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Public Speaking by Irvah Lester Winter
page 18 of 429 (04%)
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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