A Functional English Course
LAST year the University of New Hampshire made elective its hitherto compulsory freshman English course, and adopted a procedure which it hopes will make possible from now on an insistence upon good usage in English on the part of every student in the University all through his four college years, whether enrolled in English courses or not. The purpose of this article is to explain this new program and what led to its adoption. This institution, in common with most others, had maintained for many years a course in English composition which was required of all Freshmen. The course had varied somewhat in content from year to year, and its teachers had tried and after a time rejected a great many textbooks. Of late it had developed a markedly analytical attack. The student read essays and other prose, took part in class discussions, resolved the items under consideration into their elements, learned to understand the thought of the writer and to appreciate the processes by which he had turned this thought into effective prose. The student was taught to think and to express his own thoughts in felicitously chosen words. The course had been acknowledgedly a difficult one, and those who taught it prided themselves that they could certainly be charged with no laxity and that their work had been strictly upon the college level. In spite of this serious effort, however, the weekly college newspaper had bristled with violations of both good usage and good taste, and an embarrassingly large number of sophomore, junior, and senior students who had successfully passed the freshman course had handed in, in all other courses, ill-written tests and examinations. It had become imperative to find out, if possible, why this situation existed, to improve the course, or to substitute for it something better. The entering class at New Hampshire totals from year to year about six hundred students, selected from nearly three times as many applicants. Most of them come from New Hampshire high schools and academies, and they have all been chosen from the upper portions of the graduating classes of their schools. They have come largely from a rural or semi-rural native population, but in part, in the industrial cities of the state, from families of FrenchCanadian, Syrian, Greek, Italian, or