Schulwesen_, Vol. LII (1916), 1.

XXI

THE TEACHING OF THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES

=The college course must emphasize power, not facts=

IT is well at times to emphasize old truths, mainly because they are
old and are consecrated by experience. One of these, frequently
combated nowadays, is that any college course--worthy of the name--has
other than utilitarian ends. I therefore declare my belief that the
student does not go to college primarily to acquire facts. These he
can learn from books or from private instruction. _Me judice_--he goes
to college primarily to learn _how to interpret_ facts, and to arrive
through this experience at their practical as well as their theoretic
value: as respects himself, as respects others, and in an ever
widening circle as regards humanity in general. The first object,
thus, of a college course is to humanize the individual, to emancipate
him intellectually and emotionally from his prejudices and conventions
by giving him a wider horizon, a sounder judgment, a firmer and yet a
more tolerant point of view. "Our proclivity to details," said
Emerson, "cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry." The
college seizes upon the liberating instinct of youth and utilizes it
for all it is worth. We summarize by saying that the college prepares
not merely for "life" but for "living"; so that the society whom the
individual serves will be served by him loyally, intelligently, and
broad-mindedly, with an increasing understanding of its aims and
purposes.

=The college can attain its aim only when the student brings necessary
facts from secondary schools=

This, let us assume, is the somewhat lofty ideal. What about its
concrete realization? Especially when the subject is a language,
which, considering that it consists of parts of speech, inflections,
phonetics, etc., is a very practical matter and apparently far removed
from the ideal in question. Every language teacher is familiar with
this stock objection. How often has he not been told that his
business is not to teach French culture or Spanish life, but French
and Spanish? And as everybody knows, French and Spanish are not
learned in a day, nor, indeed, if we judge by the average graduate of
our colleges, in four years of classroom work. It is not my purpose to
combat the contention that college French or Spanish or Italian could
be taught better, and that from a utilitarian point of view the
subject is capable of a great