all that which is necessary for the student, and that in this custom of teaching grammar is a great historical misunderstanding.
The child knows that it is necessary to write in the pronoun sibye, not because it is the dative case, however many times you may have told him so, and not merely because he blindly imitates what he has seen written over and over again—he gets possession of these examples, not in the form of the dative case, but in some other way.
We have a pupil from another institution and he knows grammar excellently, and yet he can never distinguish the third person from the infinitive of the reflexive, and another pupil, Fedka, who, knowing nothing about infinitives, never makes a mistake, and who uses auxiliaries with remarkably logical consistency.[1]
We, in the Yasnaya Polyana school, recognize in the teaching of reading and writing all known methods as not without their advantages, and we employ them in proportion as they are willingly accepted by the pupils and in proportion to our attainments in knowledge. At the same time, we do not accept any one method to the exclusion of another, and we are all the time trying to discover new measures. We are in as little sympathy with Mr. Perevlyevsky's method, which did not receive more than a two days' trial at Yasnaya Polyana, as with the widely disseminated opinion that the only method of teaching a language is writing, notwithstanding the fact that writing constitutes in the Yasnaya Polyana school the principal method of teaching language. We are searching and still hope to find!
- ↑ The concrete examples given by Count Tolstoï would be meaningless in English.
