Spencer Heath Archive

Item 627

Quote on writing from G. Stanley Hall, Youth, pp 246-247, typed by Heath (in the same notebook as Item 626) probably because it described his own oral approach as “the first spontaneous source of original impression and ideas.”

About 1937?

“It is hard and, in the history of the race, a late change to receive language through the eye which reads instead of through the ear which hears. The invention of letters is a novelty in the history of the race that spoke for countless ages before it wrote. … The book is dead and more or less impersonal, best apprehended in solitude, its matter more intellectualized; it deals in remoter second hand knowledge so that Plato reproached Aristotle as a reader, one removed from the first spontaneous source of original impression and ideas.

“The plea is for more oral and objective work, more stories, narratives, and even vivid readings, all to the end that the ear, the chief receptacle of language, be maintained in its dominance, that the fine sense of sound, rhythm, cadence, pronunciation, and speech music generally be not atrophied, that the eye which normally ranges freely from far to near be not injured by the confined treadmill and zig­zag of the printed page.

“Closely connected with this, and perhaps psychologically worse, is the substitution of the pen and the scribbling fingers for the mouth and tongue. Speech is directly to and from the soul. Writing, the deliberation of which fits age better than youth, slows down its impetuosity many fold, and is in every way further removed from the vocal utterance than is the eye from the ear. Never have there been so many pencils, and such excessive scribbling as in the calamopapyrus pedagogy of today and in this country. Not only has the daily theme spread as an infection, but the daily lesson is now extracted through the point of a pencil instead of from the mouth.

“The youth do not learn to write by writing, but by reading and hearing. … Nothing so sharpens the mind and quickens thought as seeking and finding facts and truths in common. … The best literature is fashioned on the best conversa­tion, while if talk becomes bookish it loses vitality.”