FRENCH 2

Another academic year is drawing to a close and some 300 Freshmen have completed their work in French 2. This veteran first-year course, so frequently criticized, is still unblushingly unreformed.

The French Department, faced with a thankless task, deserves sympathy. As the educational authorities who have written in recent issues of the CRIMSON on the transition from school to college have pointed out, the product of the preparatory schools is often inadequately prepared in the rudiments of French, German, and Spanish, and so long as this continues to be the case elementary language courses will be necessary. The University, moreover, justly thinks first in French 2 of a well-rounded reading knowledge, though the extent to which this is secured is open to question.

A large share of the translation work this year was assigned in Joliet's "Precis Illustre de la Litterature Francaise", a book, which, in addition to having the monotonous, inventory-like dullness of so many literary histories, affords mediocre training in vocabulary. The chief academic crime which the French Department committed was to require a knowledge of the subject matter of much of this book.

It is of little use to those who will and to those who will not continue the study of French to know that a tone of melancholy runs through. Lamartine's poems or that Vigny was an advocate of courage, or to memorize the dates of Madame de Stael's and Chateaubriand's works, when not one of these authors and a dozen others similarly studied figures in the reading of the course. Such facts learned by pure memory work will in most cases be forgotten long before there is an opportunity to use them in more advanced courses. The final examination this-year, for example, required a knowledge of the subject matter in 103 pages of the "Precis", pages which included only two authors who had been read during the year. The uselessness of such assignments is apparent. The remedy seems simple: let the classes study in the "Precis" only those authors whose works are read. If French 2 is to be given at all, it might at least cover its appointed field intelligently.