Elocution in the Public Schools. ALICE P. LUDLAM BY ALICE P. LUDLAM. I CONSIDER it an epoch in the history of the art of elocution when an educational journal that has the standing of the WESTERN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION that its editor and manager has solicited an article on elocution in the public schools, not because I am not sensible of its educational value but because educators keep such a stubborn front against it that it takes a bold man to tread upon such questionable ground. When properly understood and taught, I know of no one study that has a greater value as a character builder and making a man a man able to cope with the varied experiences in life, than the study of elocution and dramatic art. I have practically retired from the field as a teacher and reader, am not looking for a job hence can speak freely and perhaps be believed. I am sensible of the fact I am sensible of the fact that we are much at fault that this state of affairs exist among educators on the Pacific Coast. We have been frowned down for so many years that we have not taken our profession as seriously as we should, but is not that the case in every other branch of education? It is just as hard to secure a superior teacher in mathematics or English as it is to secure a superior teacher of elocution; that there should be no ground to taboo the one and not the other, yet who would think of dropping mathematics or English from the curriculum of the public school and yet for the same reason they barr elocution? What is elocution and where is its value in the schools? I am going into no hair-splitting definitions but will use the word in a general sense. The attention is given to developing the breathing capacity first, as that makes voice, then the voice is trained for purity. volume, resonance, projection, etc., and I am sure anyone attending any of the state or county institutes can count on their two hands, the speakers from the most learned and celebrated down, that understand the projection of voice well enough to be heard in a room with a seating capacity of four hundred. Then comes the moulding of that voice into words by the use of the elementary sounds, and how many college professors do you know who can correctly form those sounds? Then comes the analysis of the printed thought and how to best express that thought. The body is trained to do its supplemental work by gesture. The emotions are then developed, and all is crowned by a study of man in all conditions of life, with specific reference to the art of portrayal. To sit down and read Shakespeare is not like seeing a master of dramatic art portray his characters. To read a great poem does not give the average man as clear an insight as if he adds to it the thrill of the human voice true to the thought expressed therein. Just a little wrong emphasis often obscures a thought that otherwise might be plain. To be a good elocutionist or actor means a life of sacrifice, to un derstand and use the principles means to be a well controlled man. A child should lay the foundation of a life, and a life To breathe well work in the school in which it is trained. means health, to use the voice well means a proper exercise and position of the muscles and organs grinding and controlling the voice against which nothing can be said. The training of the body to obey the mind and act only according to its dictates is certainly not dictates is certainly not a bad thing to learn. To be able to translate the written word into a live picture, is not a bad thing to learn; to be able to speak our mother tongue with correct enunciation, to learn to pronounce all the words we use or read, is certainly not a bad thing to learn, to be able to delve into litera ture to learn what the mitre means and make it a living thing to our companions, is certainly not a bad thing to learn. To have one's heart throb with all the heights and depths of sorrow, woe, love, mirth, laughter and tears, and portray those throbbings is certainly not a bad thing to learn. Then why don't you have it in your schools? Why not drop some of the present superficial work and delve into what helps man to be a better man? THE NORMAL SCHOOL AT SAN JOSE. BY CHAS. H. ALLEN. On the morning of Friday, November 4th, a class of eleven having completed to the satisfaction of the faculty the course of study, training and practice prescribed, was graduated from the Normal School at San Jose. Their names are as follows: Marvin L. Benson, Olga M. Ehlers, Ernest Ellsworth Hough, Maude M. Martin, Helen E. Marcus. Ida May Nelson, Alma E. Plumb, Ethel May Pyle, George D. Parkison, Yosemeta Ralston and Jessie D. Wood. The exercises were very simple, occupying only the first morning period. After the regular opening exercises the principal of the school awarded the diplomas, and after a song by the school a short address was made by Miss Lucy M. Washburn, one of the teachers. Miss Washburn said: "The little band of students who go out into the world from us today have wished that among those to say good-bye to them should be the one who has been longest their class-teacher. "I thank them heartily for this evidence that the connection has been a pleasant one to them as well as to me. The one thing that we elder teachers in this great and growing institution remember with most affectionate regret, in respect to its comparative days of smallness, is the opportunity we then had for personal acquaintance with all the students. The double charge given the class-teacher affords opportu nity for some such acquaintance with a portion at a time of the present great school, not only along the lines of single study, but as to the student's wider range, general progress and personal circumstances. It thus opens the door to that living intercourse that is half the student's education and more than half the teacher's joy. "This class, tho not a large one, in some sense represents a new departure in this school. It is the first time that half, or more, of a class have been graduates of high schools before they came to us, and have had the work of those high schools accepted in lieu of a part of the Normal School course. Not that we have not had high school graduates here before for many years back and during the past five years in largely increasing numbers. But the definite recognition of their high school work and the attempt thus to form a combined course of high school and normal school study began two years ago this fall. It fell to my lot as class teacher to watch the results, and it has been the good work of the class that entered then, of those who went out lately, those who yet remain a little longer, and those who compose one-half of the present graduating class, it has been their good work that has sealed the success of the experiment and enabled the normal school to offer this year's entering high school graduates even a closer welding of the work they have already done with that they are to do with us. It is a good time, then, to consider how these results compare with our usual unbroken normal course. "There are balancing advantages in having a full course of study in one institution or of dividing it between two. Any good institution tries to make its curriculum a coherent, well-balanced whole, in which each part bears upon every other. More than this, the work of a normal school is in a way distinct from that of any other school; it is truly professional, not only in the classes technically, so called, but in every class from the very day of entrance. The teacher's point of view is held in every subject, and methods are taught by example, whether the subject be science, language, mathematics or any other. Now that is something the high school can never do since their students are not mostly prospective teachers. It makes a fuller professional course for those who can enter our junior classes and work on always in the professional atmosphere. "On the other hand, those who come to us as graduates of good high schools, having already given three years to that course, and adding at least two years with us, give on an average a year longer to study before they graduate from the normal school-a year in which they should have gained acquaintance with studies of great culture value, for which our four years' course does not allow time. And as there is always a loss in changing from one institution to another, in the adapting one's self to new ideas and aims as well as to different teachers, so there is a gain in experience; and experience, thoughtfully undergone, adds greatly both to culture and to teaching power. "Normal schools are schools for fitting teachers, and they can never carry out the whole education of all prospective teachers, from the first entrance to the kindergarten. Not only would this be an impossible burden, but not until young people have gained a certain progress in their education and growth do they know enough of their own powers to chose their vocation in life. The more other schools will do well of the preliminary part of education, the more can the normal school restrict itself to building on that foundation, and the more of such advanced students will it have room to receive; therefore the larger the proportion of the teachers of the state to whom it can give its valuable professional training, and the shorter the part of their education that they have to take away from home, the larger the number of individuals who can take it; more than twice as many can spend two years away from home as can spend four absent years. So that the building up of good local high-grade schools tells in all these ways for the wider work of normal schools. "I can remember the time when this normal school had to do the work of training teachers for California public schools almost single- . handed-with no branch normal schools and with so few real high schools in the state that they could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Then the only fitting for the normal school that could be had by ninety-nine out of one hundred prospective teachers was that given by the grammar schools. See what a change! What opportunities are springing up on every hand, with high schools developing not only in all the towns but in the unions of county districts and with the grade and quality of their instruction steadily growing higher. "You have taken for your motto, "The glories of the possible are ours. I have been telling you how much more has been possible to many of you than to your predecessors. But I wish to add a look, not into your past but you: future. At the same time that high schools have been springing up at your doors to open the way for you to the normal schools, the great universities have been developing to beckon you beyond it. There is no more fatal outcome of any course of study than the notion that it has led one to a stopping place. Not such, I trust, is the conception of those whom we have tried to lead thro their studies at the normal school to a height from which they could catch glimpses into the endless stretches beyond. And the university, so far as it realizes its name, means a further introduction into their varied fields. As formerly there were few high schools in our State, so its university was but small, and so little within the acquaintance of most young people of the State that it might almost have been surrounded by a Chinese wall. Now it has not only widened its range of work but it has reached out with helpful hand to the schools of the whole State, while another great university has come into being and with friendly emulation keeps pace with it, both saying to every earnest, eager young man or woman, 'Come! and broaden your life aud your power of useful. ness by our help!' "The great changes that I have sketched must put young teachers on their mettle. They foretell other changes; they prophesy that the day is at hand when no ill-instructed, empty-minded teacher will be tolerated; they make whatever preparation we have gained only a step to more and higher preparation. "Not that all the preparation of the teacher is in his preliminary courses of study in any institution, including the highest. All these do but put him in better training and equipment for that individual work which is his only continuous way of progress. Every good teacher, from time immemorial, has been a growing teacher, not content with past attainments, but ever working on, under whatever difficulties, to know more and use that knowledge better and thus to be more himself. His school room is his laboratory, in which he is always working out new results and teaching himself in his continuous study. But besides this, every good teacher is studying on beyond what he is at present teaching, deepening his own culture, enlarging the reservoir from which he gives forth to his students, so that his teaching comes with ever more fullness and force. Now in this work that every good teacher has always carried on, but too often alone under depressing difficulties and limitations, he now has the help and stimulus of the enlarging and ever more widely helpful universities. With their open doors, their varied courses, their extensive lectures, their summer schools and all their other agencies, they say, 'Come, make a beginning, and go on to all the fullness possible, far more than may at first seem possible.' A teacher has only resolutely to study along by himself in any line he chooses, in moments and hours that others waste, and save even a little of the generous Californian salary, to see his way to profit from time to time, if not for long periods at once, by these wideopen opportunities, to get fresh starts in more of that independent work and thought which will make him, not that dwindlidg, dwarfing thing we sometimes see a teacher beeome, but like a living tree, a deeprooted, wide-spreading, ever-growing, lifting its head above the feeble herbage into clear air and open view of earth and heaven. Of heaven, I say, for the study I mean is not the mere learning of words or even facts, but the thoughtful tracing of great laws of our being as seen in nature, in society, in history, in literature, in all products of human life and thougat-interpreting to us, ourselves, our duty and our destiny;" President Randall addressed the gradudates, giving them good counsel and words of encouragement, expressing to them the parting words of good will from the faculty. The customary evening reception was given to the class in the normal school building, and was in all respects an enjoyable affair. awakened. It would be easy to write a lengthy article about favorite wild flowers, and I think my favorites will always be those I gathered and loved in childhood, but I wish at this time to deal particularly with the flowers, or rather families of flowers, mentioned in Lesson 13, "Bee Pastures of California," found in the State Fourth Reader. Muir's word pictures are realistic to a mature mind, but I fear most children regard the study of the words and definitions to be learned in this lesson as anything but an agreeable task unless some interesting explanation is given by the teacher. Teach the children that plants are grouped into great orders or families and that compositae, mints, nemophilas, castilleias and gilias are family names, and that hundreds of plants belong to the same family because they are similar in structure. Compositae is the class name of the largest family of plants and there are somewhere near thirteen thousand species whose representatives are found in most parts of the world. A great variety of cultivated plants that are familiar to every child belong to this family. Among the best known are dahlias, chrysanthemums, cosmos, and the oll-fashioned zinnias and china asters, while as wild flowers there are over twenty varieties that are widely distributed in this region. Sunflowers or compass plants, with their yellow or brown centers, dandelions, Beloning to the mint family we find horehound, with its tiny white flowers, Scarlet Gilias There are about seven common varieties of nemophila, but the best known are the baby blue eyes or marianas, as they are sowetimes called. There are two kinds of baby blue eyes, one having distinct blue veins, but they are so much alike it is difficult to distinguish them. White nemophila you will find in marshy places and there is also another nemophila, white, with the exception of a dark purple blotch on the tip of each petal. This latter flower, however, is not very common. A purple flower of this family is found in the southern part of the state, but it bears little resemblance to our delicate favorites. What a wonderful range of color, from white to scarlet, we find in the different varieties of gilias. These interesting flowers belong to the phlox family. There are light, deep and lavandar blue gilias on the coast, scarlet ones in the Sierras, the rich rose colored prickly phlox, or gilia Californica, in the dry hills of the south and a little lilac fringed gilia in the same vicinity. Then we have the evening snow or white gilia, the salmon colored wild bouvardia, and many other delicate varieties. Castilleias or Indian paint brushes are well known scarlet flowers. There are a number of beautiful varieties. Closely related to them are the escobitas, or magenta paint brushes. Both belong to the figwort family. The well known scarcity of scarlet flowers make Indian pinks and scarlet paint brushes highly prized. The yellow pansies belong to the violet family and are sometimes called wild violets. They resemble a pansy more than a violet on account of the brown markings on the yellow petals. The botanical name is viola pedunculata. The chapparal will need no description for the benefit of children in the middle and southern mountain districts but to the children of the cities and plains it is a stranger. The shrub, growing close to the ground, forms dense thickets; the leaves are small, shiny, and have whole margins, while the magenta colored flowers, resembling sweet peas, form a veritable bee pasture indeed. THE PERSONALITY OF G. STANLEY HALL. Dr. Hall is President of Clark University, Worcester Mass., and the editor of the Pedagogical Seminary. He is the leader of educational thought of the United States along the line of child study. He will appear as the star attraction first at the San Joaquin Valley Association at Fresno, and then at the California Teachers' Association in Santa Rosa, California. Frederic Burk who spent several years in close relation with Dr. Hall, and who knows him personally better than any other Western man thus writes of him: ness that is the hard earned product of a manysidedness of knowledge and trained thought. Twenty-five years ago we find him struggling to digest and elucidate, in the Presbyterian Quarterly, Dorner's theology; then a student of metaphysics in Germany, and contributing to the American literature of Hegel; an instructor in literature in Harvard; back in Germany again studying the leg of a frog; a neurologist; the first occupant of the first university chair in experimental psychophysics in America; the leader in the movement to subject children's mental activities to scientific inquiry; the president of the first exclusively graduate university in America encouraging diverse lines of scientific research. Yet, withal, he is intensly human in his whole manner and impulses of life, and has never lost touch with the common instincts and views of living. It is one of his doctrines that the great geniuses the world has known in art and science are those who have succeeded in carrying over into adult life the primitive instincts Thruout the United States to day, in the higher educational institutions, there are doubtless to be found more men at who have one time worked under his direction than have proceeded from any other teacher. They are not disciples in the sense of putting forth one cult of ideas, but they are none the less products of G. Stanley Hall's many-sided suggestiveness. Dr. Hall is not a Prometheus, but a lighter of tapers which must secrete and burn their own oil. That which is a never ending source of astonishment to his students, is his familiarity, seemingly, with every concievable phase of human progress, and his ability, in consequence, to focus upon a single principle, data of facts gathered from the four corners of the earth. He is an omniverous reader, and everything new, from a bit of antiquarian research in the closets of metaphysics to the latest biological discovery in the jelly fish, is food for his unprejudiced appetite. G. STANLEY HALL. "You ask me, Mr. Editor, to give you my personal impressions of President G. Stanley Hall and of what he stands for in the progress of human thought. I have a suspicion that the principle which Dr. Hall will symbolize a half century or so hence will be quite different from the narrower associations with which his name is now connected. We say he stands for child study. True, but child study with him is merely one product of a deeper vitalizing view of mental activity. I am inclined to be extremely skeptical of childhood. that education in posterity will justly claim him, nor will psycholRather do I feel that Stanley Hall does not stand at all, ogy. so far as our present vision discerns, but, in disobedience of the law of gravitation, is suspended over what now seems an abyss that separates the psychology of the future from the pedagogy of the tuture. Neither this psychology nor this pedagogy has as yet for us a material and preceptible existence. But they are in the air of present thought and we somehow sense them and believe that the next half century or so shall reveal their materialized forms. In this period of rapid evolution of scientific thought, G. Stanley Hall seems best to express this widespread feeling and to be able, from his accumulations of the fact of modern scientific researches, suggestively to sketch here and there in rough outline the forms these future sciences shall take. If the next half century of research shall have developed a psychology which shall bear the same relation to the phenomena of mind that modern evolutionary principles bear to living matter, and if the pedagogy of the future shall be in an intimately allied relation to this psychology, then the figure of G. Stanley Hall in posterity will stand on the firm bridge of connection between them, pointing out the way the world has followed. But for the present he must stand for suggestiveness a suggestiveness that is not, as in the case of many geniuses merely intuitional, but a suggestive This many-sidedness gives him contact points with all classes of individual minds in their lines of strongest tendency. Every man that comes in contact with him finds some point to hook on. For this reason it is, that we now find investigators of all shades of researches who can gratefully point back to G. Stanley Hall as the lighter of their tapers to the most suggestive and vitalizing of modern teachers. Some Pedagogical Pebbles from Dr. G. Stanley Hall. A boy's constant quest for something new is a very different thing from the morbid craving for the latest news or novel or Sunday paper of the growing number of those whose mind is so out of condition that they cannot hold the attention for any length of time to any really intellectual effort and who never read a serious book. section by section children's minds with all the tact and ingenuity he can command or acquire. * * Method is not unlike the bony skeleton giving form and effectiveness to the body, but ghastly if exposed. Elementary Studies in Literature For Adult Classes. By CORNELIUS BEACH BRADLEY. 1-How Poetry Deals With Humble Life. In the following course of study it is proposed to subject each one of a group of related poems to the same analysis, with a view to bringing out the essential characteristics of each poem, and finally the characteristics of the entire group. The analysis is indicated in a series of questions, which are to be carefully worked out in each case after a thoro study of the poem as a whole. In order to set forth more clearly the precise import of the analysis, and the general nature of its results, the questions have first of all been applied to a poem not included in the group selected for this special study. Since the purpose here is merely to exemplify a method, no attempt has been made to present a completə analysis of that poem, nor indeed to do anything more than to suggest in skeleton-form how some of the questions may be answered. Lesson 1. Preliminary. The Method of Study. The rime of the Ancient Mariner is first to be thoroly studied so as to secure mastery of its expression and a clear idea of its contents and general features. The following questions are then to be applied to the poem,and the suggested answers are to be carefully tested by the student, even to the extent of supplementing or amending them if necessary. 1. What is the role or character in which the poet himself appears, or what is his point of view in the presentation? How nearly does this represent his actual relation to the things of which he writes? If it be not his actual relation, but one artfully assumed, what special purpose or end seems to be subserved thereby? In the Ancient Mariner the poet assumes two characters. In the one' he describes an an on-looker what he hears and sees at the door of the banquet-hall. In the other, he identifies himself with the mariner and tells his story. Neither role, of course, represents any actual participation in the events narrated. The first device furnishes an occasion-a frame or setting for a story which would otherwise be left suspended in air; and, by contrast, throws up the features of that story in stronger relief. The second device makes possible a much more direct and realistic presentation of the weird experiences. 2. What are the particular phases or aspects of life upon which the poet here fixes his attention? What principle of order determines the sequence of images and scenes thruout the poem? What is the essential structure of the poem? What are its main divisions and the material used in each, how are these divisions related to each other in thought and in form? Has the poem formal divisions as well? How are these indicated? Do they coincide with the structural divsions? The aspects of life as preseeted in the Ancient Mariner are two-fold: (a) the outward experiences of a sailor's life on a long, adventurous voyage; and (b) the inward experiences thru which a soul is purged at last of its naiive indifference and heartlessness toward the beauty and the life of God's creation. The sequence of details in the poem follows strictly the supposed sequence of events—the order, that is, is chronological thruout-both in the envaloping story of the wedding-feast and in the mariner's tale. The essential structure of the tale itself may be suggested by saying that the inward experiences are projected upon the outward exper. iences as upon a screen. The manner in which the tale and the story of the wedding-feast are wrought together has been suggested under (1) above. It is further to be noted that the frame or setting is most fully developed at the opensng of the poem, where for a time we pass freely from setting to tale, and from tale to setting again, as at lines 10, 11, 21, 31, 40, 41. An occasional interruption by the wedding-guest (11. 79, 224, 345) serves to keep the setting in mind, -as well as to give a striking emphasis to certain crises of the experience, -until at last the tale, when completed, melts away into the occasion again (11. 582-596). There is then a distinct appeal to the wedding-guest (11. 597-617), the poet takes up his earlier role of on-looker (1.618), and the company is dismissed. Formally, the poem is divided into seven numbered parts, and these again into irregular rhyming stanzas. The main divisions mark important stages in the main narrative, but have no relation to the enveloping story. 3. Is there a dominant mood of feeling running thru the poem? Is it single, or do other moods appear? If there are others, do they reinforce and sustain the main mood, or do they come in at hap-hazard? Does the poet succeed in making the reader share his moods? Analyse some striking examples to discover, if you can, the means by which he accomplishes this. Most pervasive of all is the fascination of the weird and the super. natural. This spell is seen at the very beginning (11. 3, 13-20, 38-40, 79– 80) in its reflection from the wedding-guest. As the tale proceeds, the reader is brought directly under its power. It comes to its climax in the sinking of the ship, after which it is shown again in reflection from others the hermit (11. 562, 563, 573), the pilot boy (1. 565)-and lastly in the effects of the remembered experience upon the mariner himself (11, 578590). A safe and natural descent is thus secured from the excitement of the climax. In marked contrast with this master-mood is the suggested merriment of the wedding occasion, and the free, natural excitements of the outward voyage. In subtle, changing harmony with it are the various moods developed under the supernatural discipline, from callousness and wantonness at the beginning, thru fear, horror, shame, and the promptings of a better nature, to the peace of love at last-a peace shaken at times, however, by waves of recollection of what had been. The means by which, on the large scale, a mood may be communicated to the reader, have already been seen in the account given above of the development of the master-mood of the poem. An example for more detailed analysis may be found in such a passage as that which makes one feel the heartslck horror of being becalmed in the tropics (11. 107-138). We find here a series of images of external things carefully selected to furnish the basis of that feeling:-the breathless calm, the idle sails, the silence, the copper sky, the broiling sun, the motionless ship-this last emphasized by a striking comparison, because it cuts off all hope of change, Associated with these is a series of images directly suggesting inward states:-droop. ing spirits showing themselves in an aversion to talk, the hopeless monotony of waiting "day after day-day after day," helplessness-"As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." Then comes the crowning horror of thirst, at first with Tantalus-like torment in the midst of suggested but impossible gratification; the stagnant and festering sea with its loathsome life; fearful portents and delirious dreams: the waking agony of the last stages of thirst. All these images, it should be further remarked, are subtly supported and enforced by the choice of words and the movement of the verse. 4. By what means has the poet contrived in this case to invest the commonplace with interest and charm? Has the poet here any further purpose than that of giving us a vivid picture of that which has interested him? How can you be sure on this paint? The first query is scarcely applicable to the Ancient Mariner as a whole, but if we limit its scope here to the ordinary sailor's life, we shall see that it is made interesting and impressive, first, by selection of those elements only which distinctly appeal to interest and feeling :-the parting from home, the unfamiliar phenomena of the tropics (11. 29, 30), the excitement of the storm, the danger of the ice-floes, the ocean birds, the calm, the sighting of a ship, and so on; and, second, by showing us all these things as working together to an end of transcendent importance, the discipline and succor of human soul. There is, moreover, in the poem a distinct attempt to sum up the true import of a discipline like that of the mariner; and of this we may be sure not only because of the detached form and the universal terms in which the moral is stated (11. 610–617), but also from the varied sorts of emphasis with which it is invested. LESSON II. STUDY OF EVANGELINE.—The poem is first of all to be thoroly mastered in its expression, content, and general features. The questions given above are then to be applied to the poem and carefully worked out in detail according to the method already indicated. The answers in every case should be as definite as possible, and should be written down in well-considered terms, to be made the basis of compari son of views and discussion when the class meets. LESSONS III, IV, and V are similar studies of Snow-Bound, The Deserted Village, The Cotter's Saturday Night and Gray's Elegy. LESSON VI. Put the five poems studied into relation with each other, making the results already reached the basis of comparison and contrast between them, leading up to a characterization of them all as members of a related group of poems. Add to these-with fitting char. acterization-whatever other poems you recognize as clearly belonging to this group; and with these associate examples of the treatment of humble life in widely different vein, or even in the realm of another form of art; as, for example, in prose, or in pictures. * Division II, "How Poetry Deals with Nature," and Division III. "How Poetry Deals with the Deeper Questons of Life," may be expected to follow later. |