriate 
 use. 
 
VI. MR. JAMES BRYCE ON THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT 
 LITERATURES 
 
 The Right Honorable James Bryce, British ambassador at Washington, 
 gave the Phi Beta Kappa address at the fourth annual dinner of the Michigan 
 chapter of the society, in Ann Arbor, April 4, 191 1. The main portion of the 
 address was devoted to the value of the ancient literatures in life. 
 
 Mr. Bryce chose as his starting-point a sentence from an American novel: 
 "The life of an American man is business." To this view he took exception, 
 and declared that all universities, while they prepared men for business of one 
 sort or another, should prepare them also for the side of life which, though not 
 gainful, is profitable and valuable. In this sense, he considered that the ancient 
 literatures were practical studies, and there was even a sense in which the 
 farther removed they were from the present time and thought the more impor- 
 tant were they as an intellectual influence, because they showed more clearly 
 what is permanent in human nature as distinguished from what is evanescent, 
 and what man had been when first he rose to high levels of thought and poetical 
 creation. 
 
 Among the ancient literatures Mr. Bryce included the writings of the 
 Arabs, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, and even the mediaeval Dante, 
 and the Icelandic sagas. 
 
 "The study of the old classical languages, which people commonly but 
 erroneously call dead, said Mr. Bryce, in substance, "is important and 
 profitable for many reasons. One is that it gives us a comprehension of our 
 own language, and this in turn acts upon our thoughts, so that our minds are 
 liberalized, our imaginations quickened, and our knowledge of all things 
 becomes more accurate. The study is important also because it aids in the 
 acquisition of style. 
 
 "Another great value of old literatures is that they aid us to understand 
 the present by giving us a true comprehension of the past. We all live too 
 much in the present, or, as the poet says, 'the world is too much with us.' Yet 
 we can never understand the present without an accurate, comprehensive, and 
 sympathetic knowledge of the past; and the best way to know the past is to 
 understand its literature. The remote past, too, is worthy of our study, for 
 in it we find those things which are primal and universal in human nature. 
 To see how greatly we men have changed is most enlightening, and to know the 
 measure of the progress of man is highly instructive as indicating the probable 
 paths to be followed by civilization in the future. 
 
 "It is much to be regretted that the number of men who are studying Latin 
 is becoming small, and the number of those studying Greek, infinitesimal. I 
 venture to predict, however, that if the universities can safely pass the danger 
 period that is threatening us now, in twenty or thirty years there will be a 
 great reaction in the attitude toward these ancient literatures. The pressure 
 of intense competition in business will diminish in the next generation; the 
 great corporations will have largely completed their exploitation of natural 
 resources; gainful occupations will relatively decrease in importance; the ideals 
 of men will return to those subjects in which the ancient literatures contribute 
 to make life rich and enjoyable, and the study of the classics will revive." 
 
 64 
 
The University Bulletin is issued by the University of Michigan as 
 often as once a month during the university year 
 
 Entered as Second-Class Matter at the Post-Office at Ann Arbor, 
 Michigan 
 
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