Speech Comes to Life

Abstract

IT IS well for speech educators to remember the recently expressed attitude of a college president who insisted that speech teachers might best serve God, their country, and humanity generally if they closed up shop and went home. This man further urged that specialists in the speech field might judiciously confine their efforts to teaching certain individuals not to speak at all. Such an attitude has a certain validity. Speech training in most educational institutions has largely been confined to the high-pressured grooming of a few of the school's top extroverts for careers as exhibitionistic demagogues. Even more unfortunate is the fact that speech educators have failed to build curricular offerings of a true experience nature that could contribute functionally and realistically to the total growth of adolescent boys and girls. Speech training has long been conceded to be a good thing for students, something that everybody needs, but practically no attention has been paid to the 'why and how of the administration of speech curriculums. A recent survey by the writer of the speech offerings of over sixty American colleges and universities revealed the fact that speech education is definitely stilted and professionalized. The findings of Ritter' and Weaver2 also point to the fact that departments of speech, academic youngsters that they are, are trying too strenuously to live up to the traditional pattern of the proverbial pigeonhole. The concept of any relationship between general education or the whole personality and basic courses in speech has simply not occurred to most speech teachers. Their righteously academic concern for the safety of their esoteric techniques is so great that the endproduct, namely the student, is all but forgotten. The one course in the curriculum which could naturally and quite logically be of a functional nature has become a series of textbook exercises in which students do little more than memorize the names of the laryngeal cartilages. Extra-curricular work in speech is characterized by educational perfectionism in its worst form. High-