CHAPTER VIITHE FINAL CONSIDERATION
There remains one final consideration. No one who has had the patience to examine dispassionately the facts contained in the preceding chapters can have failed to recognize the loss of time and waste of effort which the acquisition of our present orthography involves. Beside these, the needless squandering of money it causes, though a subject of just complaint, seems to me, after all, of slight account. But even evils of this sort, great as they unquestionably are, yield in importance to one far greater. In truth, it is not because of the waste of time in education—harmful as that unquestionably is—that our present orthography is peculiarly objectionable. It is the direct influence the acquisition of it exerts in putting the intellectual faculties to sleep at the most active period of life. Learning to spell is, with us, a purely mechanical process. As a mental discipline it is as utterly valueless as mere memorizing, where the student does not understandwhat he is repeating. Like that, it is also a positive intellectual injury. At the very outset of his school life the child is introduced into a study in which one natural and most important process in education, that of reasoning from analogy, is summarily suppressed. He finds at once, because the sound in one word is represented in one way, that it does not follow, as it ought, that in the next word he comes to it will be represented the same way. On the contrary, he finds it denoted by an entirely different combination of letters for no reason which he can possibly discover. It accordingly never enters his head that a sign, whether consisting of a single letter or a digraph, represents a particular sound and strictly ought never to represent but one. For him it can and usually does represent any one of half-a-dozen. This of itself tends to deprive him of the possession of all knowledge of the number and value of the sounds belonging to our speech. Unfortunately such a result is not the worst. The far more serious injury caused is the influence exerted upon the mind by the prohibition which the acquiring of our present orthography succeeds in imposing upon the exercise of the reason.
We can get some glimpse of the havocwrought to the reasoning powers by considering a single one of hundreds of illustrations that could be cited. At the very outset of his study the child is given, for example, the wordsbedandredto spell. If he has been properly trained up to this point, the limited acquaintance he has made with the values of letters leads him to sayb-e-dandr-e-d. These are pure phonetic spellings. They satisfy all the conditions. Then he is introduced to the wordhead. Reasoning from analogy, he proceeds to spell ith-e-d. But here authority steps in and directs him to insert another letter for which neither he nor his instructor can see the use. Then the wordbeadis shown him. Following the analogy ofhead, he naturally pronounces itbĕd. Once more authority steps in and directs him to give the combinationeaanother and quite distinct sound. Next, he is presented with the infinitives and presents,readandhear. Conforming to the example just given, and perceiving it to be satisfactory, he fancies that he has reached at last a secure haven. He finds his error when he meets the preterites of these two verbs. Both have the same vowel combinations as the present. One of them has precisely the same form. But he discovers thatreadof the preterite has quite a distinct pronunciation fromreadof the present,and that theeaofheardhas still another sound, distinct from that of either, to which he has not yet been introduced.
This condition of things is one which in numerous cases cannot easily be remedied, owing to the lawlessness prevailing in our representation of sounds. For the present, therefore, it may have to stand. But let us take up one or two cases where irrationality now prevails, and yet where a rational change can be made easily. It would, for instance, assuredly seem hard for a being who possesses intellect enough to be lost or saved to pretend that he sees any reason why the plural of words ending inoshould end sometimes with simplesand sometimes withes. Occasionally they have both terminations, according to the fancy of the individual writer. For illustration, the plurals ofgrotto,halo,memento,motto, andnegroare spelled by some authors withosand by others withoes. In the case ofhero, the latter ending has become the one regularly employed. This is probably due to the fact that the singular once ended ine. Discarded from that, it has transferred its unnecessary existence to the plural. As the large majority of these words never had theeas a termination, there seems not to be the slightest excuse on the ground either of derivation or pronunciation forinserting anywhere in the inflection the unnecessary letter. On the other hand, there seems every reason for making the spelling of the termination of this class of words uniform. Yet men will be found to insist in imposing upon the learner the task of mastering a distinction which serves no other purpose than to defy analogy and insult common sense.
Or take another sort of trouble which adds its burden to early education and contributes its share to the impairment of the reasoning powers. In the case of certain words the child is censured if he leaves a letter out. In the case of other words of precisely the same character and origin he is censured if he puts it in. He is asked, for example, to spell the conjunctiontill. The men who first employed the word had no use for but onel. They therefore did not double it. Now if the child spells it, as did his remote ancestors, with a singlel, he is blamed; but when he comes to its compounduntil, he is blamed again if he spells it with twol’s. If such differences of form served any purpose whatever, some justification might be pleaded for their maintenance. But nothing of the sort do they do. They simply heap up the burden of useless or rather harmful knowledge with which children are compelled to load their memory in defianceof their reason. Time which should be spent in learning something valuable in itself, and therefore permanently profitable, is now wasted in mastering empty distinctions in the external representation of words which have no distinction in reality, but are reckoned conventionally of the first importance.
Is it any wonder that in circumstances like these the child should speedily infer that it is of no benefit to him to make use of what little reasoning power he has been enabled to acquire? He must force himself to submit blindly to authority, which compels him to accept as true what he feels to be false. Now, authority in education is a good as well as a necessary thing when its dictates are based upon reason. But when they are not, when in truth they are defiant of reason, no more pernicious element can well enter into the training of the young. Doubtless the logical processes employed in other studies correct in time for most of us the mental twist thus imparted in childhood. But it is not always corrected. We have only to read certain of the arguments advanced against spelling reform to become aware that the faculty of reasoning on this subject which has been muddled in childhood is apt to remain muddled the rest of one’s life.
One illustration will bring out pointedly the truth of this last assertion. There is frequent complaint that the children in our schools spell badly. In this there is nothing new. It is a charge which has been made in every generation since spelling assumed the abnormal importance which has been imparted to it by modern devotion. In the sense in which it is often understood the complaint has no foundation in fact. Children spell just as well now as they did a generation or generations ago. If anything—persons of different periods, but belonging to the same class being alone taken into consideration—the proportion of so-called good spellers will pretty certainly be found larger now than ever before. But there always has been, and so long as our present absurd orthography continues there always will be, a goodly number of persons by whom it will never be thoroughly acquired. By many a respectable mastery of it will not be gained till a comparatively late period in their education. All this, too, in spite of the fact that in the popular mind correctness of spelling has assumed an exceptional importance. A man can blunder in his statement of facts; he can lay down false premises and draw from them the absurdest conclusions; he can exhibit incompetence andinconsequence in the discussion of matters important or unimportant—yet none of these gross manifestations of ignorance and incapacity will bring him so much discredit in the eyes of many as the inability to spell certain common words properly. There is something even worse than this. In many communities a man may be a drunkard or a libertine with far less injury to his reputation than the disclosure of the fact that he is unable to spell correctly.
This state of feeling has imparted to spelling a factitious importance in modern education. But it involves further an inconsistency in the course of many of the stoutest defenders of the present orthography. These are often seeking to reconcile things which are incompatible. No more frequent attacks are made upon the system of education prevalent in our higher institutions of learning than the stress they are supposed to lay upon the cultivation of the memory instead of the reason. Now, if there be any truth in this accusation, the course adopted is nothing more than an extension to the advanced student of the very processes which are used in the instruction of the child. In learning to spell, his memory is developed not merely in place of the reason, but too often in defiance of it. Yet in nineteen cases out of twenty it willbe found that the very persons who indulge in the most lugubrious lamentations about the subordination of the reason to the memory in the educational processes employed in our universities, are the ones who insist most strongly upon the retention of an orthography which tends inevitably to produce the very effect they profess to deplore. In one breath they complain of the poor spelling of the students in our schools and colleges. In the next breath they object to any alterations which would bring order where now all is inconsistency and confusion; to changes of any sort which would make English orthography approach nearer rationality, and, therefore, easier to acquire. Is it not fair to consider this attitude on their part a direct result of that mental twist already mentioned as imparted in childhood?
I do not believe myself that the English race, once fully awakened to the exact character of English orthography, will cling forever to a system which wastes the time of useful years, and can only exhibit as its best educational result the development of the memory at the expense of the reasoning powers. I do not underrate the immensity of the obstacles which lie in the path of those who set out to accomplish even the slightest change. There is, first andforemost, the impossibility of effecting, in the present state of public opinion, any thoroughgoing and therefore completely consistent reform. In any partial reform which can be secured there will be certain to remain inconveniences and inconsistencies which it must be left to the future to correct. At these the objector can always plausibly carp. But there is something more than the difficulty inherent in the matter itself. This is the immensity of the efforts demanded to destroy the superstition as to the sanctity of this creation, not of scholars, but of printers, which we call English orthography. Even to do this preliminary work will require the time and toil of years of struggle.
The fact is perhaps not much to be regretted. There is nothing worth living for that is not worth fighting for. But the task is no light one. Not merely have ignorance and prejudice to be overcome, but, what is far worse, stupidities, against which, the poet tells us, even the gods fight unvictorious. The higher class of minds have, indeed, been largely gained over. But there is little limit to the endeavor that must be put forth before any impression can be made upon that inert mass which prefers to remain content with any degree of error, however great, in preference to making any attempt to correctit, however slight. Still, this is the usual experience of all movements which aim to overthrow “the reign of ill custom”—to use Jonson’s words—which has long prevailed. The advocates of reform of English orthography can expect nothing different. But they can be encouraged by the recollection that the efforts of men in the past engaged in even harder enterprises have after long years of struggle been carried to successful completion, because the combatants themselves have been sustained by the hope, and have acted under the inspiration, that what ought to be is to be.