The University of Notre Dame

The SCOP'S DemiseAuthor(s): John KnightSource: Notre Dame English Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring, 1972), pp. 34-39Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40066570 .

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The SCOPfS Demise

John Knight

V-Jld English may never again be taught at Notre Dame. To say this today brings waves of cheers from graduate student and faculty member a- like, although ten years ago many would have mourn- ed the decision to cut Old English from the pro- gram. Evidently justifications for the program alteration were many: Old English was not admit- ted by many faculty members to be a part of the English literary mainstream; Old English was said to be German, not English;Old English required an inordinate amount of the graduate student's time; and Old English was excess lead in an already too medievally-oriented curriculum. Finally, the English Department's Committee on Graduate Studies felt that removing Old English would free the de* partmentfs medievalists from running a departmen- tal service course, a burdensome task to be sure, and thereby "improve Medieval English studies.,. by enabling the area to attract student specialists through other routes than Anglo-Saxon, remove the system which makes English language classes either too large or too small for effective teaching, allow more latitude in planning course offerings, and enable it, in short, to enjoy the same inde- pendence and freedom other areas have in develop- ing its field of study.

f! As one who sincerely ad- mires Old English literature, I find all of the above to be so much academic balderdash created to impart dignity to dumping an important segment from the graduate- school curriculum. I say this for two reasons: first, I find the sudden concern for the poor graduate student not only unconvincing but academically unacceptable if Notre Dame cares to conduct a program at all worthy of the designation

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THE SCOP!S DEMISE 35

graduate; second, I find none of the above reasons sound from the basis of medievalists' reasoned con- clusions concerning the place of Old English in the continuum of English literature and language.

I do not for a minute deny that my fellow graduate students complain about the Old English requirement. My fellows also complain about fellowship allocations, the language requirement, the number of papers they have to do this semester, the provost... AD INFINATUM. I agree and affirm ninety-nine percent of their complaints. But I believe that we should make some necessary dis- tinctions concerning Old English. According to an extensive (five page) quest ionnairre distributed by Dr. Edward Kline in February, 1969, to his Old English class, his students by a considerable ma- jority did not object to the Old English require- ment. They did object to the departmental hypoc- risy of requiring only the literature section of Old English but not the grammar, when in fact one can hardly survive the literature without the gram- mar. And today, in talking with the few students from the Mold program11 who are now completing their lfAnglo- Saxon,11 the complaints are not about the materials or their relevance to the total degree program.

Because I did not take Old English grammar at Notre Dame but at another university, I believe that I can pinpoint somewhat objectively the con- sistent graduate student gripe about the Notre Dame Old English offering. The objection is method, not subject. Repeatedly non-medievalists face me with the same question: why doesn't someone teach Old English as literature and not as a linguistic crossword puzzle? Drs« Nicholson, Kline, and Doubleday irritate their students from outside the medieval area with their nitty-gritty approach to

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36 THE NOTRE DAME ENGLISH JOURNAL

the literature, making the entire first semester very unpleasant. Secondly, the non-medievalists dislike the strict grammatical process explicit in these teachers1 methods. Simply put, why memo- rize Moore and Knott's grammar book?

Before offering a solution, I should say that for the medievalist, the nitty-gritty approach is necessary because the language in all its pedantry is necessary. But the outsiders1 point should be considered; there are, after all, viable alterna- tives. Because I believe that Old English, liter- ature and language, is essential to a really edu- cated English doctorate, I believe that the materi- al should be taught, but not necessarily as in the past.

If the main problem has been method, let us find a better classroom technique. As an equivo- cator, I propose alternatives. First, incorporate into one semester both grammar and reading. It is not impossible, even if it is not the best method. Here the instructor selects a list of Old English readings, advancing from simple prose through dif- ficult poetry, and couples that with BASIC gram- mar. Many will say that this is the approach of

Moore and Knott; so what's new? The classroom method, that's what. Get off the linguistic- grammatical emphasis; teach the literature primari- ly and the grammar as necessary substructure. Al- though it may seem heresy for a medievalist, I believe this at least practical, at least a viable alternative to no Old English, Why? Because the student outside of MEDIEVALIA, unless a linguist, is going to remember literature, not grammar. He will never teach an Old English course, but he may teach a survey course for undergraduates with Old English in translation. The post-1968 editions of the Norton Anthology, vol. 1 devote forty more

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THE SCOP'S DEMISE 37

pages to Old English literature than in previous editions. The teacher must have some graduate level training if he is to teach this material

effectively.

The second alternative is a revision of the requirement to three hours, the real situation all along. The method has been strictly written one with some reading aloud thrown in to pretend that there really was an approved way of reading Old English. Clearly for any student who has gone from Dr. Nicholson to Dr. Kline, there is not one correct pronunciation. But there is no language lab; no tapes; not even a session on the library headphones, listening to Bessinger's readings. Given the vast improvements in teaching technology, are there not more effective methods available for teaching Old English, methods more aligned with modern language methods? Indeed there are.

The February, 1972 "Old English Newsletter11 of the Modern Language Association contains a

startling article by O.D. Macrae-Gibson of the

University of Aberdeen, entitled "Old English Teaching Methods: An Experiment." Macrae-Gibson and his collegues experimented over a three year period with four different Old English teaching methods , keeping extensive records and controlling the experimental situation as much as possible (sometimes, not very successfully). Although the results are hardly fool-proof, they are enlighten- ing and fertilely suggestive for our situation. The method which Macrae-Gibson found least ef- fective was following Sweet's ANGLO-SAXON PRIMER

[9th Edition, 1953], a method not far remover] from that used here in the past. Of the three re-

maining methods, the most effective was that de-

signed by the author, Macrae- Gibson, called LEARN- ING OLD ENGLISH, followed by Barbara C. Raw's A

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38 THE NOTRE DAME ENGLISH JOURNAL

PROGRAMMED COURSE IN OLD ENGLISH, and then Bruce Mitchell's A GUIDE TO OLD ENGLISH. Although a de- tailed review of the methods is beyond the scope of this essay, the consistent evidence from the study was that applications of new teaching ap- proaches considerably increased the effectiveness of Old English grammar learning. Macrae- Gibson ' s method, for instance, is described as follows:

"Makes use of the language laboratory on a private study basis. Uses a good deal less text than A [Raw's course] , in early stages this consists of in- vented sentences with restricted gram- matical content. Each lesson includes a section of grammar presented both on the page and on tape, and exercises on this including variation and similar drills... Each lesson is followed by written exercises, to be presented to and discussed with the tutor (indiv- idually) before going on to the next lesson. There was no group teaching.

!f

Admittedly the individual student* to- tutor ap- proach is unfeasible here for a department-wide course. But, the point is that there are alter- native teaching methods available, such as Miss Raw's "programmed11 course which uses psychological reinforcement techniques. In her method students move through a continuous Old English text, modi- fied in its early stages for grammatical ease but using extensively the language laboratory (one hour, five days a week) and the reinforcement tech- nique.

Neither of these two "better" methods may be right for the Notre Dame situation. However, the

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THE SCOP'S DEMISE 39

question remains: has anyone thought about chang- ing the basic approach to teaching Old English in this department? Seemingly not, and I think that is not excusable. But, the approach to the problem has been wrong on the part of the department. Don't delete Old English, a beautiful part of ENGLISH literature, from the program. Rather, im- plement a new approach. Even those poor, over- worked graduate students like the literature; they detest only the method.

I believe neither of my suggestions are real solutions • I have not taught Old English; nor have I really labored over these two alternatives to the past program. But I am sure of something: I am appalled that the English Department feels justified in granting a Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature to any student who knows nothing of the origins of the English language, of the great Old English heritage behind English lan- guage and literature, and who doesn't know "Beowulf11 from f!The Seafarer.11 Contrary to the currently held belief in this department, dropping Old English is not helping the graduate student ex- cept in the most superficial ways. Rather, the deletion further waters down the doctorate, making the graduate student a less attractive commodity on the job market and certainly cheating him of an exciting literary experience.

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