as a language is taught to make literature available.
"Example is better than precept." Reading good literature for the love
of it will bring in the habit of grammatical speaking and writing far
more effectively than what is known as "a thorough grounding in the
principles of English grammar." I doubt if the knowledge of, and
facility in, English can be built up on such a basis; rather the laws
should be deduced from examples. Philology, etymology, syntax are
derivatives, not foundations. "Practice makes perfect" is a saying that
needs to be followed by the old scholastic defensive _"distinguo."_
Practice in reading, rather than practice in writing, makes good English
composition possible. The "daily theme" may be overdone; it is of little
use unless _thought_ keeps ahead of the pen.

I would plead then for the teaching of English after a fashion that will
reveal great thoughts and stimulate to greater life, through the noble
art of English literature and the perfectly illogical but altogether
admirable English language. The function of education is to make
students feel, think and act, after a fashion that increasingly reveals
and utilizes the best that is in them, and increasingly serves the uses
of society, and both history and English can be so taught as to help
towards the accomplishment of these ends.

There is another factor that may be so used, but I confess I shall speak
of it with some hesitation. It is at present, and has been for ages,
entirely outside the possibility even of consideration, and in a sense
that goes beyond the general ignoring of religion, for while Catholics,
who form the great majority of Christians, still hold to religion as a
prime element in education, there are none--or only a minority so small
as to be negligible--who give a thought to art in this connection. I
bring forward the word, and the thing it represents, with diffidence,
even apologetically: indeed, it is perhaps better to renounce the word
altogether and substitute the term "beauty," for during the nineteenth
century art got a bad name, not altogether undeservedly, and the
disrepute lingers. So long as beauty is an instinct native to men (and
it was this, except for very brief and periodic intervals, until hardly
more than a century ago, though latterly in a vanishing form), it is
wholesome, stimulating and indispensable, but when it becomes
self-conscious, when it finds itself the possession of a few highly
differentiated i