Modern Languages as MentaL Discipline.

A writer in a recent number of Education has an interesting article upon the benefits which might be got from the study of Modern Languages, if it were only properly pursued at our schools and colleges. Just at present it is the fashion among educational people to set a low value on this kind of study. Facility in speaking two or more languages is admitted to be a desirable attainment, because of the practical uses to which the accomplishment may be put. It is recognized, too, that the study of Modern Languages is the only means of getting at the treasures locked up in foreign literatures. But here the benefits of the study are considered to cease. The attribute of developing the student's mind-the highest function which can belong to any branch of learning-is denied to Modern Languages, and attributed exclusively to the classics and sciences. The result of this pre-possession against Modern Languages is, naturally enough, a verification of the general notion. Since nobody believes that mental discipline can be obtained from this sort of study, nobody either studies or teaches the subject in the proper way for getting such discipline. There are no such textbooks as there are in the other branches of study. For a scientific exposition in grammar and the nature of language in general, one goes to the classics rather than to living languages. The study of Modern Languages is made to engage the memory alone, and those who undertake the study tend. in consequence, to "become simple information-machines, stuffed with systems of facts that they have no chance to digest ; and they come to play mere parrot roles, learning their task-work without any stimulus to awaken their powers of observation or shape their judgment."

The theory that thus limits, a priori, the scope of Modern Languages is strongly opposed by the writer we are quoting. He claims, that if the same scientific methods that are now used in teaching the classics, were employed with Modern Languages, the mental discipline afforded by the latter study would be as good as that of the former, or better. He cites the experience of the Germans to support his assertion. "German educators," he says, "have given Modern Languages an important place in their schools and gymnasia, and for the last two decades have been, thereby, rewarded with the most gratifying results in the general linguistic training of their youth. Nowhere else has stress been laid upon the philological study of these idioms, and the natural consequence has followed that faulty methods have been rooted out, the standard of their appreciation everywhere raised, and rich fruits garnered in their advance in academic discipline. It was this religious regard for the spirit, rather than the letter of language that lifted Germany out of the slough of despond in which all linguistic study was sunk three-quarters of a century ago, and gave her such vantage ground over all other nations that they will probably never be able to overtake her in this work. Here, too, just in proportion as methods have been bettered, and the true spirit of linguistic training developed, the Modern Languages have risen higher and higher in the scale of patent agencies for mind culture, and, in some parts of the empire have for years stood alongside the classics, and shared with them all their rights and privileges."