But a more potent cause and a real
justification of this attitude is the neglect of due balance of
qualities and acquirements by so many educators and educational
systems. Great educators have themselves rarely been narrow-minded
men; but the traditions they have founded have gone the way of all
traditions.
What begins as an inspiration hardens into a formula. The ideals of
the Renascence were caricatured in their offspring of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Not only did the evolution of modern life
with its cities, its printing press, its gunpowder, its steam engine
and the rest, destroy the need of the well-to-do to be trained in the
practical arts of chivalry, of the chase, of husbandry, even of music
and design, so that the bodily activities of boys became relegated to
the sphere of mere games and pastimes; but as books usurped more and
more of the hours of boyhood, so the instructors of youth fell more
and more into the fatally easy path of formal and grammatical
treatment. The subject-matter of education was indeed literature, and
the very noblest literatures, mainly those of Greece and Rome: but
there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it;
its meaning and spirit were concealed from all but the few who could
surmount the fences of linguistic pedantry and artificial technique
with which it was surrounded.
I do not know when the expression "the dead languages" was invented:
but certainly Latin and Greek have been treated as very dead languages
by the great majority of teachers for a very long time.
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