Art principles in literatureDonnelly, Francis P. (Francis Patrick)
Philosophy
Art principles in literature
Donnelly, Francis P. (Francis Patrick)
Aesthetics; Literature
In the former of these two stages, as self-expression was the end,
language was the chief and almost exclusive means. Sciences were
relegated to the university and informational subjects were left strictly
subordinated, and the whole course was predominately humanistic.
Modern education has profoundly changed this simple arrangement. The
university method of education and electivism and specialization have
been advanced to college, to high school and to grade school. Many
natural sciences have been systematized and brought into early classes.
The university chemistry and physics of fifty years ago are now in the
grades. Besides professional courses, pre-medical, pre-law, pre-divinity,
pre-engineering, pre-journalism, and in general pre-professional
studies are in our schools or at the doors. The trades are not behind
the professions. The million trades which concern themselves with the
production of raw material or with the manufacture of raw material into
finished products or with the distribution of finished products, all
these are knocking at the door or looking in the window of our school.
Nor is that all. As the professions want pre-professional and the trades
pre-trade courses, so the state demands pre-citizen courses in civic and
hygienics and military tactics, and the home exacts pre-family courses in
eugenics and many domestic sciences. Do not close your curriculum list
yet. The profession, the trade, the home, the state are not all, and to
leave out religion, which calls for pre-religious courses in private
schools, we have the whole field of sport and play in pre-dancing,
pre-ball-playing, and at last pre-movies. To make the conquest of the
practical complete, it is seriously advocated by a special committee of
the N. E. A. that this bewildering multiplicity of sciences, professions,
trades, civic, domestic and amusement courses should be begun at the
junior high school or seventh grade.
There is the contrast. Life is emotional. The early schools that used
to be devoted chiefly to writing and speaking, are now crowded with
a multiplicity of fact subjects, and even language and literature,
the most humanistic and emotional subjects of our courses, are taught
theoretically by university and scientific methods. In the Jesuit _Ratio
Studiorum_, which did not differ essentially from other systems, four
years of the lower schools were given to correct expression of the truth,
one year to the element of interest, or beauty, in expression, and one
whole year to the element of force, or good, in expression. These two
latter classes were called humanities and rhetoric and correspond to the
present freshman and sophomore classes in Jesuit colleges.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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