Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1875 — Memory in the Study of Language. [ARTICLE]

Memory in the Study of Language.

Of all the exercises which most faror ignorance in teachers who are not duly prepared, and which inspire most ennui in students, the worst are those mnemonic exercises in which the master acts a purely passive part and the pupil an automatic one. It is said that by such means we develop the memory of children, but for this no special effort is needed, as the culture Of 'memory, like that of attention, is secured by the activity of the other faculties. It is more particularly in exercising the judgment that we enrich the memory with useful things. The knowledge we gather in the first years of life we owe to observation and experience—the best of masters-*-and it is more profoundly engraved upon the memory than all the memorized lessons of college. The mother tongue is acquired without learning anything by heart Those who, in teaching their pupils to speak a foreign language, give them words* to learn, to form into phrases, commit a triple error. In the first place, the child does not learn to talk by passing from words to phrases. In the second place, in order to speak, he learns to understand what is said to him. In the third place, no mother ever attempted such a proceeding; the instinct of imitation alone suffices the child in learning to speak. The expression of thought is not aided

by learning extracts from authors, because, for the most part, these extracts contain not a phrase or an idea that would aid In conversation. In this work the Attention Is directed exclusively to words, and the meraoryis aided by their juxtaposition. By means of repetition they are revived in the mind in their order of succession, each word suggesting that which follows. The mors we repeat the lemon in order to retain it, the more easy and rapid the recitation, the more the text escapes analysis and the will. Excellent as the exercise may be in pronunciation and oratory, it is inefficacious as a means of learning to speak. To learn a model by heart no more teaches to speak titan tracing a drawing-model teaches to draw. —Olavde Mated, in Popular Science Monthly.