Upon this foundation of a sound accent and a basic vocabulary must be
built the general fabric of the language. For the most part this must
be done in the school. At present in Great Britain a considerable
proportion of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses--more particularly
those in secondary and private schools--are too ill-educated to do this
properly; there is excellent reason for supposing things are very
little better in America; and, to begin with, it must be the care of
every good New Republican to bring about a better state of things in
this most lamentable profession. Until the teacher can read and write,
in the fullest sense of these words, it is idle to expect him or her to
teach the pupil to do these things. As matters are at present, the
attempt is scarcely made. In the elementary and lower secondary schools
ill-chosen reading-books are scampered through and abandoned all too
soon in favour of more pretentious "subjects," and a certain
preposterous nonsense called English Grammar is passed through the
pupil--stuff which happily no mind can retain. Little girls and boys of
twelve or thirteen, who cannot understand, and never will understand
anything but the vulgarest English, and who will never in their lives
achieve a properly punctuated letter, are taught such mysteries as that
there are eight--I believe it is eight--sorts of nominative, and that
there is (or is not) a gerundive in English, and trained month after
month and year after year to perform the oddest operations, a non-
analytical analysis, and a ritual called parsing that must be seen to
be believed. It is no good mincing the truth about all this sort of
thing. These devices are resorted to by the school teachers of the
present just as the Rules of Double and Single Alligation and Double
Rule of Three, and all the rest of that solemn tomfoolery, were
"taught" by the arithmetic teachers in the academies of the eighteenth
century, because they are utterly ignorant, and know themselves to be
utterly ignorant, of the reality of the subject, and because,