How do the schools of today teach English literature ?
And do they do well to try to teach it at all ? I happen during the past week or two to have been discussing English (I am rather under pledge to say British in such cases, though I never heard of British literature) novels with various young people of a generation later than my own. What did they think of Esmond? Well, they had had to do it for an exam. at school. Or Rob Roy? Well, they had had to read it as a holiday task. And so on. Nothing, it is certain, can be counted on more infallibly than to wreck the taste for a good book than to have to be examined about it. Have the schools found the way to instil a love of good literature without prescribing the reading of good literature as a task ? It is not an easy problem, and the wrong way of solving it is more obvious than the right.
* * * *