The Reign of Pedantry in Girls' Schools.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 850, 15 June 1888, Page 4

The Reign of Pedantry in Girls ' Schools.

Elizaabeth M. Powell, in the ‘ Nineteenth Century.’ We English certainly are a very singular people. We clamour for freedom, we profess to worship liberty, and yet at the very same time we voluntarily place our solves under the strictest laws, aud yield with abject submission to the Frankenateins, social, political, and educational; which we have qnrselves created. The despotism of fashion is universally admitted, bub who imposes it upon us?. Tne tyranny of democracy we are all learning to dread, yet from whence does democracy derive its power ? And the tyranny of educational systems—is there such a thing? That is the question into which I propose to inquire. We will look into the schools for girls of the educated classes ijj

England iit this present time. They are mdltitudincus, and of various graded i High Sohoola, eoibracirig children of every class iind priding themselves lipon It; private schools—for young ladies; as they ate especially designated ; educational homes—as I see it Is becoming customary to define a very small circle of what used to be termed private pupils, living as one family. are the young people in these Bchools doing ? What are they learning ? Reading, writing, spelling, and elementary arithmetic of course. But would anyone who had not inquired into the matter readily believe that they are, with very few exceptions, studying precisely the same period of English history, or at least that they have only a choice between two periods? Would it be credited that one specified play of Shakespeare or one poetical subject is put before all ?—that the quick and the stupid alike are t > be required to enter into abstruse questions as to the derivation of obsolete words, and to explain recondite allusions to old-world customs ? W ould it be considered natural and necessary that hours and' hoqra should be devoted to advanced aritbmetib and algebraic calculations by girls who may have naturally no aptitude for figures, and may probably never be called upon to' calculate more than ordinary sums of compound interest ? Would it be thought the best possible use of time —so inestimably valuable in these early years—to spend it in learning the names which grammarians hav,©-"affixed to the different parts of a sentence, afi'd determining whether ‘ co-ordinate sentences are of the copulative, adversative, or causative (illative) class ? ’ I speak in ignorance, and am honestly open to correction and' conviction, but I oonfess that this species of instruction to me savours strongly of pedantry. M. Jonrdain spoke French fluently vat least we may take it for granted he did) before he knew that his sentences were thrown into a form called prose ; and as we all—if we are sane—have the power of reasoning logically, though we may never have heard of the ‘ mood Barbara,’so educated persons have the power of Bpeaking grammaticalfy, though they may have never been called upon to write ‘ten complex sentences with an adjective sentence qualifying the subject, and ten more with an adjective sentence qualifying the object.’ I trust [ may not be misunderstood. No doubt grammatical analysis is good as a mental exercise, but does it do more than enable us to affix certain technical names to certain portions of a .sentence ? Will not young people as they grow up—if they have been perfectly grounded in the simple elementary parts of grammatical knowledge, and have a taste for languages—study these distinctious and definitions for themselves, and learn in a few days what in childhood and early youth it would have taken weeks and mouths to acquire ? And if they "have no taste for languages, ■ will not . terms they have learnt often with sorrowful hearts and red eyes, and many reproofs and reproaches—be put aside, like a worn-out book, upon those dusty shelves of the mind which are devoted to useless memories ? Personal experience tells more than argument or reasoning with most of us'; and.as I was not; taught upon the modern system, but learnt my lessons in a way so primitive that it would make a teacher in a High School hold up her hands' in horror, I canuot be called a good judge of the usefulness of this complicated grammatical instruction. All 'I can say is that carefully defined rules upon points which common sense will make clear have been to myself a hindrance rather than a help. As an instance of this, when I first ventured to write a sentence for publication, having a deep sense of rny. profound ignorance of the rules of punctuation, I applied myself to the study of Liudley Murray’s grammar —then the one accepted authority for English people. He gave seventeen-rules for the right placing of ths .comma, aud I thought it my duty to endeavor to master them. But my patience did not hold'put. Like the American who put no stops in his book, but filled a page with ,/them at the end that every reader might take which he pleased, I threw aside the seventeen rules of punctuation, aud in their stead placed ou one mental page the simple definitions of the respective Value of periods, colons, semicolons, and commas which I had learnt as a child, and then took whichever common sense and observation pointed out as suitable to my purpose ; and in the end I found that I escaped any special criticism. But I have another complaint. This modern fashion of treating noble thoughts, feelings and principles, set forth iu prose or verse, merely as the material for grammatical analysis, appears to my prejudiced mind to be a kind of intellectual vivisection. The life is destroyed in the act of discovering and distinguishing the elements of which its body is composed. A young friend of mine said to me the other day that Bhe had ‘ done ’ the story of Margaret, in the ‘ Excursion/ with notes, for a correspondence class, questions being given upon the notes. All that she bad retained frum this ’ doing ’ was. as far as I could gather, nothing but the fact that she had ' done ’ it. Feeling, admiration, there was none. The poetry had been a lesson to b e ‘ got through.’ The. language was to be mentally dissected, and then the lesson was finished, and the story of Margaiet peed never be thought of more. No doubt we must teach young people the rules of grammar, but why should we for this purpose degrade the most elevating, imaginative, rythmical of English writings ?