Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II STUDY AND TEACHING OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE "These studies nourish youth, entertain old age, gild prosperity, furnish a resource and comfort in adversity, delight us at home and do not hinder us abroad, are our companions during the night, when we are travelling, or are sojourning in the country."—Cicero. MUCH has been heard of recent years about the supreme importance of foreign languages in modern education, and in addition to 'emphasising the need of previous good drill in the mother tongue, the object of the present section of our subject will be to indicate a way to the realisation of the wish of reformers to see language instruction recast in all our schools. The words of the famous scholarly Roman orator that appear above, which in his time could but express the sentiments of the cultured few, accurately set forth at the present day a result of what he himself in the same speech called "liberal studies," which every advocate of "Commercial Education" on healthy lines will foster. A modern writer, in a novel read by every German, from the Imperial family to households the education of which has ended with the elementary school, has said that " Poetry everywhere dominates the work of the children of men"; in Debit and Credit, as Professor Franz Lange well said, Freytag has "glorified the profession of Merchant, and exhibited the German at his best, at his work." But we are told by some that Utilitarian principles are hurtful to education; and such seek in modern language instruction to discredit attempts toteach an even living language colloquially. The writer fully endorses a resolution of the Modern Language Association at their last annual meeting: " Every effort shall be made to maintain the scholarly and literary side of modern language teaching... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.