A limited amount of systematic grammatical teaching is a necessary preliminary step.  The purpose is an introductory acquaintance with certain basic forms, terminology, relationships, and grammatical perspective.  This should be accomplished rapidly.  Like the preliminary survey in any field, this stage of the work will be relatively superficial.  Fullness and depth of understanding will come with application.  This preliminary understanding can not be learned “incidentally.”  Such a plan fails on the side of perspective and relationship, which are precisely the things in which the preparatory teaching of the subject should be strong.

This preliminary training in technical grammar need not be either so extensive or so intensive as it is at present.  An altogether disproportionate amount of time is now given to it.  The time saved ought to go to oral and written expression,—­composition, we might call it, except that the word has been spoiled because of the artificiality of the exercises.

The composition or expression most to be recommended consists of reports on the supplementary reading in connection with history, geography, industrial studies, civics, sanitation, etc.; and reports of observations on related matters in the community.  Topics of interest and of value are practically numberless.  Such reports will usually be oral; but often they will be written.  Expression occurs naturally and normally only where there is something to be discussed.  The present manual suggests compositions based upon “changes in trees, dissemination of seeds, migration of birds, snow, ice, clouds, trees, leaves, and flowers.”  This type of composition program under present conditions cannot be a vital one.  Elementary science is not taught in the schools of Cleveland; and so the subject matter of these topics is not developed.  Further, it is the world of human action, revealed in history, geography, travels, accounts of industry, commerce, manufacture, transportation, etc., that possesses the greater value for the purposes of education, as well as far greater interest for the student.

Probably little time should be set apart on the program for composition.  The expression side of all the school work, both in the elementary school and in the high school, should be used to give the necessary practice.  The technical matters needed can be taught in occasional periods set aside for that specific purpose.

The isolation of the composition work continues through the academic high schools and in considerable degree through the technical high schools also.  In the high schools the expression work probably needs to be developed chiefly in the classes in science, history, industrial studies, commercial and industrial geography, physics, etc., where the students have an abundance of things to discuss.  Probably four-fifths of all of the training in English expression in the high schools should be accomplished in connection with the oral and written work of the other subjects.