A Course of Study in Language for Elementary Schools and Handbook to Accompany the California State Series Text (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Course of Study in Language for Elementary Schools and Handbook to Accompany the California State Series Text

It has finally come to pass that the principles upon which existing courses of study are founded and methods of teaching based are being openly questioned. As teachers become less and less an isolated class and mingle more with intelligent citizens who are actually carrying on the work of the world, they are beginning to awaken to the fact that many of the notions which they have held as self-evident truths are such, nowhere except within the walls of the schoolroom. The purpose of this preface is to show some common sense principles which may be employed in effective language teaching. The author has also attempted to make plain that the tenets underlying the majority of the language text-books are merely pedantries which would long ago have been discarded by any class of people except those who relied upon their ancestors to do their thinking for them.

Language teaching has long consisted in the learning of a series of definitions and rules. While these may be good as pedantic ornaments, yet neither case enables a pupil to choose the correct language forms.

I. Children only learn correct written forms by the habit of writing them - there is no equivalent for habit.

Aristotle years ago pointed out that the learning of the definition of wealth never made a man wealthy. Pedagogues, who as a class have spent their lives learning definitions, should long ago have discovered this simple truth by inspection of their own bank accounts.

If a man secured a book, learned all the rules for guiding and controlling an automobile, and had all the terms explained so that he understood them thoroughly, then presented himself as a chauffeur, would the owner of the machine hear him recite his rules and definitions, and, upon finding him letter perfect, send him out to give his wife and children a ride? Yet this same method is the common one now used in teaching language. "A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought," the book tells the child, "Begin it with a capital letter and close it with a period," and the child having learned the definition and rule is expected ever afterwards to obey its dictates. Lie is a transitive verb. Its parts are lie, lay, lain. Remember this," says the book, "and you will make no mistakes," and yet high school graduates, knowing and writing the above statements, give as an illustration: Mother laid down to rest yesterday.

One can go out any day and watch a carpenter mark out and fit two boards together at an obtuse angle, but the carpenter knows no definition for an obtuse angle. He has learned to do the thing and that is what counts. A little girl watches her mother as she sits sewing.

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