Composition at the Barricades

THE present state of English composition is apparently more than a temporary, local decline that can be arrested and restored by a little tinkering with teaching and testing here and there in American schools and colleges. When, in early June, the congregation of Oxford University rescinded a month-old decision and restored Latin as a compulsory subject on entrance examinations, the case was put by one of its members: “The decline of Latin in the schools here, and its virtual disappearance in America, is one cause of a growing incompetence in the writing of our English. I am thinking of politicians, journalists, preachers, essayists — and, I fear I must add, learned persons.”

The fact that written English is slipping in England as well as in America suggests that the reasons for the decline may be more deep-seated than we realize, that the condition may be a symptom of profound changes common to English and American culture. It would be interesting to know whether there are non-English-speaking countries in which the writing of the mother tongue is likewise degenerating.

If the remedy lies in education, it is in education in the broadest sense: in whatever goes on, for better or worse, in the entire life of the pupil, of which the classroom is an almost infinitesimal part. At best, the English teacher must be prepared to take some of the responsibility, most of the initiative, and, when anything goes wrong with language anywhere, all of the blame.

That changes have worked against the teaching and learning of effective English can hardly be doubted. Many of them may still lie hidden. Others are far from established. A few may be reasonably held as certain. In any event, some thought about such changes in the schools and in the society of which they are a part may be a step toward seeing just what the problem is.

The rapid growth in the numbers attending school and college, with the consequent overloading of the teacher, is well known. The question uppermost in the minds of four out of every five high school teachers is this: “How can I teach a class of thirty-five pupils whose I. Q.’s range all the way from eighty to a hundred and forty?”

And the second question is similar to it: “With five classes a day of thirty-five pupils each, how can I assign enough compositions, even short ones, to get anywhere with the teaching of writing?” The teacher might go on: “ If my pupils write only one paper a week, I can’t honestly read them all. I can only mark the mechanical mistakes, like spelling. That isn’t teaching. You must stop to think about what a student writes if you hope to teach him anything about either thinking or writing. You must get into his mind. Teaching composition isn’t dealing with words; it’s dealing with people. I’ve given up. I have had to go to workbooks — the self-correcting kind with a teacher’s answer booklet.”

Smaller classes, with students grouped according to ability and ambition, and fewer of them per teacher are, of course, the only remedy. But the realization of that goal is still far in the future. Meanwhile, what we need is some hardheaded thinking and experimentation on how to do a better job of teaching under conditions as they are and as they are likely to remain for some time.

In his struggle to save the written language, today’s teacher of English stands almost alone. There was a time when the study of other subjects called naturally for written reports and essays and, at the least, for written answers of some length on examinations.

The essay test — that is, the examination which demands original thinking and writing — is dead. It had a decent funeral, with orations, and its many mourners have now left the churchyard. But the fall of the essay examination as a college entrance test is perhaps the greatest single cause of the decline of the teaching of composition in the schools. The use of objective tests in schools and for college entrance has not only decreased practice in writing. It has given the schools the idea that the colleges do not put much value any more on a sound training in writing. If a student can enter college without ever having written a composition in his school, is composition worth teaching? Under these conditions, who can blame the teachers for wondering whether writing is any longer one of the essential three R’s?

The colleges and their examining agencies are in no way culpable. To save the essay test they have tried every known means and experimented with countless new ones. They have met today’s more and more complex and exacting demands of testing for college entrance brilliantly and fairly. In their determination not to direct the schools, however, they have underestimated an inevitable power that they never wished to have. The colleges once exerted considerable influence upon written composition through their entrance examinations; they could, if they would, bring to bear such influence quietly but effectively through other means. If, in doing so, they would unobtrusively consider their obligation to be the improvement of the teaching of composition not only to the college-bound but to every student everywhere who has it in him to think and write straightforward prose, an abandoned salient will have been re-established and widened.

In addition to removing the necessity and the incentive for writing, the objective test has had a less obvious but even more corrosive effect upon writing. Calling for facts and information rather than original thinking, it does not require the student to reach and support generalizations and conclusions of his own. Under its influence, teachers are putting more and more emphasis on memorization of facts and storage of information rather than on understanding. Expressed another way, students do not have much to write about. They can put facts together like glass beads on a string, and if they can do it without making any mistakes, they get the impression that they are writing. Teaching the mechanics and techniques of writing to empty students is an immoral business, a waste of everybody’s time.

The only remedy is an increase in the number of enlightened teachers in all subjects, teachers who are bent on educating their pupils, tests or no tests. They will soon discover that the best preparation they can give their students for taking an objective test is to forget the test and to get to work on reading, thinking, and writing. Mere facts and information take care of themselves in the process.

THE schools are beset by another difficulty that cripples the teaching of language. It is a commonplace that year by year, subject by subject, more and more ground has to be covered. Not enough of the old can be jettisoned to make room for the new. Hence, to save time, subject matter must be presented condensed and processed. More and more, teaching is by abstractions and prefabricated generalizations and conclusions, not by cases, particulars, or illustrations. There is no time for inductive teaching.

The result is a learning through mere words almost wholly removed from any firsthand experience, even from any suspicion that words have anything to do with experience. They are just words that, at a pinch, can be defined by other words, generalizations that can be supported by other generalizations, or even by a rewording of the same ones. Here are the seeds of what later flowers into pure jargon and rich gobbledygook.

Holding fast the connections between words and the realities of experience is the essence of all use and understanding of language, its use in thinking and in writing and speaking, its understanding in reading and listening. Fortunately, making these connections is a natural process. It is the way a child learns his native language. His first question is, “What is that?” He sees and touches the object before he asks for and is given the word that names it. Later, the question becomes, “What does that word mean?” That is the critical point in his whole education in language. If the answer is given by specific examples within his own experience, he is learning language. If it is given as a rewording in equally abstract and remote words, he is learning incantation.

When this natural process asserts itself in the English classroom it can fare badly. Asked to define “ terror,” a child naturally says something like “Terror is when you are almost hit by an automobile.” The teacher corrects him: “It is wrong to say ‘Terror is when.' ” The learner keeps trying until he gets “Terror is a state of fear approaching panic.” He wins an A and the damage is done. Similarly, much isolated vocabulary drill hopefully undertaken by the schools in preparation for aptitude tests is excellent training in the use of language as incantation and as an ornate cloak for vacuity.

The remedy for this lies in the lower grades. Teaching in the eleventh and twelfth grades must continue to be carried on in relatively high abstractions. But in the lower grades, little by little, a habit of mind can be established that will not let any generalization slip by without a quick mental checkup by illustration and example, or any abstraction without a down-to-earth operational definition. Taught and practiced in the grades, the process of relating language to actual experience can become the established way the mind works. There have been and are mature men incapable of thinking in any other way. Mr. Justice Holmes and Judge Learned Hand come readily to mind.

This matter of dealing with abstract words and generalizations is only one detail of a large issue — the teaching of language in the schools. It is an open question whether what is taught in the schools really is the English language.

The idea that English grammar and structure are identical with those of Latin is implicit in much of the teaching, and methods once used for teaching Latin live on under a disguise of very fancy modern dress. Contemporary studies of the language are beginning to take hold, but much remains to be done for, and to, the classroom teacher before he can use them effectively.

The study of the intricate ways of language in the interchange of ideas and feelings — what it can state, what it can suggest; how it can clarify, how mislead; the almost limitless variety of meanings and shades of meaning it can convey — this also is beginning to gain a foothold.

But the linguists and the operationalists (to coin a stand-in for “ semanticists,” which seems to have taken on an emotional tinge) still work apart and even at cross-purposes. What must come if the English language is to be effectively taught in the schools is a revival of the trivium, the union of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, done into modern English, and with the full enlistment of modern knowledge.

TEACHERS should also take a new look at usage. The old formalist view that nothing is right unless it conforms to classical grammar and the best literary standards mercifully has gone. In its place, however, is established an equally undiscriminating pronouncement, “Anything goes. If enough people use it, it is right.” The obvious exception is made of illiterate expressions which, though clear in meaning, damage the user: “ I seen him when he wasn’t hardly trying.”

In addition to making heroic and mildly manic efforts to banish such expressions, teachers and others keep alive the venerable argument about locutions that depart from traditional grammar but are not as yet fully accepted. It is more generally understood that such usage will in time be accepted and called idiom. The slang dictionary of fifty years ago reads today like a list of literary, even diplomatic phrases. But there is always a line where the advancing front encounters rearguard action. “It’s me” is no sooner in occupied territory than the battle rages at the like — as salient.

All this ado is harmless except that, in treating current usage as a matter of manners, not of meanings, it diverts attention from the important issue.

The distinction between inventive and preventive usage is never considered. New usage can be inventive, bringing into the language useful and vitalizing expressions—“egghead,” for example. Or it can be preventive, destroying the power of the language to make useful distinctions, or even to express what its users want to say. If, within the space of half an hour, someone hears, as (or, if you prefer, like) I recently did, that it is a “ terrific” day (the sun was shining, the air balmy), that these new birthday cards are really “terrific,” obviously “ made up by some artist with a terrific sense of humor,” and that a new policy is “a terrific deal insurancewise,” what can he call a hurricane that scared him to death and blew his garage roof away? And will he be fully understood and considered to be moderately literate if he says “It doesn’t cost me much to run my car” instead of “ My car is terrific expensewise”? Or does an admissions officer reading on a candidate’s report that “he does not take too much interest in athletics” know for sure whether the writer means that the candidate takes scarcely any interest at all or that he takes a great deal but does not let athletics interfere with his studies? One principal might mean the first, another the second. The admissions officer can only wait and see.

A detailed study of usage that does more than record and count and describe is overdue. The key question is not whether a new expression is considered by so many people to be at this or that level of usage but whether it is inventive or preventive.

The teacher of language, especially of writing, is working under another handicap. The gap between speech and proficient writing is widening. The student does not hear much good, let alone distinguished, English. Reading aloud in the home is an archaic pastime. Conversation is a lost art. Radio and television, their language aimed at catching and entertaining the customer, talk to him in his own easy jargon and patois. There are a few programs on which guests, commentators, and even announcers speak literate English. There are still some great preachers. But all these put together are far outnumbered. The language our pupils hear is not the language from which clear, coherent writing is easily developed.

Nor does the student’s reading help his writing much. Radio cut into his reading, though not dangerously; he learned to read against a background of music and voices. Television cuts deeper; it does not mix with reading.

More detrimental to the student’s reading than the possible falling off in the amount he reads, however, is the emphasis now put by schools and colleges upon the speed of reading. If he is to get through the amount of reading required by his school and college, he must be trained to read faster. He is drilled to read by eye alone. Hearing in the mind the sound of the language being silently read is a fault that must be overcome.

The result is that writing too becomes the business of the eye alone. The mind’s ear grows deaf. Unless the pupil’s pen is the tongue of a ready speaker, we cannot hope for even moderately effective writing.

The teacher and poet in Robert Frost spoke together when he wrote: “A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.”

Methods for the use of the voice in teaching composition could quite easily be developed. They would include the use of the pupil’s own voice in the writing and revision of his work. Supplemented by sound films and recordings made especially for the purpose and by facilities for pupils to read aloud to themselves, they might well help to solve the problem of teaching composition to large classes and reduce the teacher’s overwhelming load of students’ papers to correct.

Whatever is done to improve the writing of English must be done in the elementary and secondary schools. The freshman year at college is too late. By that time bad habits have become ingrained and prejudices against writing have been established in the mind of the student who writes badly or has never written at all. But there is a more urgent reason: freshman English does not help the boys and girls who do not go on to college. Even without benefit of the college instructor, they should still somehow be taught the power of articulate speech and articulated writing.

All in all, the high school teacher of composition has his work cut out for him. He is half inventor and explorer, pushing into new territory with whatever tools he can devise. He is half repairman, doing what he can to mend the damage done both in the school itself and in the world of which it is a part. At the moment, he does not appear to be holding his own. He may even be resigned to a retreat so gradual that nobody will recognize it as ultimately a defeat, especially if he calls it “ Keeping abreast of the times” or “Adjustment to the modern world.”

Paul Diederich, of the Research Division of the Educational Testing Service, writes: “Since I am skeptical of the possibility of widespread improvement in writing except at a rate that is truly glacial, I find myself in sympathy with our committees of outstanding school and college teachers who devise our College Board examinations in writing. They expect very little, they get less, and our scores are based on what college-entering students do, not on what we wish they could do.”

It may be that we shall have to accept with grace and a show of gratitude downward-spiraling standards dictated by high school students. It may be that we shall have to rest content with examinations that test a smaller remnant of writing with greater accuracy.

It may be getting late. But it is still far too early to give it all up with a shrug. English teachers are a resourceful, resilient, determined breed. Parents want the best for their children and are willing to find out what that best is.

More and more people are hearing the alert and beginning to realize how much is at stake. It is no less than our survival as a civilized people — perhaps even as a people at all.

For, menacing and obdurate, Caliban still crouches in his cave, the eternal archetype of the savage state of man:

“You taught me language, and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse.”