Baltimore Evening Sun (14 September 1911): 6.

Mr. Preston’s declaration that the public schools must and shall be for the common people, and for the common people only, coming, as it has, so quickly upon the heels of Mr. Joesting’s brave and public ratification of the American language, gives assurance that the days of English, that hideous and alien jargon, are now numbered. So long as the schools were run by Johns Hopkins sciolists, with the connivance of a board of plug-hatted and silk-stockinged patricians, English, with all its abominations, was rammed into the osseocaputs of the helpless young. But now that there has been a clean sweep and democracy is triumphant, the tongue of Joesting becomes the tongue of the schools.

Thus Mr. Preston sets forth the philosophy of it:

The public schools are not for the academicians, but for the plain people, and it is my duty to see that they are devoted to the plain people. They are for the children who have to fit themselves for the future, to make their way in the world.

In brief, the schools must be adapted to the needs of the average child—to the needs of that child who leaves in the sixth grade and has to struggle for existence all the rest of his life. Why handicap him by wasting his few precious hours, which he should spend in acquiring useful knowledge, in a vain effort to cram him full of useless knowledge? Why teach him geometry, physiology, basket-work, literature? Why force him to master the abstruse and ridiculous grammatical laws of a foreign and hated tongue? He will never hear that tougue spoken by his associates in after years. He will never hear it in the lodgerooms and vaudeville houses he visits for intellectual stimulation. He will never encounter it upon the sporting page of his favorite newspaper—the one literary delight of his manhood. It will fall upon his ears, so long as he lives, as something rare, barbarous and outlandish, as something fantastic and indecent. Why, then, set it before him, to torture him in his tender nonage? Why not teach him American?

A difficulty, of course, presents itself at once; there are no existing handbooks of American for use in the schools. English grammars are innumerable—every second pedagogue has written one, copying some earlier pedant—but knowledge of American is still handed from mouth to ear. Studying English in the schools, the pupil has to soak up American, as it were, at home and on the streets. In the same way the Polish schoolboy, condemned to struggle with German or Russian in the classroom, yet manages to acquire the beautiful tongue of his native land outside. But the difficulty here is not a serious one. Handbooks of American, if they are actually needed, may be written quickly. Mr. Joesting might devote himself to the task. Mr. Konig, a high authority, might give it his leisure. I myself, if the immodesty may be forgiven, offer my services. I have no connection with any school-book agent or trust. I am not a politician. The cry of the wolf cannot be raised against me. All I pretend to be is an humble and reverent student of a loose and lovely, a liquid and luscious language—the mother tongue of 80,000,000 free Americans.

It is the fashion of the proud and lofty, of course, to laugh at American. They denounce it as a dialect without grammar—as a vulgar patois, lacking plan or beauty. What folly! As a matter of fact–and I have proved it in this place in the past, by copious and impressive examples—the grammar of American, though it differs vastly from that of English, is fully as exact, fully as scientific and fully as beautiful. The English say “I shall;” we say “I will.” The English say “I should have gone;” we say “I ought to have went.” The English say “I took a holiday;” we say “I went to work and taken a holiday.” Is there any sound reason, rooted in the nature of things, why the English forms should be preferred to ours? Is the English language supported by divine revelation? Of course it is not. Like our own, it is nothing but the natural speech of a civilised people. We have our own natural speech. We, too, are a civilized people. The two languages, in many ways, are identical. But in many other ways they diverge enormously. Why not admit those divergences and so give them the dignity and authority they deserve?

Mr. Joesting sounds the battle cry and Mr. Preston gallops up astride his war horse, Bucepbalos. Let the good fight go on until the last pedagogue of the old regime to routed from the schools and sent fleeing and bawling to the tall timber. Let the ward executives then nominate teachers sprung from the plain people—teachers who have spoken American from infancy, as their natural and only tongue; teachers who know it and love it, as Mr. Joesting knows and loves it; teachers biliously impatient of English, with its silly pretensions and artificialities, as they are impatient of all the other hideous garbage that emanates from the Johns Hopkins University. The day of deliverance is at hand. One long, loud blast upon a bugle horn—and the last tower of Van Sickleism will fall.