Some New Paths in Teaching German

Abstract

IT is probable that so long as modern language instruction has a history, it will date many things from the World War. The mass exit from German courses, the immense impulse given to the study of French, and the rapid expansion of Spanish studies are all major transformations which we may think unjustified by the requirements of American education present and future but which must be faced and dealt with as facts. The story of the fall of German studies has often been told and will be revealed in full by the figures gathered by the Modern Foreign Language Study and soon to be issued in its statistical report. It is said that in 1915 there were 265,000 students of German in the public and private secondary schools of the country. In the spring of 1925 the public schools reported 32,870 such students, as compared with 359,219 in French and 253,397 in Spanish. These figures, which include reports from over 72.28 per cent. of all the public secondary schools in the continental United States, may be supplemented by reports made to the Bureau of Education in 1922 from 11.8 per cent., increasing the totals of German enrollment by about 1,000. A careful estimate based on these data furnishes a total of 34,670 pupils in German classes. The estimated total of modern language enrollments for the Union, 784,352,1 is made up as follows: French, slightly over 56 per cent.; Spanish, slightly less than 39 per cent.; German about 4.4 per cent. In the private schools the German figures rise to 7.5 per cent. of the modern language enrollments. Of the 32,870 German pupils tabulated by the Study's statisticians, 21,208, or nearly two-thirds, are found in the New England and middle Atlantic states. This is higher than the percentage of French enrollment in this territory (63 per cent.), while for Spanish the conditions are reversed, only a little over one-third of the Spanish pupils being