Papurau Newydd Cymru

Chwiliwch 15 miliwn o erthyglau papurau newydd Cymru

Cuddio Rhestr Erthyglau

19 erthygl ar y dudalen hon

-----THE TEACHING OF WELSH…

Newyddion
Dyfynnu
Rhannu

THE TEACHING OF WELSH IN WELSH 1 ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. The following is the paper on the above subject by Professor Lloyd, of the U.C.W., read at a I meeting of the Welsh branch of the Teachers' Guild, held at Aberystwyth last Saturday It is, I take it, a favourable augury that the branch of the Teachers' Guild which has been established in our midst has set apart an afternoon for the discussion of this topic. In doing this, the committee have not, of course, sanctioned any scheme, or even taken sides on the question whether tnere shall be teaching of Welsh or not. But they have recognised the interest and the practical importance of the question, and so have prepared the way for an indulgent hearing of what the advocates of this teaching had to say for them- selves. For my part, I ask nothing better than that the matter should be approached in a purely judicial spirit, for, if what I have to urge does cot commend itself to the enlightened judgment, I know not on what other grounds to claim your co-operation. I make, therefore, no appeal to the patriotic impulses of this gathering, firstly, because I suppose not all of you have the felicity to be Welsh, and my declamation might, therefore, fall but coldly on your ears, but even more because I do not believe it is patriotic to appeal to the passions of a people against its truest interests. I advocate some system of teaching, or, as I prefer to put it, quite apart from national pride or prejudice, I believe the principle is a good one, and, if applied, could not fail to benefit the Welsh people educa- tionally. No doubt many of those who are urging the same thing do so fiotn a mere instinct of admira- tion for all that is Welsh and of the reverse for all that is English. But injudicious champions must not be allowed to damage a good cause: the question is really one of educational reform, and I am happy to have the privilege of presenting it in that light to the audience of educational expeits. Let me begin by saying that there is here no question of the perpetuation or the extinction of the Welsh language. The life and death of a language are under the control of natural laws- law& so subtle and yat so potent as to elude and defy the utmost diligence on the part of any organization v hich might set itself to thwart them. At one time, it was said that the introduction of railways would kill the Welsh language, but the language, as a Welsh poet says, was too wise to put its neck under a wheel, and now people talk of the necessity of having booking clerks with an elementary knowledge of Welsh. Later, it was confidently prophesitd that Welsh would disappear with the progress of Board School educition: as a matter of fact, what usually happens is that the Board School education succumbs to the language. Quite as futile would it be to aify artificial organi- zation to seek to prolong the life of the Welsh language an hour beyond its appointed day of doom; when Welsh is not spoken by the common people in their own homes and of their own free will, because they like it and do not care to speak any other language, its career as a living speech will have come to an end. That such a day may come no one will of course deny, unless he is con- cerned to maintain that Providence means to exercise a special guardianship over the language of Eden and of Paradise. All that is contended is that the day has not yet come. Welsh is the home tongue of thousands of Welsh firesides, and is likely to remain so for an indefinite period. From these firesides Welsh-speaking children, knowing little, if any, English, are being sent for instruc- tion to elementary schools. The number of such children attending school at present is probably not far short of 150,000. The question to be solved is how, in the case of these 150,000 children, are we to deal with the knowledge of Welsh and the ignorance of English with which they enter upon school life. Hitherto that question has been answered by treating the children of Merioneth- shire and Cardiganshire in exactly the same way as the children of Norfolk or Devonshire. It has been assumed that they know English, and that they know no other language. I do not for a a moment mean to say that sensible teachers have not grasped the absurdity of the situation and done their best by private methods of their own to remedy the vice of the official system. I only say that this is the system on which codes have been drawn up, text books prepared inspection con- ducted, and grants awarded. All instruction has been conveyed in English, and the mysteries of nouns and verbs have been unfolded to the be- wildered scholar before he was quite clear in his mind as to the difference between the terms "horse" and "cow." I have been startled to discover that Welsh schoolboys had somehow developed a skill for parsing which was indepen- dent of any knowledge of the meaning of words; they knew a noun when they saw it, even though the sense of the word might be a matter on which they did not feel qualified to pronounce an opinion. Knowledge acquired in this manner, even though it should pass the ordeal of inspection, is of course mere useless lumber, of which the scholar willingly relieves himself when he has outgrown his school- going days. Professor Henry Jones calculated some time ago that only one-fifth of the scholars in a purely Welsh school acquired there English enough to be of practical service to them in after life; the remaining four-fifths soon became monoglot Welshmen and Welsh-women, knowing practically nothing, save what they had learned in the Sunday School, where the teaching was criven in a form suited to their comprehension. °This state of things, of course, only prevails in the rural districts. In a seaside town like Aberystwyth, annually flooded with summer visitors-the flower of the Midland counties, there is too much English in the air to allow the younger generation to remain in entire ignorance of the neighbour tongue. Yet even here some of us could tell tales of the Jingoistic feats of lodging-house handmaidens; only the handmaidens may be importations from the country. The Society for the- Utilisation of the Welsh Language has undertaken to grapple with this question. It disclaims any intention of giving the Welsh language a longer lease of life than it is entitled to, and aims only at the utilisa- tion of such knowledge of Welsh as there un- doubtedly is. Some of our supporters have, indeed, come over to us because they see in our plans the most effectual method of killing the Welsh language When English is rationally taught through the medium of Welsh, they say it must make such headway as to drive out the older language altogether. I believe myself they arn a good deal too sanguine, and that there is nothing to prevent Wales from beiug bilingual for many centuries; but I cite their views in order to show tIat we are a liberal and comprehensive body. The kev-note to the movement then is "utilisation," the applica- tion of the well-known educational principle that in teaching we should proceed from the known to the unknown, turning all the child's previous knowledge to account, and developing earlier lines of thought, instead of beginning entirely from the foundation. During its earlier years the Society which now numbers 1,200 members, devoted its energies mainly to the task of bringing public opinion to bear upon government so as to secure the recognition of Welsh teaching in some form in the Education Code. This part of the work was carried to a successful terminition in the year 1889 when the principles of the Society were recognized' in the New Education Code laid by Government before Parliament. The Code, you will remember, did not survive the party struggles of that session, but it was re-introduced in the next, with the Welsh provisions intact, and it came into operation last September. Thus all that Government can do ior us in the matter has been done. The words of the Code are few, and seem to concede little, but official assurances have been received that they are intended to cover all the proposals of the Society, and that if they do not do so, they must be made to. Our appeal has now to be made to those around us- to teachers and schco! managers. This is really a teachers' question, and I am strongly of opinion that the only way of proceeding in the matter is to enlist the co-operation of those who have themselves to carry out in practice the schemes of educational reformers. To appeal to the national enthusiasm of school managers, in days when national enthusiasm is so sure a pass- port to fame, against the over-burthened teacher would not only be moraily wrong, but-what is worse- u nprofess iona 1. It costs the educational authority little to put on a new subject the strain of fitting the new requirement into the school machinery falls mainly on the teacher. But the position is (ana otnerwiso I should hardly have ventured to bring this matter before the Teachers' Guild) not that we propose to saddle the teacher I with new burdens, but that we seek to readjust and lighten the old. There are scores of teachers among our members—teachers in no less than 80 schools have at different times put our ideas to the test of practice, and, if any teachers have regarded us with distrust, it has been the result, I feel certain, of that innate conservatism of which teacher human nature, like other samples of the nn?16 c?m™0<ty, contains so large an admixture, lhe old plan has somehow or other pulled us through year after year. Why venture, they say, I .1 upon new ana perilous experiments? But this is an argument to which you of the Teachers' Guild, the pioneers of reform, the apostles of educational light and leading, will, I am sure, show scant merjy; what appiftves ilself ia your tight as reasonable you will not reject because it is new. I believe the Society has suffered to some extent through the prominence necessarily given hitherto to the weakest part of its programme-Welsh as a specific subject. Until last September, that was the only portion of our design which it was possible to set working in the schools. Welsh grammar could be taught instead of geography, history, or a scientific subject. Now I think it will be readily admitted that if a child is to learn grammar at all, he should begin with the grammar of his native tongue. If his mind is directed to the rules and distinctions which govern so familiar a feature of his life as his every day talk, his intelligence will be stimulated in a profitable way; he will be taught that most valuable lessen, to think for himself, instead of blindly regarding whatever is as existing by some mysterious destiny. If, on the other hand, his most serious grammatical studies gather round a foreign tongue, then grammar will become for bin a kind of eabalistic science, the real import of which is only known to those great necromancers, his preceptors. This, I am convinced, is the case with numberless boys and girls who study Latin they know no more correct the accusative case, say, with actual speech as known to them than they do with the planet Saturn. If grammar, then, is to be made a profitable study for Welsh boys, let it be through the medium of Welsh. Some of those who habitually speak out of the emptiness that is in them have maintained that Welsh has no grammar suitable for use in instruction they imagine the language to be a sort of fortuitous concourse of atoms, blissfully innocent of rules. Possibly, some who are here present and have earnestly wrestled, as beginners in Welsh, with the middle voice and the emphatic predicate are of a different opinion. My belief is that Welsh grammar is an admirable intellectual exercise, particularly so when studied side by side with English grammar it is a whole- some thing to be taught that such rules as "The verb must agree with its nominative in number and person," and "The plural is formed by inflection from the singular," are not as immutable as the law of gravitation. But the question may very properly be asked-baving regard to the very limited possibilities of instruction afforded by an elementary school course, is it well to teach so ornamental a subject as grammar at all ? No one now believes the old fable that "grammar teaches us to read and write correctly," any more than that other, that logic teaches us to reason with propriety." People who know much logic often reason very badly, and to speak and write correctly is an affair, not of grammatical rules, but of practice. When Welsb grammar is proposed as a substitute for geography or some scientific study, there is reasonable room for doubt whether the older subjects may not be in many cases the more useful. Hence, in advocating the adoption of Welsh as a specific subject, the society is in a weaker position than in urging its claims as a class subject. This part of the programme has peihaps suffered also through the inadequacy of the text books, which have been prepared by the society; my own ex- perience in teaching Welsh by their means has convinced me that they need to b ? very thoroughly revised. The mistake was that they were entrusted to compilers who bad previously taught only English grammar, and who followed English conventions, therefore, instead of working on the lines indicated by the genius of the language itself. Welsh as a class subject means the substitution for the present course in English grammar of a graduated course of translation from Welsh into English. The precise manner in which this course is arranged will appear from the prospectus of the society, of which a copy is now before you. In- stead of teaching young Welshmen and Welsh- women parsing and analysis in an unknown tongue, it is proposed to give them systematic lessons in the language which in after life will prove of most service to them in bettering their worldly foitunes. This will be done, not by ignor- ing Welsh and treating it as a vulgar eccentricity, but by making it the basis on which to build a knowledge of English. In doing this, some amount of instruction in Welsh as a literary language wiIi necessarily be given, but the ultimate y result will be that the scholar will speak and write both Welsh and English with tolerable ease, in- stead of speaking only Welsh and writing no language at all. It may be said that this is to be over-sanguine, but surely the experiment is well worth trying. No system of teaching English can be worst than the present one, which in addition to its other disadvantages, the diffidence and awkwardness it produces in the child, the severance it produces between the school and the outside world of home and play, has this crowning draw- back, that it does not teach English. Reading books suitable for the purposes of the scheme are now being prepared some will be ready in a few months' time; and it is earnestly to be hoped that they will meet with the approval of teachers, so that a fair trial may be given to the new method. In the meantime, if I have not convinced you of the wisdom or practical helpfulness of the scheme, I trust I have prepared your minds calmly and dispassionately to consider it when the time comes to put it into operation. Experience must decide the matter; to past experience of my own I can of conrse lay no claim, but I claim the right of every one who has a practical interest in educational matters-the right to suggest reforms.

BETTER THAN WEALTH.

[No title]

THE CARD SCANDAL.

LLANEGWAD AND BRECHFA. SCHOOL…

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LLANDILO BOARD OF;1' GUARDIANS.

NOTES POLITICAL AND OTHERWISE.

LLANRHYSTYD. |

LLANDYSSUL.

ABERAYRON.

PENBOYR.

ST. CLEARS.

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----------LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

PRESENTATION '1'0 THE MAYOR…

NEW QUAY SCHOOL BOARD.

LLANDILO SCHOOL BOARD.

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