The child of foreigners may outstrip native children and astonish the school by unprecedented progress because, being already familiar with the ideas of the lesson, it is compelled simply to acquire the language by which the ideas are expressed. By reason of their inability at first to tell what they know, such children are often classified with those less mature, and the mastery of the new language in their case is not as difficult as the mastery of new ideas for which brain-growth may be the essential condition. To ignore the fact that such children often know more than they can tell is pedagogic folly in the highest degree.
Courses of study are sometimes mapped out so as to cause inequality in the pace with which ideas are accumulated and language is developed. Undue stress on grammar, rhetoric, and belles-lettres may cause abnormal development in the direction of flowery language, a verbose style, an ornate diction. It is a fault difficult to correct. To insist that such a student shall have something to say, to force him into studies that will bring him face to face with great questions as yet unsettled, to beget in him a state of mind in which he is troubled with ideas, to compel him to work over and over what he writes until his sentences are as clear as crystals, seems necessary to counteract the one-sided development of such students. The curriculum of study may err on the other side. The graduates in the various courses of engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical, and mining) sometimes develop technical, to the neglect of linguistic, skill. In the presence of a body of capitalists they are made deeply conscious of the difference between the ability to think and the ability to express thought.[14] In one large school of technology the graduates established prizes in English composition and endowed chairs of the English language and literature, so that future students might acquire the power to state in clear and intelligible language the results of their work as specialists. In no long time it was discovered that for this purpose they also needed training in an art similar to that of the teacher,—namely, the art of developing the ideas and thoughts which underlie and condition the engineering project under consideration. For him who would be a leader among men, the ability to express thought is quite as important as the ability to think. Moreover, there is a vast difference between ability to express thought on one’s feet in the presence of an audience and ability to express it on paper in the privacy of the home. J. J. Rousseau and Washington Irving could write well, but neither of them could make a speech. Patrick Henry’s eloquence before an audience was unsurpassed; he never could write a satisfactory report. Power in both directions may be acquired in a college course through the exercises of a good debating society. The student who, during four years, carefully writes out his thoughts, then discards his manuscript while speaking, and studies how he can best convince his hearers and how he can prune himself of the defects pointed out by the merciless criticism of his fellows, can feel sure of ultimate success. President Barnard says of one of our largest institutions that half its glory departed when its literary societies were killed through the influence of the Greek letter fraternities. A public speaker who is a slave to his manuscript is deserving of pity. College authorities may well exercise their ingenuity in finding a substitute for the drill and practice which the literary societies of by-gone days afforded in learning to think and to express thought in the face of opposition, criticism, and other unfavorable conditions.