Founding Grammars (16 page)

The Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863, includes the specialized use of
shall
with third person to promise or express determination (“We here highly resolve … that government of the people, for the people, by the people shall not perish from the earth”). As early as the 1780s, Noah Webster had complained that few people knew the proper uses of
will
and
shall.
By the early nineteenth century, these specialized uses would have been even less common outside of grammar books. Yet Lincoln obviously understood them.

None of the formal grammar rules that Lincoln applies in his speeches would have been acquired naturally while growing up on the Indiana frontier. He could only have learned them by studying Kirkham, Murray, and other grammarians. Grammar books promised to set their users on the path to scholarly and social achievement. In this case at least, those promises were fulfilled.

 

4.

Rational Grammar

In spite of Lindley Murray's overwhelming popularity during the 1820s, linguistic reform was far from dead. While Noah Webster was laboring on his landmark dictionary, other grammarians took up the banner of natural American speech. Like him, they called for a more realistic approach to grammar, often using the same arguments as Webster—that grammar should be based on how people really speak and that common usages should be acceptable. They rejected Latin-based rules, just as he did.

The “rational” grammarians were like Webster in another way, too. They had fallen under the compelling influence of John Horne Tooke. Their fascination with his theory of word origins would prove to be a fatal diversion. Sensible grammar reforms were lost in the welter of long-winded arguments that prepositions, adjectives, and other parts of speech had originated as nouns or verbs. As a result, their books suffered the same failure as Webster's
Philosophical and Practical Grammar.
Reviewers, teachers, and the few members of the general public who were aware of these alternative grammar books preferred to cling to their trusty copies of Murray or Kirkham.

The most prominent of the reforming grammarians was a Bostonian educator and textbook writer named William Bentley Fowle. At around the same time that Andrew Jackson was preparing for his first inauguration, Fowle was writing to argue for an English grammar uncluttered by artificially imposed rules. “It is to be regretted,” he writes in his 1827 book
The True English Grammar,
“that a grammar of our language was not formed at a period when our ancestors were free from any servile deference to Latin.”

Fowle notes that Lowth modeled his grammar on Latin partly as a way to familiarize students with Latin terminology before they went on to study that language. For most students, however, learning Latin grammatical categories is a waste of time. “Not more than one child in a thousand studies Latin after having studied English grammar,” argues Fowle. Since Latin is reserved for the privileged few, “is it not wiser to have a grammar which we can call our own?” In the true Jacksonian spirit, he calls on Americans to adopt the vernacular of “the common people.” Although their nonstandard usages often “bring upon them the sneer of grammarians,” these speakers are adhering to a more natural form of the language.
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Fowle's early experiences with grammar influenced his later attitudes. He was born in 1795, the third son of highly educated, though poor, parents. His father, Henry, had originally planned to pursue a literary career, but money troubles and a fast-growing family forced him into the trade of pump and block making. He nonetheless managed to keep up his interest in books and scholarship and owned a large, carefully chosen library. He sent his son to school at the unusually early age of three.

Young William first attended a “dame school”—a school for small children run by a woman rather than a schoolmaster. There he started his mental training by memorizing the Westminster Assembly's “Shorter Catechism.” He learned it so thoroughly that he could repeat the whole thing “backwards as well as forwards,” much to the delight of his teacher. She often called on him to perform this feat in front of school visitors. Fowle recalled, however, that he didn't understand much of the meaning in either direction.
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This experience contributed to his later belief that memorization was a poor way to learn.

William's talent for rote learning stood him in good stead when he began studying grammar a few years later. By the age of six he had memorized Caleb Bingham's popular grammar book for young children,
The Young Ladies' Accidence.
Next he tackled an abridged version of Lindley Murray's grammar and soon had that committed to memory as well. At the age of ten he won a medal for grammar knowledge.

In spite of these achievements, Fowle hated grammar. He describes his early grammar classes in
The Teacher's Institute,
an advice book for young teachers that he wrote after twenty years as a schoolmaster. He recalls that pupils sat on twelve long benches, with six or eight boys to a bench. Each bench represented a different “form,” or level of scholarly achievement. The boys took turns reciting grammar lessons at the rate of one bench a day, progressing from the more advanced pupils on the front benches to the less skilled at the back. A grammar lesson typically consisted of a boy spelling a few words and then reciting at least six lines memorized from the grammar book.

Those who performed especially well were moved to the front benches. That meant that their turn to recite a grammar lesson came around again more quickly than if they'd stayed in place. When a boy could recite every word of the grammar book three times in a row, he received the dubious reward of promotion to the first bench, where he was introduced to the mysteries of parsing. This system understandably squelched any potential enthusiasm for mastering the subject of grammar. “Such was the horror in which this exercise was held,” recalls Fowle, “that boys, whose turn it would be to say grammar the next day, would miss words in spelling, so as to drop down to a lower form, and put off the evil day.”
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Many who had the opportunity to advance to the first form intentionally gave wrong answers to avoid the move.

In Fowle's view, teaching grammar by forcing students to memorize and recite it is not only mind-numbingly tedious, it's ineffective. To the boys who struggled with memorization, grammar lessons were a recurring nightmare. To those—like Fowle himself—who excelled at it, the lessons were less painful but still ultimately meaningless. The schoolmaster never discussed the context for the rules or explained how to apply them. Students simply parroted the lessons without comprehension.

Fowle discovered the uselessness of knowing grammar books by heart when he entered the prestigious Boston Latin School at the age of thirteen. One of his teachers tested his grammar skills by demanding the past participle of
love.
Fowle was humiliated to realize that he couldn't remember it. He concludes, “It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that I hated grammar, had no faith in the utility of teaching it as it was then taught, and determined to reform the method if I ever had a good opportunity.”
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That opportunity would eventually come, but Fowle would discover that grammar teachers—as well as their former pupils—were remarkably resistant to change.

After two years at the Boston Latin School, William was ready to enter Harvard. Unfortunately, his father was once again mired in financial difficulties, so instead of going to college, William signed on as a bookseller's apprentice. His master was none other than Caleb Bingham, author of
The Young Ladies' Accidence—
now retired from teaching and in the business of publishing and selling textbooks. Fowle's unhappiness with the way grammar was taught did not extend to his new mentor. He greatly respected Bingham. He later wrote of him as “a good scholar; a very successful and much beloved teacher; a gentleman in the best sense of the word.”
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Fowle's apprenticeship dramatically influenced his ideas about education, including grammar education. Because the bookstore dealt only in textbooks, business was sporadic. Fowle had plenty of time to read and found that he enjoyed this informal way of gaining an education. He also began developing his own ideas about teaching. Bingham was a prominent school reformer, and the bookstore was a gathering place for like-minded teachers. Fowle often joined in their lively conversations.

The store was so congenial that when an acquaintance, theologian William Ellery Channing, offered to pay Fowle's way through Harvard, he declined. He later wrote that he was grateful that poverty had prevented him from attending college, “which would have furnished me with a diploma to wrap up and bury my intellect.”
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Instead he continued learning on his own. He formed the “Belles-Lettres Society,” a group of a dozen or so shop clerks that met once a week to read each other original essays. The group stayed together for two years, and several members later became professional men or teachers.

When Bingham died in 1817, his family hired the twenty-two-year-old Fowle to run the business. Fowle spent five more years at the bookstore. Then he got the chance to put some of his educational theories into practice. Boston's Primary School Committee discovered two hundred young people who had somehow slipped through the school system's cracks. They were now too old to attend primary school, but not qualified to attend classes with pupils their own age. The Committee decided to educate them in a special school.

The sum allocated to furnish a schoolroom and hire a teacher was a barely adequate $1,000 (equal to about $21,000 today), so to save money, the school was organized on the “monitorial” system.
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The monitorial system was a recently invented way to keep students with varying skill levels occupied while employing only one teacher. The teacher focused on instructing the oldest, most advanced students. These students—the monitors—would then listen to the younger children reciting their lessons. That way, the whole class could be active at once. Normally students sat silently much of the time, waiting for their turn to recite. Fowle, who was a member of the Primary School Committee, volunteered to do the teaching until a permanent instructor could be found.

Fowle's first experience teaching grammar, described in
The Teacher's Institute,
reinforced his disgust with mainstream grammar books. When quizzing the monitors on the parts of speech, he discovered to his chagrin that they could not correctly identify the parts of even the simplest sentences. Asked to parse the sentence
David smote Goliath,
one young woman guessed that
smote
was a preposition. Her reasoning—prepositions, according to Murray, “serve to connect words with one another and to show the relation between them.” In this case, the student explained,
smote
connected David with Goliath. When asked what she thought the relation between them was, she ventured that it was not a very friendly one.

This incident, so reminiscent of Fowle's own embarrassing experience at the Latin School, made him realize that grammatical ignorance was common even among those who had studied the fabled Murray. He comments drily that his student's performance shook his faith in “the perfection” of that book.
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No doubt it also strengthened his resolve to one day provide an alternative.

Fowle's temporary teaching assignment grew into a career. He approached it with the zeal of a born didact, introducing several innovations previously unheard of in Boston. These included using blackboards to write out grammar and spelling exercises and do arithmetic; teaching geography by drawing maps; and using instruments like air pumps to teach science. Instead of the usual instructional method of mindless repetition, he tried the novel approach of engaging the students according to their interests and capacities. Fowle also allowed girls to attend the school year-round, instead of the usual arrangement of teaching them only during the summer when the boys were busy elsewhere. Even more radically, he abolished corporal punishment.
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Fowle's reforms paid off. The special school was so successful that the School Committee eventually rewarded him with a regular teaching appointment and a schoolmaster's salary. In 1823 Fowle took over the headship of the Female Monitorial School—an early version of teacher training for young women. He remained there for seventeen years, until worsening health forced him to abandon teaching and return to bookselling.

Fowle's innovations gave him a taste of the hostile reception that radical reformers can expect. Conventional public schoolteachers saw Fowle's success as a threat. Not only would the monitorial system cut down on the need for their services, but they might be forced to introduce some of the same changes into their own classrooms. In an effort to close the special school after its first year, a teachers' group organized a campaign of letters to the newspapers, arguing that the new system was a way of cutting corners. They told parents it had nothing to recommend it but cheapness.

Although a placid, tolerant man in private life, Fowle reacted ferociously to attacks on his work. He jumped into the fray with a series of newspaper essays defending his methods and, incidentally, accusing other Boston schools of inefficiency. Under pressure, the City Council announced that the experimental school would be shut down. Later—after furious protests from the School Committee and perhaps after reading Fowle's essays—they changed their minds. The school was allowed to go forward with Fowle at its head. The furor over Fowle's school reforms was a preview of the violent reaction that his alternative grammar book would trigger several years later. It convinced him, as he would later write, that “there are no greater enemies to improvements in education than schoolmasters.”
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