In manual training we have a further instance of the transmutation of dead fact into living action. Those facts and principles of measurement, calculation, physical properties, which were once given directly to the student as rules or formulae to be learned, are now encountered by him as he follows step by step some active process in which they are involved. He thus grasps them more readily and retains them more easily, since they represent to him the living conditions or results of an activity which he has himself witnessed or carried on.
Of similar significance is that interesting type of primary education which uses the primitive industrial processes, such as pottery making, weaving, iron and metal work, not only to train the eye, the hand, and the mind of the pupil, but to afford him some insight into the complex social organization of which he is a part. By following out these processes from their crude beginnings to their complicated development in the present industrial order, the child is believed to gain not only a vital and thorough knowledge of the facts and principles incident to them throughout their evolution, but also some comprehension of those infinitely tangled and multitudinous activities which constitute the world's life, but which to those of us not thus initiated are usually little more than a "big blooming buzzing Confusion."
With the relative values of these various educational movements we are not now concerned. Our interest is wholly in the coincidence of their animating ideas, a coincidence which can hardly be regarded as purely accidental. Beneath innumerable differences of superficial aspect, these three noteworthy tendencies in modern education are rooted in the same elementary principle, namely that the products or results of an active process can be rightly understood and strongly seized upon by the human mind only in connection with that process.
Within the field of language-study, moreover, this principle has to some extent already obtained. The historical and the comparative study of languages and literature is in fact built upon it. Our teaching of English composition has for several years paid tribute to it. In English grammar, last of all, we are beginning to recognize it. In this subject, therefore, we have yet to receive the returns which its completer acceptance and more consistent carrying out have elsewhere yielded.
These returns are so far conceded that I need only enumerate them. The laboratory method, manual training, the study of social and industrial activities, the organic or functional study of languages, of literature, of English composition, restore to dead forms, detached facts, meaningless laws, the color, the life, the significance which they have lost through separation from the activities which gave them birth. Such restoration will assuredly take place in grammar--has indeed already taken place wherever the organic conception of language has entered into it.
When we have at length dismissed entirely from our teaching that artificial product of the grammarian's ingenuity which I cannot forbear characterizing as "near-language," and set our pupils in earnest to studying the language process by direct analysis of the sentence-activity, we shall find this subject richer in its opportunities than any of us has conceived. In the first place the language process is not, like weaving or pottery making, obsolete in our modern households. It is at hand whenever and wherever one wants it. It is carried on by every child without self-consciousness as an essential activity in his daily life. It may be studied without elaborate apparatus of any kind. Since it involves abstract relations, without that actual manipulation of material substance characteristic of the industrial processes, it should doubtless not be the earliest activity studied by the child; but we must not on the other hand forget that when every language relation is consistently referred to the concrete reality behind the words, intelligent dealing with it becomes comparatively easy even for pupils in the lower grades.
But beyond its extraordinary availability, the language process has a second and quite incommensurable advantage over any other process as a subject for study, in its unrivaled importance to the social order. If it is held advisable that the young student should understand certain industrial processes, that he may thereby gain some insight into this complicated modern world of ours, he should assuredly to this same end apply himself to that great process of communication by language between man and man, through which alone the individual can put his knowledge and thought at the service of his fellows, through which alone society can profit by the achievements of its members.
It is with this act, rightly understood, that grammar has to deal, not with mere words printed on the page. And in so far as it studies this act at first hand, observing and analyzing it as communication, as the living transference of thought from mind to mind, creating thus and shaping to its ends the sentence form--in so far may it be accounted real grammar.
