Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1862
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
We made various experiments in teaching grammar, and must confess that no one of them succeeded in our aim of rendering this study attractive. In the summer, in the second and first classes, a new teacher made a beginning with explaining the parts of speech, and the children at least some of them at first were interested, as they would have been in charades and enigmas. Often, after the lesson was finished, they recurred to the idea of enigmas, and amused themselves in puzzling one another with such questions as, "Where is the predicate?" or
"What sits in the spoon,
Letting his legs hang down?"
But there was no application to correct writing, or if there was any it was rather to erroneous than to correct sentences.
Just exactly as it was with the wrong use of vowels when you say you pronounce a but write o, the pupil will write robota for rabota, "work," and mo Una for malina, "blackberry";[23] when you say that two predicates are separated by a comma he will write, "I wish, to say" and so on. To expect him to recognize in every sentence what is the subject and what is the predicate is impossible. But if he learns to do so, then in the process of searching for them he loses all instinct which he must have for writing the work correctly, not to speak of the fact that in syntactical analysis the teacher is all the time obliged to be subtle before his scholars and deceive them, and they are very well aware of this.
For instance, we hit on the proposition: On the earth there were no mountains.
One said the subject was earth, another that it was mountains, but we said that it was an impersonal proposition, [24] and we saw very clearly that the pupils kept silent simply from politeness, but that they understood perfectly well that our answer was far more stupid than theirs; and in this respect we were secretly in perfect agreement.
Having persuaded ourselves of the uselessness of syntactical analysis, we also tried etymological analysis the parts of speech, declensions, conjugations; and in the same way they proposed conundrums to one another about the dative case, the infinitive mood, and adverbs, and it resulted in the same ennui, the same abuse of the authority exerted by us, and the same lack of attention.
In the older class they always use the letter in the dative and prepositional cases, but when they correct the younger ones in this respect they can never give the reason why, and they are obliged to fall back on enigmas of cases in order to remember the rule: "The dative takes a #."
Even the little ones, who have as yet heard nothing about the parts of speech, very often cry out the right letter to indicate the dative, though they themselves do not know why, and evidently take delight in the fact that they have guessed it.
In the last few weeks I experimented with the second class with an exercise of my own invention; and I like all inventors was charmed with it, and it seemed to me extraordinarily convenient and rational until I became convinced of its inefficacy in actual use. Not naming the parts of speech in a sentence, I made the scholars write something down, sometimes giving them a subject that is, a proposition; and by means of questions I tried to make them amplify the proposition by introducing adjectives, new subjects, qualifying clauses, relatives, and complementary attributes.
"Wolves run."
"When?" "Where?" "How?" "What wolves run?" "What are running?" "They run and what else do they do?" It seemed to me that in getting accustomed to questions requiring this, that, or the other part of speech, they would acquire the distinctions between the different parts of the proposition and the different parts of speech.
They did acquire them, but it became a bore to them, and they in their heart of hearts asked themselves "Why?" and I was obliged to ask myself the same question, and could find no answer.
Never, without a struggle, will man or child give up their living speech to mechanical analyzes and dissection. There is an instinct of self-protection in this living speech. If it is to develop, then it endeavors to develop spontaneously, and only in conformity with all vital conditions. As soon as you try to catch this word, to fasten it into a vise, to tear it limb from limb, to give it ornaments which seem to you necessary, how this word with its living idea and significance contracts and vanishes away, and all you have left in your hands is the mere shell on which you can work your own artifices, not harming and not helping the word which you want to form. Up till the present time the scholars of the second class continue syntactical and grammatical analysis and the practice of amplifying sentences, but it drags, and I suspect it will soon stop of itself. Moreover, as an exercise in language, though it is thoroughly ungrammatical, we do as follows:
(1) From given words we have the pupils compare sentences. For example we write Nikolai, wood, to learn, and one writes: "If Nikola? had not been cutting wood, he would have come to learn;" another: "Nikolai cuts the wood well; you must learn of him," and so on.
(2) We compose verses on a given model, and this exercise, more than all the rest, occupies the older pupils. The verses are made like the following:
By the window sits the old man In a tulup worn and torn, While the muzhik in the street Peels red eggs to eat.
(3) An exercise which has great success in the lowest class: Some word is given first a substantive, then an adjective, an adverb, and a preposition. One pupil goes behind the door, and each of the others must compose a sentence in which the given word is employed. The one who hides must guess it.
All these exercises the writing of sentences on given words, versification, and the guessing of words have one single aim: to persuade the pupil that a word is a word, having its unalterable laws, modifications, endings, and mutual relations; now this conviction is slow to enter their minds, and it must assuredly precede the study of grammar.
All these exercises please; all exercises in grammar produce ennui. Stranger and more significant than anything else is the fact that grammar is a bore, though nothing is easier. As soon as you cease to teach it by a book, a six-year-old child, beginning with definitions, will be able in half an hour to decline, to conjugate, to recognize genders, numbers, tenses, subjects, and predicates, and you feel that he knows all this just as well as you do.
In the dialect of our region there is no neuter gender: gun, hay, meat, window everything is she, and in this respect grammar is of no avail.
The older pupils for three years have known all the rules of declension and the case-endings, and yet, in writing a short sentence, they will make several mistakes, and in spite of your corrections and all the reading they do, they will use a wrong word over and over again.
But you ask yourself: Why teach them when they know all this as well as you do? If I ask what is the genitive plural feminine of bolsho'i, "great"; if I ask where the subject or the predicate is; if I ask from what stem comes the word raspakhnulsa[25] it is only the nomenclature that is difficult for him, but the adjective in whatever number and case you wish he will always use without mistake. Consequently, he knows the declension. Never in speaking will he neglect to employ the predicate, and he will not confuse the complement with it.
He is aware that raspakhnuf sa, "to open," is related to the word pakh, and he recognizes the laws of the formation of words better than you do because more new words are invented by children than by any one else. What then is the good of this nomenclature and demand for philosophic definition which are above their powers? Except the demand at examinations, the only explanation for the necessity of grammar may be discovered in its application to a regular evolution of thought.
In my personal experience I never found this application, I never find it in the example of men who, without knowing grammar, yet write correctly, and of candidates in philology who write incorrectly, and I can point to scarcely one illustration of the scholars at Yasnaya Polyana finding a knowledge of grammar of any practical use.
It seems to me that grammar goes of itself, like a mental gymnastic exercise, not without utility, while language the ability to write, read, and understand also goes of itself.
Geometry and mathematics in general present themselves at first also as merely a mental gymnastic exercise, but with this difference, that each geometrical proposition, each mathematical definition, leads to further, indeed to an infinite number, of deductions and propositions; while in grammar, even if you agree with those who see in it the application of logic to language, there is a very narrow domain of these deductions and propositions. As soon as the pupil, by one route or another, masters a language, all applications from grammar fall away and perish like something which has outlived its usefulness.
We personally cannot as yet divest ourselves of the tradition that grammar, in the sense of the laws of language, is indispensable for the regular development of thought; it even seems to us that there is a need of grammar for young students that they have in them, though unconsciously, the laws of grammar; but we are convinced that the grammar which we know is not at all that which is necessary for the student, and that in this custom of teaching grammar is a great historical misunderstanding.
The child knows that it is necessary to write in the pronoun sibye, not because it is the dative case, however many times you may have told him so, and not merely because he blindly imitates what he has seen written over and over again he gets possession of these examples, not in the form of the dative case, but in some other way.
We have a pupil from another institution and he knows grammar excellently, and yet he can never distinguish the third person from the infinitive of the reflexive, and another pupil, Fedka, who, knowing nothing about infinitives, never makes a mistake, and who uses auxiliaries with remarkably logical consistency. [26]
We, in the Yasnaya Polyana school, recognize in the teaching of reading and writing all known methods as not without their advantages, and we employ them in proportion as they are willingly accepted by the pupils and in proportion to our attainments in knowledge. At the same time, we do not accept any one method to the exclusion of another, and we are all the time trying to discover new measures. We are in as little sympathy with Mr. Perevlyevsky's method, which did not receive more than a two days' trial at Yasnaya Polyana, as with the widely disseminated opinion that the only method of teaching a language is writing, notwithstanding the fact that writing constitutes in the Yasnaya Polyana school the principal method of teaching language. We are searching and still hope to find!