Excerpt from To What End Do High Schools Teach English?: A Paper Read Before the High School Section of the Rhode Island Institute of Instruction, November 4, 1892 What is perhaps a rather widely prevalent miscon ception of the object of the secondary teaching of English, was illustrated, the other day, at a meeting of high school teachers. I had had occasion to say, speaking of certain high school girls, that they seemed to me to have achieved fluency and correctness of expression in satisfactory measure, and could proceed to their next studies without being treated as if their composition were in arrears. This elicited from a col lege man who was present the sarcastic remark that it might be, in the next century we were to be inundated by a flood of notable female writers. Thus my excellent college friend naively revealed his ideal of high school achievement in English, and perhaps threw light upon a subject on which he could speak with more authority, - the actual aim of the professorial teaching of English within the college walls. Here was an educator in conspicuous position, announcing literary distinction as the ambition that we teachers of English should aim to foster in our laborious supervision and correction of compositions. Before taking in hand this absurd ideal, and trying to show its utter irrelevancy to the conditions in which we work, I cannot forbear stopping a moment to query. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.