Iconoclastic journalist, essayist, and critic, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) may be most famous for his rip-roaring writing style--witty, combative, and yet graceful. In his review of The Social Objectives of School English, by Charles S. Pendleton, Mencken employed that style to skewer "the worst idiots" in "the slums of pedagogy": teachers of English.
The Lower Depths (1925)
by H.L. Mencken
Here, in the form of a large flat book, eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches tall, is a sight-seeing bus touring the slums of pedagogy. The author, Dr. Pendleton, professes the teaching of English (not English, remember, but the teaching of English) at the George Peabody College for Teachers, an eminent seminary at Nashville, in the Baptist Holy Land, and his object in the investigation he describes was to find out what the teachers who teach English hope to accomplish by teaching it. In other words, what, precisely, is the improvement that they propose to achieve in the pupils exposed to their art and mystery? Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic, or military?
In order to find out, Pendleton, with true pedagogical diligence, proceeded to list all the reasons for teaching English that he could find. Some he got by cross-examining teachers. Others came from educators of higher degree and puissance. Yet others he dug out of the text-books of pedagogy in common use, and the dreadful professional journals read by teachers. Finally, he threw in some from miscellaneous sources, include his own inner consciousness. In all, he accumulated 1,581 such reasons, or, as he calls them, objectives, and then he sat down and laboriously copied them upon 1,581 very thin 3x5 cards, one to a card. Some of these cards were buff in color, some were blue, some were yellow, some were pink, and some were green. On the blue cards he copied all the objectives relating to the employment of English in conversation, on the yellow cards all those dealing with its use in literary composition, on the green cards all those having to do with speech-making, and so on. Then he shook up the cards, summoned 80 professional teachers of English, and asked them to sort out the objectives in the order of appositeness and merit. The results of this laborious sorting he now sets before the learned.
Here is the objective that got the most votes--the champion of the whole 1,581:
The ability to spell correctly without hesitation all the ordinary words of one's writing vocabulary.Here is the runner-up:
The ability to speak, in conversation, in complete sentences, not in broken phrases.And here is No. 7:
The ability to capitalize speedily and accurately in one's writing.And here is No. 9:
The ability to think quickly in an emergency.And here are some more, all within the first hundred:
The ability to refrain from marking or marring in any way a borrowed book.And some from the second hundred:
An attitude of democracy rather than snobbishness within a conversation.
Familiarity with the essential stories and persons of the Bible.
The ability to sing through--words and music--the national anthem.I refrain from any more: all these got enough votes to put them among the first 200 objectives--200 out of 1,581. Nor do I choose them unfairly; most of those that I have not listed were quite as bad as those I have. But, you may protest, the good professor handed his cards to a jury of little girls of eight or nine years, or to the inmates of a home for the feeble-minded. He did, in fact, nothing of the kind. His jury was very carefully selected. It consisted of 80 teachers of such professional heft and consequence that they were assembled at the University of Chicago for postgraduate study. Every one of them had been through either a college or a normal school; forty-seven of them held learned degrees; all of them had been engaged professionally in teaching English, some for years. They came from michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Toronto, Leland Stanford, Chicago and Northwestern Universities; from Oberlin, De Pauw, Goucher, Beloit and Drake Colleges; from a dozen lesser seminaries of the higher learning. They represented, not the lowest level of teachers of English in the Republic, but the highest level. And yet it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers.
The ability courteously and effectively to receive orders from a superior.
The avoidance of vulgarity and profanity in one's public speaking.
The ability to read silently without lip movements.
The habit of placing the page one is reading so that there will not be shadows upon it.
The ability to refrain from conversation under conditions where it is annoying or disagreeable to others.
The ability to converse intelligently about municipal and district civic matters.
The ability to comprehend accurately the meaning of all common abbreviations and signs one meets with in reading.
The ability, during one's reading, to distinguish between an author's central theme and his incidental remarks.
Concluded on page two
