We're Shy of English Teachers

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial/opinion page staff

Published by the StarTribune

April 18, 1965

   I TAKE MY SHARE of liberties with the language and feel that the rules should permit a measure of flexibility, the better to capture the spirit of modernism infecting the land. But I'm a stickler for correct usage by others and believe hanging too good for supposedly educated folk who consistently misuse "lie" and "lay."

   I still believe, despite some contrary contentions, that by the time a lad finishes high school he should know an adverb from a preposition and have certain knowledge of composition and grammar.

   Several weeks ago I wrote a piece expressing amazement at the detail contained in a college English text devoted to teaching freshmen to write themes. Here was elementary information I was sure any college student would dismiss as something he'd suffered through in eighth grade.

   BUT PERHAPS I was wrong. I got a quick response from an English major, a man who a few years before had been pressed into service as a temporary freshman English teacher. 

   Had I read some of the themes he received, he said, I "would realize with a shock how urgently these freshmen needed just the kind of instruction you question."

   He had 56 students. "With only three exceptions they did not know how to spell. The symbols and uses of punctuation were as mysterious to them as some electronic code from outer space. They could not organize words into a simple sentence. They could not even put them together to make sense."

   This response was very disheartening and I looked up an English professor who has done research in the field and asked him if things really were this bad. He didn't think so, but confessed a vast need for improvement.

   "There simply aren't enough competent English teachers," he sighed. "About half such high school teachers don't have college majors in English." He cited a report of the National Council of Teachers of English which said that more than 94 percent of the colleges that prepare elementary teachers do not require systematized study of the history and structure of the English language and that over 61 percent do not require a course in grammar and usage.

   "But don't put all the blame on the teachers," he said. "Parents are even more to blame. Children don't hear enough English spoken at home. Dinner conversation is cursory at best, with no analogies ever drawn and few opinions articulately expressed."


 THERE IS A DEFINITE relation between grammar and reading, he continued, and parents seldom encourage children to read anything of substance. But youngsters with a broad background of reading "invariably do better in English than those who read little."

   Here the urban pupil has an advantage over his country cousin. Books are readily available to him, whereas the small-towner has no library at his elbow and not enough volumes other than anthologies are provided at school.

   The notion has been largely abandoned, the professor said with relief, that writing skills can be sharpened by parsing and diagramming sentences. Writing can be done better, he declared, if such procedures are forgotten.

   "We are searching for new approaches," he concluded. "Teaching a person to use the language, to be specific and articulate, to express thoughts accurately--teaching him to communicate and to write clearly--is one of the most important jobs that confronts us today."

   Who can say that he's wrong?

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