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VIEWS.
VIEWS
EDITOR VIEWS:
Before it passes from the memory of those who heard it I wish to correct some misstatements of the essay read by the representative of the Oread Society at the recent contest.
Although it is true that the ability to speak German has a money value, and that some students pursue the study on that account (facts that I should be glad to have advertised further), it is not true that this is the chief aim of the course here. Still less have we ever claimed that our students could acquire the ability to speak fluently by pursuing the abbreviated course in our institution.
What we do claim is that industrious students acquire the ability to read ordinary German without a dictionary, to get along, make their wants known, carry on a limited conversation in the language, and a beginning which, if persistently followed up, may give them the ability to speak fluently.
The essayist stated that in two classes in which twenty-one students studied German, only one can speak German fluently, thus implying that only one had attained the object of the course here. Now the facts:
This twenty-one includes all of the scientific students, many of whom took only a partial course, one or two almost none, and the Modern Literature students, about one-third of the whole number, who took all the German in the course. The comparison, therefore, is to be made with twelve instead of twenty-one. This was a wild hyperbole. Of these twelve, only one, it is true, can speak German fluently, but, the whole truth, even this one did not acquire the fluency of speech in the University classes, but by constant use of all his opportunities, while nearly every one of the twelve accomplished all that the course offers them.
Allow me to add one statement. The utmost that the German course offers the student is five and a half terms work, the French four and a half; while in Greek there are eight, and in Latin eleven terms. And yet on this basis of extreme inequality the Modern Languages are constantly summoned to a comparison with the Ancient. No just comparison can be made until the students of modern languages are given a course of the same length as those have who pursue the classics.
Meantime, when I see here and there a classical graduate who can read Plato or Airchylos, or Lucretius or Quintillian at sight, I may present some further facts.
W. H. CARRUTH.
EDITOR VIEWS:
For a large part of the material of the latter third of the Oread essay, "The College Ideal," I was indebted to Matthew Arnold's "Higher Schools and Universities of Germany." This acknowledgement could not well be made in reading the essay, but I fully intended to add to the printed copy a note to that effect. In the hurry of the time this was forgotten. Since the contest my attention has been called to the fact, and I myself have found in looking over the book again, that my memory has made me indebted more than I wished, much more than I myself knew on the night of the contest. I now gladly acknowledge any and all obligations.
PERLEE R. BENNETT,