ABSTRACT
To the problems of education and the practices involved in it, Richards turns in his next book, Interpretation in Teaching (1938). This book, according to Richards, "came into being under the ... stimulus of the General Education Board, as a Statement on the application of Theory of Interpretation to General Education". The book was "written for teachers and concerns the layman only in the degree to which he recognises that in the matter of the conduct of our native language we are all our own pupils". It is a sort of Practical Criticism1 applied to prose, reporting the results of presenting a number of passages, which raised various theoretical issues about use of language, to groups of University students, extracts from whose answers are given by way of illustration. Three areas are covered, those of Rhetoric, Grammar, and Logic, which Richards described as "the first three liberal Arts, the three ways to intelligence and a command of the mind that met in the Trivium" (3). It is Good Sense, or Sanity, the mind's order, that we are after, something which, it will be remembered, Coleridge wished to achieve by the not so very different "principles oflogic, grammar, psychology". Richards' target is the books used in teaching logic, rhetoric, and grammar at a fairly elementary level. He appears to have made an informal survey of those books and to have found them in many ways wanting. Many of the exercises are concerned with passages taken from these books, and what Richards wants is that his subjects should see through the errors taught by his contemporaries.
