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MASON W. GROSS
again. Surely it is obvious that
if
this is true those who would improve
i.qstruction are licked from the start and that no amount of tinkering
with anthologies is going
to
change the situation. In that case, should
we not explore this matter right away, instead of occupying ourselves
with a study that assumes this situation is going to persist? Are the
teachers just plain incompetent? Are the classes too large? Is there
no school library, or is it poorly assembled?
In other words, I would suggest to the authors of this work, that
if they could assume that the anthology would
be
used by a competent
teacher who would consider it along with other materials as an aid to
the teaching of English, a lot of their problems, and also of the
anthologists', would disappear. To require publishers to come up with
textbooks which will "literally" teach the course is to demand the
impossible.
However, it is clear that even if the anthology were simply a teach–
ing aid, our authors would have criticisms to make of much of the
content of the books under study. For example, they find a disturbing
trend towards the inclusion of more and more material by twentieth–
century authors. But unless such material is ruled out by the very fact
of its having been written since 1900, then surely, as this century wean
on, there is a good chance that there will be some increase in the
amount of modern writing suitable for adoption alongside work from
earlier centuries. The authors spend a good deal of time pointing out
that what the writer should do is to convey ideas. Are we then sup–
posed to put these two theses together and argue that there have
been few ideas in the twentieth century worth writing about or worth
studying in the form in which they have been written?
One could well argue that much contemporary thinking about the
world would have been impossible had it not been for the develop–
ment of a new logic by such authors as Whitehead and Russell. What
these logicians did was to dethrone the Aristotelian analysis with its
emphasis on the subject-predicate form of statement. In subtle ways
this had an effect on forms in art and music as well as in literature,
and precisely because of the huge difficulties in learning how to
manage these forms, much contemporary literature sounds barbaric to
those whose sensibility is stuck in the past. Messrs. Lynch and Evans
apparently want
to
be sure that our high school students shall develop
a sense for the English language which will keep them forever at odds
with the new notions about the nature of the world and of man.
Perhaps the most important point of the book is the insistence
that the purpose of English courses is
to
teach literature, just as history
co~rses
teach history, and that everything admitted to an anthology