The Ohio Educational Monthly (Volume 25) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876. Excerpt: ... past? Shall we not present the collated and condensed results of their thoughts to our pupils? letting the good seed sink where it will, explaining the rank and position of the critic where it is necessary, and urging the individual pupils to take the criticism to the text, and to read, compare, and ponder. I am far from denying an iota of the immense value of the study of the text of an author; but I merely say that as this cannot be done successfully in school hours (and by "successfully" I mean so as to interest a large majority of the class) it should be done outside of the recitation, and be entirely voluntary; by which the teacher would be freed from the annoying interruptions of the schoolroom, and in addition would have a class, however small, of con amore students, the sine qua non of literary or any work. Then your "germ" would be planted in fertile and receptive soil; and the earnest instructor would taste that sweetest of rewards, "seeing the fruit of his labor." It has been my experience in three years' teaching of this subject, that a class listens eagerly to the glowing rhetoric of Macaulay in his various literary and critical essays, or the warm, tender, intensely human talks of Thackeray about the humorists of the eighteenth century; and all the time a taste for the works of these two inimitable stylists is being insensibly formed in the pupil's mind, and thereby a double benefit insured. Let the teacher's efforts be catholic in their scope and methods; let him think nothing foreign to his purpose which may interest one mind, even the dullest; let him introduce his pupils to as many great men as possible, supplementing his own reading and thought with the best products of modem criticism; let him study the tastes of individual pupils for ...