Public Speaking by Irvah Lester Winter
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said, in some other subject--in English literature or composition, in
debating, history, or what not. He should be one of the academic faculty--concerned with thought, which speech expresses. He should not, for his other subject, be mainly concerned with gymnastics or athletics; he should not, for his own good and the consequent good of his work, be wholly taken up merely with the teaching of technical form in speaking. He should not be merely--if at all--a coach in inter- collegiate contests; nor should his service to an institution be adjudged mainly by the results of such contests. He should be an independent, intellectually grown and growing man, one who--in his exceptionally intimate relations with students--will have a large and right influence on student life. The offer recently held out by a university of a salary and an academic rank equal to its best, to a sufficiently qualified instructor in public speaking, was one of the several signs of a sure movement of to-day in the right direction--the demand for a man of high character and broad culture, specially skilled in the technical subject he was to teach, and the providing of a worthy position. One fact that needs to be impressed upon governing bodies of school and college is that the cultivation of good speaking cannot but be unsatisfactory when it is continued over only a very brief time. It may only do mischief. A considerable period is necessary, as is the case with other subjects, for reaching the student intelligence, for molding the faculties, for maturing the powers, for adapting method to the individual, and for bringing the personality out through the method, so that method disappears. Senator George F. Hoar once gave very sensible advice in an address to an audience of Harvard students. He did not content himself with dwelling on the inevitable platitude, first have something to say, and then say it; he said he had been, in all his |
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