exercises in paraphrasing (for the most part the conversion of good English into bad), and wind up with lessons in “Composition” that must be seen to be believed. Essays are produced, and the teacher noses blindly through the product for false concords, prepositions at the end of sentences, and, if a person of peculiarly fine literary quality, for the word “reliable” and the split infinitive. These various exercises are so little parts of an articulate whole that they may be taken in almost any order and any relative quantity. And in the result, if some pupil should, by a happy knack of apprehension, win through this confusion to a sense of literary quality, to the enterprise of even trying to write, the thing is so rare and wonderful that almost inevitably he or she, in a fine outburst of discovered genius, takes to the literary life. For the rest, they will understand nothing but the flattest prose; they will be deaf to everything but the crudest meanings; they will be the easy victims of the boom, and terribly shy of a pen. They will revere the dead Great and respect the new Academic, read the living quack, miss and neglect the living promise, and become just a fresh volume of that atmosphere of azote, in which our literature stifles.
Ahora bien, el maestro de escuela no tiene más culpa de esto que de aferrarse al latín. Para los maestros y maestras, cuyas vidas están agobiadas por una voluminosa masa de trabajo mental de baja categoría, preocupaciones y responsabilidades razonables e irrazonables, no es más posible hallar la energía y la libertad mental necesarias para realizar ningún cambio vital en los métodos que los libros de texto, las tradiciones y los exámenes les imponen, que lo es para un médico generalista inventar y fabricar a partir del mineral bruto los instrumentos de acero que pueda exigir alguna operación de uso frecuente en su práctica.