Report On The Teaching Of English In The United States 1908 Classic Reprint

Author : Stanley Leathes
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331276487
Total Pages : 24 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (764 download)

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Download or read book The Teaching of English at the Universities (Classic Reprint) written by Stanley Leathes and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-12 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Teaching of English at the Universities There are now in this United Kingdom and in other English speaking countries a great number of Professors of the English language and of English literature. Not so very long ago there were none. Yet the art of writing English had been practised with some trifling success for many generations before the first professor appeared. This reflexion may serve to keep us humble who belong to the teaching profession. One might hastily draw the inference that there is no necessity to teach English at all, at the Universities or elsewhere. But I do not think that inference would be safe. Things used to manage themselves in the old days. Now we have undertaken to manage things, and they no longer run alone. We must go on managing them, and manage them as well as we can. Some day, perhaps, we shall learn to manage them better than they used to manage themselves. It would be hazardous for an amateur - and in this field I am but an amateur - to lay down lines of English teaching for those who have made it their life-work. To mention one danger alone, I cannot pretend to know what all of them are doing; still less, what all of them have done. The hasty critic might be silenced by one or other of these replies: 'I have done that all my life;' 'I have tried that and it failed.' And yet it would not be safe to omit from the survey what is common practice; it is also sometimes worth while to repeat an unlucky experiment. From a more lowly position I can speak with less offence; let me try to put myself into the place of the freshman, the leathern fox, and set forth as best I can the needs of his class, which, diverse as it may be in character, capacity, and preparation, is not so diverse in its needs. Teaching should be determined by the needs of the taught, and not by the propensities of the professor. The first need of every freshman, although he may not know it, is to learn to write English. It is easy to say that he ought to have learnt to write English at school. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.