An interesting document has just been published by the Committee on Composition and Rhetoric of the Board of Overseers regarding the teaching of English in our public schools; and the amount of work disclosed which our English department undertakes appears stupendous. According to this report 12,000 compositions are read annually in English A and then returned to be rewritten, and 38,000 compositions in the whole department are handed in annually. These compositions consist of most immature thoughts written in an intelligible hand and wholly discreditable to the average age of undergraduates.

In order to find out how much the blame of this state of things lay with the schools the committee requested last year's freshmen to answer the following questions: What was the number and nature of written exercises at his school, what was the relative amount of time devoted there to English composition, did he pass the Harvard entrance examination in English. The result of these answers shows a condition of affairs not only desirable but necessary to change.

These reports indicate plainly that there is a great deficiency in elementary instruction in English in preparatory schools, a deficiency which the schools themselves should improve, that this instruction may not fall upon the college. There is, perhaps, only one way to force upon schools this need of better instruction and that is to present harder examinations in English till the schools have trained their pupils to the requisite proficiency in composition. In this way the demand for greater proficiency will in time work itself back to the very primary schools and the result will be an improvement in the teaching of rhetoric and composition from the very beginning. Such a result as this will be doubly successful, for it will affect not only pupils preparing for colleges but those who are not but intend to go no further than a grammar or high school. The graduate from such schools who intends to go immediately into business is even less skilled in composition than the pupils of preparatory schools who enter college, and it is especially to them that such a result will prove beneficial. Thus there will be an improvement in composition not only of college candidates, but, broader still, of all grammar school graduates. And it is this broad and humane view of the subject that must affect all alike and should command the attention of students and schools and colleges, in order that this important subject of English rhetoric and composition may be discussed and steps taken for its improvement.