Public Speaking | Page 4

the students electing the courses in speaking number well into the hundreds. These courses are now being more generally placed among those counted towards the academic degrees. The demand for trained teachers in the various branches of the work in schools and colleges is far above the present supply. Educators in general look with more favor upon this kind of instruction, recognizing its practical usefulness and its cultural value. The question of the present time, then, is not whether or not the subject shall have a place. Some sort of place it always has had and always will have. Present discussion should rather bear upon the policy and the method of that instruction, the qualifications to be required of teachers, and the consideration for themselves and their work that teachers have a right to expect.
Naturally, public speaking in the form of debating has received favor among educators. It seems to serve the ends of practice in speaking and it gives also good mental discipline. The high regard for debating is not misplaced. We can hardly overestimate the good that debating has done to the subject of speaking in the schools and colleges. The rigid intellectual discipline involved in debating has helped to establish public speaking in the regular curriculum, thus gaining for it, and for teachers in it, greater respect. To bring training in speech into close relation with training in thought, and with the study of expression in English, is most desirable. This, however, does not mean that training in speech, as a distinct object in itself, should be allowed to fall into comparative neglect. It is quite possible that, along with the healthy disapproval of false elocution and meaningless declamation, may come an underestimation of the important place of a right kind and a due degree of technical training in voice and general form.
In a recent book on public speaking, the statement is made that it is all well enough, if it so happens, for a speaker to have a pleasing voice, but it is not essential. This, though true in a sense, is misleading, and much teaching of this sort would be unfortunate for young speakers. It would seem quite unnecessary to say that beauty of voice is not in itself a primary object in vocal training for public speaking. The object is to make voices effective. In the effective use of any other instrument, we apply the utmost skill for the perfect adjustment or coordination of all the means of control. We do this for the attainment of power, for the conserving of energy, for the insuring of endurance and ease of operation. This is the end in the training of the voice. It is to avoid friction. It is to prevent nervous strain, muscular distortion, and failing power, and to secure easy response to the will of the speaker. The point not wholly understood or heeded is that, as a rule, the unpleasing voice is an indication of ill adjustment and friction. It denotes a mechanism wearing on itself--it means a voice that will weaken or fail before its time--a voice that needs repair.
Since speech is to express a speaker's thought, training in speech should not be altogether dissociated from training in thinking. It ought to go hand in hand, indeed, with the study of English, from first to last. But training in voice and in the method of speech is a technical matter. It ought not to be left to the haphazard treatment, the intense spurring on, of vocally unskilled coaches for speaking contests. Discussions about the teaching of speaking are often very curious. We are frequently told by what means a few great orators have succeeded, but we are hardly ever informed of the causes from which many other speakers have been embarrassed or have failed. A book or essay is written to prove, from the individual experience of the author, the infallibility of a method. He was able to succeed, the argument runs, only by this or that means; therefore all should do as he did. It seems very plausible and attractive to read, for instance, that to succeed in speaking, it is only necessary to plunge in and be in earnest. But another writer points out that this is quite absurd; that many poor speakers have not lacked in intense earnestness and sincerity; that it isn't feeling or intense spirit alone that insures success, but it is the attainment as well of a vocal method. Yet he goes on to argue that this vocal method, this forming of a public speaking voice and style, cannot be rightly gained from the teachers; it must be acquired through the exercise of each man's own will; if a man finds he is going wrong he must will to go right--as if many men had