A Note on the Teaching of 'english Language and Literature': With Some Suggestions (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

R. B. McKerrow

Softcover

ISBN 10: 133283888X ISBN 13: 9781332838882

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2018

Synopsis

Excerpt from A Note on the Teaching of 'English Language and Literature': With Some Suggestions

But does it afford such a training? I venture to say that at present it does not.

It is, I think, by no means an unusual feeling among at any rate the younger section of those who are engaged in the teaching of English subjects that all is not well with the study. It does not seem as a rule to attract the best students, and in the general opinion does not rank with most of the other divisions of the curriculum. Indeed, in some quarters it seems to be looked on almost as a sham kind of learning, an amateurish sort of business altogether, for the teaching of which real scholarship is of less importance than a good presence and fluent diction. And yet considering what the subject is: that it deals, or should deal, with the very flower of our national life, taking account of almost all the best work of the best minds of the modern world; one might naturally suppose that hardly any other subject could surpass it in interest and real importance.

Again, some teachers do not feel that the results of the English course are satisfactory. The students, even granting that they are not the best, do not seem to have benefited from the time which they have spent over the study as they should have done. Their knowledge is often scrappy, they seem unable to envisage their subject from any point of View but that of the text-books in which they have studied it; they show little or no power of independent judgement, and they are often singularly blind and, indeed, indifferent to the merits of whatever does not happen to have fallen within the scope of their particular studies. With some of them, indeed, the course of literature seems to do little else but develop a power of fluent and uncritical laudation, with the help of innumerable clichés, of the particular objects of their teacher's admiration.

Lastly, some of the teachers, though perhaps only a few, are not entirely satisfied with themselves and their own grasp of their subject. Some of them feel that they have not the general knowledge of the language and literature which they ought to have, and are obliged to have recourse to specializing in some particular small sub-section or period, and frankly confessing that they are not much interested in the rest. They do the best they can, often complaining of the inadequacy of the methods by which they themselves were taught, but most of them continue to follow these very methods in their own teaching.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 133283888X
• ISBN 13: 9781332838882
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 43