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of grammar does not necessarily militate against the success of our method. On the other hand, the positive liking for foreign languages may be a great aid to us, but only if we succeed in burying within the sugar the necessary grammatical pill.
In reply to the above-quoted passages from Lobsien it might be urged that, just because grammar is a matter of thought, it is a mistake to burden children with it at too early a stage. As the intellect and powers of thinking develop, dislike for grammar will diminish. So it might be supposed, but statistics do not confirm this view. The following table, which Lobsien has compiled from material of the psychologist Brandell, shows that dislike for language-teaching increases as the grades rise, both among boys and among girls, though the increase is greater among girls.
Grade I Grade II Grade III
Boys
Girls
+ 1.2
+ 1.2
+ O.4
— 10.6
— II. 2
— 23-3
+ 3-0
+ 0.3
+ 0.9
— 9.4
— 21.0
— 30.0
We are naturally bound to be curious as to the causes of this strong dislike and, though Lobsien advances a number of reasons, he does not seem to us to have really penetrated the secret. He speaks of dryness, pedantic accuracy and hair-splitting, the undue strain upon the memory, the one-sided development of the intelligence and the deadening effect upon the imagination. And as if this were not already enough, he refers a little later on to the killing of initiative and finally to remoteness from realities. Of all these reasons only the last seems to us to be really cogent. All the others may be traced to avoidable faults of method and are not vices inherent in language-teaching. No doubt, dullness and pedantry have in earlier] days and in the old books been responsible for some egregious results. Mauthner, for instance, on p. 446 of the second volume of his " Sprachkritik," quotes the following passage from a school grammar: " The subjunctive is used in dependent clauses after verbs denoting activities which have only a conditional result, verbs indicating a thought, supposition, wish, request, hope, fear, attempt, veto, command, prohibition, permission or expectation." This example of cruelty to children we quote mainly for its historical interest, for nowadays no one would seriously contemplate teaching languages by such methods. One hardly knows which to pity more, the subject or the pupil. This form of unreal teaching may be considered extinct, but there is another source of discontent harder to exorcise, and that is the feeling of the uselessness of grammar-teaching. Grammar will never teach a man his native language; only those who have already an extensive and scientific knowledge of their own tongue will occupy themselves with its grammar or derive any benefit therefrom.