This English—A Review

"English?" responds a treble voice. "I speak English, don't I? My calibers understand me. Why the heck should you have to teach me English at all?" Having asked this question Professor Gordon proceeds to answer it most satisfactorily in his book "The Teaching of English." The book which has as its sub-title "A Study in Secondary Education," begins with an historical retrospect which will clarify for many readers what their secondary education never made quite clear, what English really is, or rather, how it came to be in such a muddle.

There is a certain thesis, "that the English which we must teach our children is English for the purposes and usages of everyday life, and that all other varieties of English must be subordinated to it." Adolescents should not be expected to describe in an inappropriate style events they are not capable of comprehending and emotions they have never experienced. "The surrounding hills," writes one pupil, "were still enveloped in a shroud of pearly grey mist while the verdant pastures that stretched to the west were paled by the morning dew." The child's possible fate in a government department can be ascribed only to a mistaken teaching policy.

Equally sensible and concise is the three-fold definition of the meaning of English: (1) the ability to express oneself in spoken or written speech and so to communicate; (2) the ability to understand the spoken or written speech of another and so to complete the communication; (3) the ability to feel or appreciate the appeal of literature. To realise these statements must be applied, a grammar that is a means only, not an end to an understanding of the meanings of words and an appreciation of a literature that is not "lives and dates and influences," Children must learn to know good from bad writing, so that when asked to criticise some bad emotive prose beginning, "For those of us who are concerned with the unplumbed depths of the present day problems and the triumphant march of democracy towards its appointed goal"—there will be none to answer (as there were), "I admire his choice of words and the felicity of his diction." or "the fault of this passage is that it contains only four full stops and one comma."

By chance the annual letter came yesterday from my sister who is at secondary school. The process of being educated bores her, but this and the fact that she is fifteen and facetious does not necessarily detract from the underlying significance of what she says. "The inspectors came on Friday ... some man in composition time fired questions in all directions—silly sort of things which made us all tongue-tied.-What is Literature?' glaring round the class—'You,' he pointed a long finger ... Then 'what are classics?' and he stabbed the air again, 45 degrees to the left of the last hole he had made in the air," The treble voice might well ask, "Why the heck?"