By Sharon Person

ESL teachers-in-training usually encounter the history of modern language teaching as a post-World War I story, with Gouin having established the foundation for the Direct Method in the 1880s. However, earlier efforts at second-language and bilingual education in the United States deserve attention for their experiments in methodology and perhaps more for the ideological arguments surrounding teaching the languages of immigrant populations in public schools.

In St. Louis, Missouri, the German language was taught in the public schools from 1864 through early 1888. The German program was begun as an experiment to draw children of German immigrants into the public school system, away from private and parochial schools where they enrolled in large numbers to take advantage of instruction in German. The 1860 census showed that St. Louis had the highest proportion of foreigners of any American city at that time, with 60% of the population foreign-born, almost exclusively European. The federal census of 1880 showed that Germans made up almost one-half the adult male population of the city.

The German language program was optional and was open to all German-American and Anglo-American students, although there were generally three times more German-American students enrolled. The curriculum evolved continuously in the first years of the program. Lessons in the lowest grades focused on speaking and vocabulary development, using what was called the "object method", which included realia and pictures. Reading and writing were introduced gradually. The writing curriculum moved from controlled essays to freer compositions. Oral and written translation were part of the curriculum as well. German lessons never exceeded forty-five minutes of the school day and, in the earlier years, were set up as a kind of pull-out program from English class. This structure was a deliberate contrast to the program in Cincinnati, which used half the day for content instruction in English and half for German, and which kept native German speakers and native English speakers separate.

For years before its institution, there had been pressure from the German community for German language instruction in the public schools. It was only in 1864 that a majority of the School Board members voted to initiate the program. For the remaining years of the program, the majority of the School Board continued to be pro-German. A strong pro-Irish faction on the Board had tried in 1878 to eliminate German instruction by putting up a petition for the introduction of Gaelic into the curriculum, which never had a chance for success, and then insisting that if Gaelic could not be taught, German should also be removed from the curriculum. Nine years later, the German faction on the Board disintegrated, largely as a result of targeted redistricting for the election in November 1887, and the new Board voted immediately to eliminate the program in January 1888. At that time, German was taught in 61 city public schools (all of them white schools except one) with almost 22,000 students enrolled. The savings from eliminating the teachers’ salaries were applied to the cost of building new schools.

That the German program met its demise because of politics and funding issues is probably not surprising. What remains striking well over one hundred years later is some of the rhetoric used by the St. Louis Superintendents and Assistant Superintendents to support the teaching of German. For example, in 1859, Superintendent Ira Divoll argued that "(S)ome acquaintance with one’s own language is necessary to prosecute the study of another to the best advantage." In other words, pupils who were native speakers of German needed to learn the fundamentals in that language as a foundation for learning English.

"(O)ur common schools are generally supposed to provide voters who can not only read the ballots which they cast but also read the political discussions in the newspapers and form an intelligent opinion upon the political issues which their ballots shall decide. Without such ability to read on the part of its citizens, the right of suffrage is a solemn mockery." These words were from the most eloquent supporter of German instruction, Superintendent William Torrey Harris, who held the position from 1867 to 1880 and went on to become the United States Commissioner of Education. Harris believed that the public schools should bring together students from different backgrounds to eliminate class distinctions and to assure that everyone acquired the same ideas of the rules of American society. Education should do more than produce good laborers. He saw the mixing of different students as creating a "new synthesis of national character," drawing on the best characteristics of the different groups.

In a recent TESOL Matters, Jim Cummins in his article "Language and the Human Spirit" expresses a view consistent with the vision of William Torrey Harris: "The choices we make with respect to how we teach language and literacy mirror our image of the society into which our students will graduate and the contributions we believe they can make to that society." Although names like Ira Divoll and William Torrey Harris and their 19th-century colleagues are not included in historical overviews for ESL teachers and administrators, their words and their work have much in common with ours today.