In Harvard’s attempt to push writing instruction in secondary schools, they ended up devalued the need for it in first-year composition. Private academics were the basis for a student’s preparation of college, so if colleges wanted to improve student quality, they would have to raise admission standards by starting at the schools. So now the preparatory schools were faced with teaching English and writing to their students and would be evaluated on a public level. Of course, the classic and common mistake of grading students on spelling, punctuation, and grammar was made and the once imposed teaching on the prep schools turned into blaming them for their writing instruction.
Not only did Harvard have problems with writing instruction, but also the issue of taking away the classics. Charles W. Eliot’s privileging of English and modern languages was an attack on the classics and took time away from them. One reason for this was that the “classics simply weren’t doing their job in producing entering students who could handle English well enough. The traditional claim of the classicists was that their subjects provided the mental discipline students needed to succeed in all their subjects” (28). Personally, as much as I would like to disagree with this, being a fan of the classics, I have to agree that the narrow-mindedness of studying and learning only the classics restricts the student from obtaining a broader prospective of the English studies. In 1872, Professor Robert Hill proposed that English should come at the freshman level of a student’s course instead of the second year. In order to do this he established a course that would meet three times a week for three hours. The third hour consisted of no outside classroom work and would give freshman “glimpses of the world in which they supposedly lived” (31).
Adams Sherman Hill’s essay focused on a more serious effort to teach children to use their native tongue “correctly and intelligently” (47) and to provide the students with practice in writing and speaking it. The goal was to have students become familiar with a few familiar and recognizable works in English literature to help with methods of though and expression. Institutions did not accept the process and methods initially and it actually took convincing by providing a basis and breakdown of coursework. Within the new methods, there was a high demand for learning the mother-tongue, English.
Till he knows how to write a simple English sentence, he should not be allowed to open a Latin grammar. Till he can speak and write his own language with tolerable correctness, he should not be set down before the words of another language. Whatever knowledge he acquires, he should be able to put into clear and intelligible English (51)
It seems that both essays argue for one thing or another, but never a commonality of teaching methods. One says the classics are not enough to teach students because they do not allow a broader understanding of the world around them. The other argues in a demand for student’s fully comprehending the English language and that they should not speak or write in any other languages until they have mastered English, which is the exact opposite of allowing them to open their minds into other perspectives. By forcing English as the mother-tongue, they are diminishing the outside perspective of the world around them.
