Education: Love & Motor Car

Educators last week were exhorted to reform their teaching by an author who laboriously examined these questions: Is love 1) a rainbow, 2) the morning star, 3) the evening star, 4) “a miracle which shines around the cradle of the babe.” 5) “something which shines round the quiet tomb?” Is a motorcar 1) a bag of potatoes, 2) a hollyhock, 3) a flying cloud, 4) the sound of the sea? That these questions are likely to be received with awe instead of derision is largely due to the fact that the author was Ivor Armstrong Richards, a founder of the modern science of semantics (the meaning of language).

His book. Interpretation in Teaching,* a compilation of lessons in his own classes, is a textbook for educators.

Richards, a literary critic and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, wrote the first book about modern semantics, The Meaning of Meaning, with Charles Kay Ogden, a fellow Cantabrigian, in 1923.

This book, whose purpose was to start a new method of thinking so that eventually people might understand each other better, was revolutionary, obscure even to specialists. Ever since then Richards and his followers have tried to make themselves clearer. The more they write, the harder it is for laymen to understand them. Interpretation in Teaching is no plate glass window even for savants.

Readers who penetrate its obscurities, however, find that Mr. Richards makes shrewd sense. Aiming to teach students to think by a logical examination of the meaning of words, he proposes that rhetoric, grammar and logic be restored to the modern school curriculum. But he would teach these subjects in a new way: not the rules of grammar but the reasons for the rules.

“The prime obstacle in general education,” he says, “is a feeling of helplessness before the unintelligible. Every problem is new to the mind which first meets it and it is baffling until he can recognize in it something which he has met and dealt with already. The all important difference between the mind which can clear itself by thought and the mind which remains bewildered and can proceed only by burying the difficulty in a formula—retained, at best, by mere rote memory—is in this power to recognize the new problem as, in part, an old conquest.” Intelligence in its highest form, he adds, is ability to ferret out the changed meaning of old words in new settings. E.g.: The water is boiling in the kettle. The kettle is boiling. (“Kettle” changes its meaning in the second sentence.) Mr. Richards’ first lesson is on rhetoric, his first example a critic’s comment on a passage in Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry.

The critic objected that florid Elmer Gantry compared love to five incompatible things, that this is as absurd as comparing a motor car to a bag of potatoes. Mr. Richards believes metaphors (comparisons) are the root of thinking, and that no metaphor is absurd if there is a specific and intelligible link between the things compared. Mr. Richards recalls that a Harvard English professor once christened his ancient Ford Thaïs (after the heroine of Anatole France’s story) because “she had been possessed of many.” “If we can do that to a car, successfully,” twinkles Mr. Richards, “what limits can we confidently set to metaphor?”

* Harcourt, Brace ($4).