As long as the children are seriously hampered with the mechanics of writing, they should be allowed to dictate their work, when any practical plan can be devised for this. When the class is not too large, they should be taught to make a co-operative product, the teacher taking down what they agree upon, revising it to suit them. In the case of the older children these spontaneous and "literary" productions should not be too minutely criticized, and the revising and rewriting of them should not become a matter of drudgery. They should have other and more colorless written work upon which they may be drilled, lest the drill should kill their creative impulse or spoil their pleasure in the created product. Their more important productions may be filed and given back to them six months later for their own correction. This critical review of their own work is generally an occasion of much pride, and the acquisition of some wholesome self-knowledge.
It is possible that this attempt to distinguish literary writing from other composition may convey the impression that literature and literary production are set off, quite apart from life, and the children's other experiences and interests. This would be a misfortune. Whenever any aspect of their lives, their work, or their play appeals to their emotions and their imaginations, when they are provided with a large vocabulary and have opened for them avenues of comparison, they will turn back a literary product. But it is seldom desirable to create this atmosphere in connection with their other studies, and the literary style and method is not a desirable one for all subjects.
For the sake of the practice in writing and composing, and for the sake of acquiring ease in telling in writing what they know or desire to communicate, the children may write something every day. But not oftener than once in six weeks can we build up in a class the atmosphere, furnish the material, and bring up the enthusiasm for the production of something worth while in a literary way—story, essay, play, or poem.
To set the elementary child, or even the high-school scholar, tasks of investigating in literature, as if he were a little college student is a serious mistake; or to set for him themes which call for such opinions and judgments as could be safely given only by a mature person. For instance, to ask the eighth grade in the average school to write a character-sketch of Shylock is to make a bid for insincerity and unfounded judgment. But satisfactory results may be obtained by giving the children a simple syllabus of questions and suggestions, indicating quite suitable problems for them to work at in their out-of-school reading; this little syllabus is then made the basis of class discussion, and parts of it finally, of written work. It requires some skill to make such a syllabus, since it must not be made up of leading questions nor of tediously detailed suggestions, neither must it attempt to exhaust the material; but must be calculated to stimulate the children to observe and to think, and must be designed to guide them into those aspects of the story, play or poem that they may suitably and profitably consider. Such a guide should be placed in the hands of young students including secondary children, whenever they are studying a mature and complex masterpiece.
The dramatization and acting of any bit of literature that yields to this process is in many ways the most satisfactory return we can ask. In a previous chapter much has been said about the various dramatic settings and accompaniments of literature. From the treatment of rhymes and jingles as suggestions for games and plays, on through the genuine dramatization of a story, to the presentation of The Merchant of Venice or some other developed literary drama, the teacher should forward as much as possible this mode of calling out the children. They must, of course, be guided by the teacher in the choice of a story for dramatization, seeking one that has clearly marked movements, some distinct events, a pretty well-rounded plot, occasion for dialogue, and other dramatic possibilities. The class may early be guided to the division of the story into its natural acts and scenes, which implies the omission of superfluous incidents and details. The difficulty comes in the supplying of the actual dialogue. The resourceful teacher will secure this dialogue by various means; for some of the scenes it will flow off without effort from the class in lesson assembled, one child suggesting a remark, another the reply, these being recorded and criticized by the class. For certain other scenes the dialogue may be prepared by groups of two or more children working apart from the class. For certain crucial and lofty scenes the teacher should make the "book." The whole must be submitted for discussion in the class, and may in the end call for considerable revision from the teacher; for the younger children cannot be expected to know and to meet the demands of dramatic dialogue—it must not only be speech, and fairly good as conversation, but it must forward the play with every sentence. Of course, this revision must never be so sweeping as radically to remake the play, or even to alter the essential character that the children have given it, no matter how crude it may seem to the teacher and to other mature persons who hear it. Let it stand as a bit of child-art, just as we rejoice to let crude productions stand as folk-art.
Of course, when the older children present a literary play or any part of it, they must memorize and give it conscientiously as it is written. Indeed, the rendering with understanding and appreciation, of whatever they have learned of good and beautiful literature is, after all, the most satisfactory and natural return. If even in high school we asked this of the children, instead of those themes of crude or stale literary criticism which we all too often get, great would be the gain in freshness, in sincerity, in appreciation, and in ultimate taste.
If we accustom the children to it from the beginning, and never intimate to them that it is difficult, it is about as easy to get verse out of them as prose. This is particularly true if the exercise is a social or co-operative one, in which the whole class unites to produce the ballad or the song. What the single child could not accomplish, the group does with perfect ease. And when the poem is done, nobody can tell who suggested this rhyme, this word, this whole line; but the whole is a product of which each child is proud, though he alone could never have compassed it. The communal story, ballad, song, or play is a unique and interesting performance, and any teacher who has ever assisted in making it feels sure that he has seen far into the social possibilities of art and the philosophy of literature. Every teacher must devise his own plan of getting this co-operative, communal, social bit of literature made, but every teacher of literature should try it.
All this, of course, has to do with the immediate practical return from the studies in literature. Concerning the ultimate, distant return we cannot speak in terms of teaching and learning. Art is long; like the human child, being destined to a long and vicissitudinous life, it had a long childhood; and this is true of its growth in each individual as of its growth in the race. So far as regards many of the most desired results of literature, we can but sow the seed, and wait years for the bloom—a lifetime, maybe, for the fruit. But though we may not reach a hand through all the years to grasp the far-off interest of our toil, we have every reason to believe that the harvest will be fair.
The term "correlation" is not to be used in this chapter in the specialized and technical sense that it has taken on in pedagogical discussion. It will be used, with apologies, to designate all connections of literature with any other subject or discipline in the elementary curriculum.
No one interested in education can have failed to notice the fact that the doctrines of concentration, correlation, condensation, by whatever name called or under whatever aspect approached, have undergone many modifications and shifts of emphasis. Like every other educational doctrine that has much of the truth in it, it was welcomed in the early days of its promulgation as the final solution, and seemed for a time to sweep out of existence, or into its own radius, every other theory or practice.
One is obliged to wonder if educational people are peculiarly liable to be caught by a formula or an apparently axiomatic statement, build everything upon it, and silence every question by a reverential appeal to it. Such seemed to be the attitude toward the doctrine of correlation when it first sifted down from the savants to the actual teachers in the actual schools; and many and monumental were the follies committed in the name of this pedagogical religion. Modified and adapted under actual practical conditions, and criticized by the present generation of educational philosophers, it has come down to the school of today—that is to say, the school that is sensitive enough and free enough to respond quickly to new thinking—as, on the one hand, a protest against isolation and abstraction, and on the other hand, an appeal for such a conservation of the unity and naturalness of the child's consciousness as is consistent with the natural and legitimate use of material. In its present form the doctrine no longer justifies the violent wresting of subjects and topics from their natural settings, to be fitted together in some merely logical and theoretical system of instruction.
In the days of determined and thoroughgoing correlation no department of discipline suffered more than the arts; and none of the other arts suffered as did literature. This is not difficult to account for. Music and painting are quite professedly and obviously unconcerned with subject-matter—are, as a rule, entirely empty of definite intellectual content. But literature has ideas, it embodies concrete images, mentions specific objects, reflects experience, and sometimes even uses actual persons and historical events; above all, it employs the same medium of expression as the other subjects. All these matters made literature the peculiar prey of the ardent correlationists; to each or any, perhaps to all, of these phenomena in literature they could attach bodies of teaching in technical subjects, and systems of discipline in formal training.
The case was equally bad when literature was constituted the center of the scheme, and when it was attached to a scheme having some other center—geography, for example, or history. For in the first case it was altogether likely that some detail or aspect of the piece of literature, merely subsidiary in the literature, would be selected for emphasis and elevated into the correlating detail; the background or setting would be taken out for study and elaboration, crowding the action, the human and really literary elements, out of sight. As, for example—and it is an authentic example of a scheme of correlation—the first-grade children are given as the center of their work The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence; from this story we take out the dog, which we study as the type of digitigrade carnivora. Or—again an authentic example—having read to the first grade The Musicians of Bremen, as one of them happens to be a donkey, we seize the opportunity to teach in detail and over several weeks of time, the physical peculiarities of the donkey and his kinsman the horse, among many exercises drawing out of the children some speculation or information as to how much water or hay the horse consumes; to which hook we attach instruction as to weights and measures; and so on into the remote fringes of information about objects and persons used in the story only in the literary way.
In the second case, that in which literature is attached to some other center, in feeling about for some bit of literature to fit into a geographical fact, a meteorological condition, or a historical event, the teacher was quite likely to hit upon a third- or fourth-rate specimen, unsuitable for his children in other respects, and in teaching it he was likely to force from it a meaning and an emphasis that as literature it would not bear; as, when the children were studying the migration of birds, he taught them Bryant's "To a Waterfowl," emphasizing the migration and ignoring the true emphasis of the poem—the lesson of a guiding providence; or as, apropos of December weather, he set the fifth grade to reading Whittier's slow-moving, meditative, and much too mature "Snow-Bound."
As a matter of fact, no art yields kindly to any method of adjustment to other subjects that emphasizes the subject-matter or information material that may perchance be involved in the art. Information-giving is not the method nor the mission of art; the four, or five arts if we include acting, with which we may have to do in elementary discipline combine and play into one another without difficulty. It is not necessary to speak again of the close and easy association of literature with all the forms of acting that the children have, from marching, dancing, and simple gesture, on to the acting required in an organized drama. On the musical side, particularly the verse-form of literature, it combines most acceptably with music. A great many of the lyrics that are simple enough for the children to learn, and many of the verses that they write, are also adaptable as songs to be sung. And even when they cannot be set to melodies they share, in their spoken form, with the actual musical notes, in the training of the ear. The exercises in drawing, painting, and modeling co-operate to fine advantage for the objectifying of the visual images, of which the children get so large a store from literature. As a matter of fact, when the children are set the task of objectifying an inner image, it is most likely to be some figure or scene from literature that comes up for expression—Nausicaa throwing the ball, Robin Hood stringing his bow, Siegfried tempering his sword, Paul Revere mounting his horse, the lodge of old Nokomis. This is because the images and pictures they find in literature retain in the minds of the children the glow of imagination, the warmth of emotion, the vitality of a remembered joy. And it is true, as every teacher knows who has taught it aright, that a bit of literature arouses in the children a mood of creative imagination such as no other subject ever can awaken. This mood of imaginative creation instinctively expresses itself in literary composition, in drawing, painting, designing, modeling, acting, or music.
On the very surface of the problem of the correlations of literature lies the somewhat difficult question of the relation of the children's literature to their lessons in reading—as regards both their beginning to read and their later practice in reading. It remains true that with all our experimenting and in spite of all the enthusiasm we can muster, to the majority of children and in the hands of most teachers the mechanics of learning to read is drudgery. This drudgery literature should share with the other subjects in its due proportion. One would not ignore the fact that this "due proportion" may be very large—larger than that of any other subject. It is quite legitimate to employ the charm and interest of literature in the service of reading; and it would be a serious misfortune for the children to learn their reading entirely through the medium of colorless fact. We have agreed that there is such a thing as literary reading, different in many ways from the reading of history or science. Even the younger children can feel this, and can produce it if correctly guided. But they should not always be doing literary reading; they should acquire the colorless but good style of merely intellectual reading. This they will not do if in their early reading exercises they are given more than their due proportion of literature.
It is undoubtedly wise to make upon the teacher and the children the impression that reading is a tool, a key—perhaps we would better call it a gate through which one gets at many things—the joys and rewards of literature, to be sure, but also the images of history, the facts of nature, the details of handicraft. A reading-book, or any system of reading-lessons that contains nothing but literature is therefore a mistake.
From another point of view it is a misfortune to identify the reading-lessons with literature. As has been said more than once in these chapters, the alert teacher of our day is eager to emancipate literature again from its bondage to the printed page, and to set free once more its function as a truly social art; making it also once more a matter of the listening ear and the living voice.
To identify the reading-lessons of the younger children with their literature lessons is to keep them at things much too immature, and to retard their mental and artistic growth. They can apprehend and appreciate many things that they cannot read. It is a commonplace that a child's listening vocabulary is far in advance of his reading vocabulary, no matter how or how early he learns to read. Of course, this is the secret of the revolt against book-reading of the children who learn to read late—the simplicity of the thought and expression in the matter they are mechanically able to read, makes it unacceptable to them intellectually. It is in the literature received by his ear that a child grows and exercises his maturer powers. The older children should be taught and exercised in literary reading, the simple interpretative reading of their literature. The best results in this most profitable aspect of the teaching of literature can be obtained in the secondary period, when the children are expert enough as readers to think while they read, and when their voices are, as mere mechanical organs, more completely under control.
The objections to the association of drill in writing, in spelling, in grammar, and in compositions are of like kind. It may be granted that there is something in the fact that literature represents the most effective use of language, and is, all things considered, the most interesting kind of writing. Still this does not constitute a sufficient reason why the burden, and in all too many cases the odium, of teaching these things should attach to literature. It is a perfidious breaking of the promise of literature, or of any art, which should keep as much as possible of the atmosphere of play. Of course, drill in language and in written expression should be attached to every subject in the elementary curriculum; and this not only for the sake of relieving the literature from a burden of unattractive tasks, but because of the fact that the literary style and vocabulary are not good for all subjects and purposes, and the children should not be trained exclusively in these. On the large scale of things, it is a pity at any stage of the child's education to identify "English" with literature, since there is and should be so much English that is not literature, and so much literature that is not English.
One of the pleasantest and most profitable co-operations of literature is with the training in languages other than the vernacular. In those elementary classes where the children have instruction in either German or French—or, for the matter of that, in Spanish or Italian—every effort should be made in their use of story and verse to secure the characteristic and universal literary effect. The German lyric has all the beauty of music and of image that the English has; the French fairy-play has most of elements of dramatic art that the children could use in English translation.
A few of the fallacies of correlation, or mere co-relation, of literature with other aspects of the children's school experience are these:
The fallacy of setting out to teach children the love of home, or country, or nature, or animals, by teaching them literature that expresses or reflects those emotions.
The love of one's own country must be in our day a thing of slow and gradual growth. Our feelings about our country should arise out of our knowledge of the heroic things in her history, out of the noble plans for her growth, out of the generous things she provides for her children and the children of other lands. Out of this or some such basis arises the emotion of patriotism, a poem or a story which reflects this emotion has some such back-ground by implication. To hunt about for a poem or story which teaches patriotism is a putting of the cart before the horse. First arouse in your children the emotion—an original personal emotion of their own, growing out of the legitimate background; then, if perchance you are so fortunate as to find a poem or a story which also reflects this emotion, and which is at the same time good as art, you are so much the richer. The children will find their own feeling reinforced and nobly expressed, and consequently deepened and dignified.
The same thing is true as to the love of animals. If the children have the literature first, or only the literature, they may have only a second-hand and perfunctory love of the beasts. But first give your grade a dog, or a cat, or a canary; or give your child in the country a pony, or a lamb, or a pig; that they may feel at first hand the throb of dramatic brotherhood, of humorous kinship, that constitutes love of animals. Then, when, judging by the proper canons that test good literature, you find a piece that reflects and deepens this, it is so much pure gain.
The same thing is true of nature. The children should have many things that reflect feelings about nature and natural phenomena, and that give the interpretations which great and gifted artists have made of these things. But one should no more go to literature for creating first-hand love of nature than he would go to the same source for facts about any specific phenomenon in nature. Of course, this is not saying that we demand that a child shall have had a previous experience of every image and phenomenon of nature that is presented to him in literature. Indeed, we expect literature to complement and supplement life in the matter of imagery; to deepen and to arouse experience in the matter of emotion. But the fallacy lies in choosing literature on this ground, and in depending upon literature to create at first hand what is, and should be, an extra-literary feeling. Now, from time to time there comes the teacher's way one of those rare chances when he finds the time, the place, and the poem all together, as when on some March day of thaw he can teach "The cock is crowing," of Wordsworth; on the first morning of hoar-frost he can read "The Frost;" on another day, "The Wind"—the things that harmonize with the spirit of an experience.
Another of the fallacies of correlation is the determined, if not violent, association of the work in literature with the festivals. As a matter of fact, there is not much more than time in certain schools to teach the younger children the things they are expected to know about Thanksgiving, Christmas, Washington's birthday, Easter, June. The work for the next celebration begins just as soon as the foregoing one is past. The partitioning of the year into these very emphatic sections, and the carrying of the children through the same round year after year, are questions too general to be treated here. But we are interested in the fact that in most cases the specimens of literature that can be considered applicable to the festivals would never be chosen from out the world of things for their absolute value as literature, nor for their peculiar suitability for the children. So it comes about that the children—the younger classes, at least—spend as much as two-thirds of their time at second- or third-rate specimens of literature.
There is not much reason for protesting in our day against that species of correlating literature with something else which consists in teaching in connection with this literature things that the children ought to know later, regardless of their immediate fitness or acceptability; as for example the facts of Greek mythology, the characters and plots of Shakespeare's plays; we can never be too grateful for that interpretation of childhood and of education which has made this hereafter impossible. At the same time, if we choose wisely now, choose in the light of our best knowledge, the children will be glad all their lives to know the things we choose for them.
The connection of literature with history is a many-sided question, and is not easily disposed of. As a matter of fact, the partnership between history and literature, so vaguely asserted and so complaisantly accepted in many quarters, is a combination in which the literature has usually gone to the wall. Indeed, the practical adjustment of history and literature wavers about between two equally fallacious schemes. One of these is to give the children the literature produced by the nation whose history they are studying; as for example, the Homeric poems when they study the history of Greece, that they may imbibe the true Greek spirit from the poems. Now, children of elementary age cannot distinguish, or even unconsciously feel, a national spirit in a poem. It is the broadly human, the universally true, elements and spirit that they feel. Besides, the Greek national spirit, the spirit of the characteristic Greek period, was not Homeric, and the literature of the characteristic Greek period would never do for the elementary children. In the case of Greek literature one cannot unreservedly demur because the Homeric poems are never bad for the children. But the same principle applied to other nations and their literature may bring disaster.
The other scheme for relating history and literature is to choose the literature on the basis of the fact that it deals with some person or event or period with which the history is concerned; as, when we have a class in the history of the Plymouth colony, we give them Longfellow's "The Courtship of Miles Standish" for literature, which, except for one or two picturesque scenes, one would never choose as literature for young children; and as, when we study the American Revolution, we give them as literature some mature and sentimental modern novel, or some sensational and untrustworthy juvenile, choosing these merely because they profess to incorporate events connected with the historical period.
The whole matter of the historical romance is important and complicated—too complicated and involving too many critical principles to be handled here. It must be sufficient to say in this connection what is sufficiently obvious to any thoughtful critic—that he who takes up and handles legitimately and justly an epoch, an event, or a group of historical persons, and at the same time produces good literature, is a master and produces a masterpiece—much too mature and developed for elementary children. Only Scott possessed the faculty of keeping generally in sight of his history, or of segregating it in an occasional longeur, and adding to it a rattling good story. But Scott is too mature and complex for elementary children up to the very oldest, and they are not likely to be studying the periods in history that interested him.
No, the kinship between history and literature, and the co-operations between them in the children's experience, are not of this external and artificial kind. It is for the mature and philosophical student to study literature as a culture product—its relation to the country and the times that produced it. It is for much older students to read the great romances, like Tolstoy's War and Peace, that adequately mirror an epoch or an epoch-making event.
For the children there is a deeper spiritual kinship between history and literature. It has to do with the personal and dramatic side, the biography and adventure of history. It lies in the spirit and atmosphere of human achievement, in the identity of the motives that express themselves in literature and in actual accomplishment. When we study the pioneer and the colonist—the born and doomed colonist—we find his kinsman and prototype in Robinson Crusoe. When we study the Revolution, the revolt against unjust laws, the protest of democracy against class-oppression, we find the spirit of Robin Hood.
I hasten to disclaim any intention of advising these particular combinations. The examples should merely serve to make clear certain aspects of the kinship of spirit between literature and history. Of course one does now and again, and as it were, by special grace, find a story or a poem—like the "Concord Hymn," or "Marion's Men," or "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers"—precisely apropos of his event and beautifully adapted to his literary needs. And one often comes upon a historical document—like The Oregon Trail or The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin—so picturesque and concrete, so observant of effects of unity and harmony, so full of appeals to the imagination, and so effective in verbal expression, as to yield many of the effects of literature.
In spite of all protests against forced and mistaken associations of literature with other subjects in school, we must constantly insist that it is no isolated thing, detached from life. On the contrary, literature arises out of life, and is always arising out of it and reacting upon it. It is effective and practically operative in a child's life precisely because it, too, is life. It is closer, therefore, to his business and bosom than any item or system of knowledge could be. It is not to disturb its trustworthiness and value to say that it does not primarily convey information and cannot be called upon to deliver facts. It does render truth and wisdom, the summary and essence of fact and knowledge. It does not destroy its educational value to say that we shall search it in vain for a body or a system of organized discipline; for, since it is art, it disciplines while it charms and teaches us while it sets us free.
The natural correlations of literature are with the other arts, but, above all, with the spirit of childhood, and with the consciousness of children; with the tone and spirit of their other work, rather than with its actual subject-matter.
Were it not for appearing captious or extravagant, one would like to say that in these days of cheap and easy books, and amidst the temptations of the free libraries, the problem is that of keeping the children from reading too much, rather than of inducing them to read enough. This is particularly true of children in our large American cities, whom we must, in our first generation of city-dwelling, guard against eye-strain, and nerve-strain, and library-air, and physical inactivity of all sorts. Luckily, our generation has learned some things about the educational processes that have tended to lessen materially the danger of over-reading. In many homes, and to many children out of school, books and magazines have hitherto been a sort of opiate, from the point of view of the child deadening the hungry sensibilities and lulling the stifled activities; and from the point of view of the parent securing silence and providing an apparently innocuous occupation. This is all too little changed now, though more and more homes are providing opportunity and encouragement for other occupations: shop and studio, and more abundant material and opportunity for play. In the cities the public playgrounds and gymnasiums—and all too rarely the public workshop and studio for children—begin to share with the public library the task of safely taking care of the children out of school.
But there will always be time for reading, and by all means the legitimate share of the children's time should be given to it. The so-called supplementary reading given them by the school is largely, I take it, a question of the much reading that will make the process easier, and not a matter of accumulating facts, or of acquiring a wider knowledge of literature. In many schools that I have observed it is often unwisely and carelessly chosen, so far as the literary share of it is concerned. It should be selected partly for its bearing upon the fact-studies, and not wholly made up of things of the literary kind. The bearings of the question of the school's supplementary reading are not literary, or, so far as they are, they have been discussed in other connections.
Every child should ideally have free access to a collection of books got together with reference to his needs and tastes. It may be serviceable to indicate the kind and number of books that might be included in such a library of a child up to his fourteenth year.
There should be in such a collection several biographies. On the whole, let them be of the older, idealizing type, not of the modern young university instructor's virtuously iconoclastic type. Children get at their history first through heroic and dramatic figures and events. In their earlier years it is the imagination that appropriates the images and events of history. It is therefore only good pedagogy to present the figures on their heroic and ideal side. Let these biographies include the record of different sorts of men—a statesman, a pioneer, a preacher, a soldier, an explorer, an inventor, a missionary, a business man, a man of letters—so that many types of character and kinds of experience may be reflected.
As the children grow older, they will dip into history for the images—the persons and detachable events. The search for facts and philosophy will come many years later. Some tempting books of history should appear on their shelves; The Dutch Republic, The Conquest of Mexico, Parkman's romantic narratives, and John Fiske's; if possible the illustrated edition of Green's History of the English People. Most of the history they get from their own reading, however, should be what they get from the biographies of the central figures in the events—Columbus, William of Orange, Francis Drake, and all the other picturesque and heroic persons. Other historical reading would best be done under guidance and in connection with the work in school.
There should be a few books of travel and exploration. Among these there should be some of the original sources, if possible the Bradford Journal, the Jesuit Relations, the Lewis and Clark Journals. Froissart and Marco Polo should be included; the fable-making travelers perform a very useful function. To these may be added a few most recent explorations—African, Arctic, Andean, Thibetan.
Children, barring the exceptional child, will not read formal science; but it may develop or help on a desirable taste and interest to have some of the many pretty out-door books in their collection—not romances of the wild, but simpler treatises about the things to be found in the door-yard and the home woodland. And when a child develops a taste or a gift in any scientific direction, he should have access, as easy as possible, to some good reference books suited to his needs. All children should have access to some of the more popular technical and scientific journals which give interesting accounts of current discoveries and inventions.
By way of nature and animal books we will include the Jungle Books, an expurgated edition of Reynard the Fox, Aesop's Fables, and, of course, Uncle Remus. Other semi-scientific nature-writers will doubtless appear in most collections of children's books—and may do no harm.
A book of Greek myth seriously and beautifully told should be accessible. No other myth is so beautiful or so imaginative, or so artistically put together. The children do not need to have to do with many myths until they know something about interpreting them. Of course, they should have access to the Bible in some attractive form. A large illustrated edition—Doré's or Tissot's—will please and instruct them from their earliest days. This is one of the cases in which pictures—good and imaginative pictures—form a desirable gateway into a realm where the children are not naturally at home, and where they need the help of a great and serious artist in finding their way. Of course, poor and materialistic pictures are a misfortune, especially those that attempt to body forth preternatural events and supernatural beings. Doré's pictures are not undesirable, because they often help a child to a noble and imaginative conception of a thing he is himself powerless to construct; while Tissot's are good because they set forth with beauty and richness of detail the many phases of life which the child must try to image in reading the Hebrew stories—from the nomadic simplicity of the saga of pastoral Abraham to the luxurious refinements of the Romanized and cosmopolitan Jerusalem.
The little scholar should find on his shelves Lanier's King Arthur, Pyle's Robin Hood, Palmer's Odyssey, some translation of the Iliad; in short, some form of each of the great hero-tales; a selected few of Scott's romances—Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Guy Mannering, Anne of Geierstein; a few of Cooper's; Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, William Morris' prose tales, a pair of Quiller-Couch's, and as many of Joseph Conrad's; these might constitute his romances. But unless he is a very unusual child, he will never read in these masters, if he is given masses of cheap and easy reading, such as the Henty books and the Alger series; or if he finds in his mother's sitting-room a stack of "the season's best sellers" and the ten-cent magazines. The cheap and easy style and the commonplace material of this sort of books offer the line of least resistance to the young reader. They flow into his mind without effort on his part, while, if he would apprehend the masters, he must actively co-operate with them at every step, arousing his best powers to comprehend their expressions and to grasp their ideas. One would hesitate to say that there is absolutely no use for books of the Henty and Alger type. One can imagine a child whose every bent was against reading, being enticed to begin by some such easy and commonplace experience. And one can imagine their being useful to wean children away from really vicious books. In a certain boys' club I know, organized in a social settlement, which was really a reorganization of a gang, these particular books were for a year or so an acceptable substitute for the bloody romances they had been reading. Many of those boys have never passed beyond them; but to many others they were, as was hoped, stepping-stones to better things. There is no place for them in the ideal collection of children's books. Certain books, harmless and as recreation even desirable, will inevitably make their appearance on the children's shelves—Miss Alcott's, Mrs. Richards', and others of the many series of girls' books and boys' books; they are doubtless innocent enough, and to be discouraged only when they keep the children from something better worth while; to be encouraged, on the other hand, only for those children who must be tempted by easy reading into any habit of using books. To be sure, you will probably find that your child has found one of them, perhaps a whole series, to which for a certain period she seems to have given her whole heart; but if treated with wisdom this symptom will disappear, and you will find her at some surprisingly early day re-reading the tournament at Ashby, and patronizingly alluding to the time when she was enslaved to "The Little General" series, or the "Under the Roses" or the "Eight Half-Sisters" series, or any other particular juveniles, as "when I was a child."
In the matter of fairy-tales one must discriminate and renounce quite resolutely. It is not good for a child who has early mastered that edged tool of reading to have access to all fairy-tales and all kinds of fairy-tales. Eschew all the modern ones. Of course, if you have a personal friend who has written a book of them, for reasons other than literary your children will read them. But as to those you choose freely for them let them have Grimm and Perrault, and the Arabian Nights, and after a while Andersen; which, together with what they will pick up here and there in magazines and in their friends' houses, will be enough.
For poetry, the child should have on his own shelves some pretty edition of the Nursery Rhymes, The Child's Garden, some really good collection of little things—The Posy Ring, for example, Henley's Lyra Heroica, Lang's The Blue Poetry Book, Allingham's Book of Ballads. For the rest he should be read to from the poets themselves, and as soon as he is old enough, sent to the volumes of the poets for his reading. As in school so at home the children should hear their poetry read until they acquire some real degree of expertness as readers. Children who can not understand at all, poetry which they read silently, will delight in it read aloud.
This little collection should contain the classic nonsense, but not all kinds of inartistic fooling and rude fun. There should be Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (always the one with Tenniel's pictures). We must remember that Alice is very delicate art, and that its final and deepest appeal is to the mature person. Certain very imaginative children take to it as a fanciful tale at the moment of ripeness; others miss it then, and must wait until the wonderful dream-psychology of it, and the delicate satire of its parodies can make their appeal to them as older persons. Lear's Nonsense Rhymes in judicious doses every child should have; "John Gilpin's Ride;" certain of the Bab Ballads; a little of Oliver Heresford's delightful foolishness. Among the folk- and fairy-tales he will find many comic bits whose kind or degree of humor will suit him admirably in his younger years. In Clouston's Book of Noodles may be found a mine of such funny tales. The Peterkin Papers is the best of modern noodle-tales. No family can be brought up without the help of Strewel Peter, nor should they miss Little Black Sambo. Most American children are enchanted with the fun of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn though one must sadly acknowledge that it is woven into back-grounds of a sensational kind not at all improving to an unformed taste.
One cannot feel that parodies are in general good for children; though, after they have had a good share of serious enjoyment out of their fairy-tales, and especially if they seem too much or too long absorbed in them, they ought to have The Rose and the Ring and Prince Prigio.
Picture-books and illustrated books are another independent little problem. It is a curious fact that it is not the beautiful lithographs of birds and animals, flocks and landscapes, children in irreproachable Russian dresses and short socks, seated in the corner of ancestral mahogany sofas, refreshing themselves from antique silver porringers, that the little living heads hang over by the hour on the nursery floor. It is much more likely to be the thunderous landscapes of the old Dutch woodcuts in Great-grandmama's Bible, the queer, chaotic, symbolistic plates of the Mother-Play; the wonderful prints of Comenius' Orbis Pictus; the casualties of John Leech's hunting fields. True, they delight in the charming details of all Kate Greenaway's books; and Walter Crane's pictures so rich in color and beautiful detail give ceaseless joy; but one must confess that they are a bit inclined to "shy" at pictures they know to be intended for them. Every nursery that can compass it should have as many as possible of the books illustrated in color by Boutet de Monvel. The children should never see comic illustrations of their nursery rhymes and stories. They are all banal as wit and trashy as art, substituting an ugly and distorted image for the possibly beautiful one the child might have made for himself. After they have passed out of infancy, they do not need pictures in their stories. The black-and-white print is inadequate when color and movement should be a part of the image, and children should have the discipline of relying entirely on themselves in visualizing the images of the text. There should also be in the "little library," or accessible to the little readers in the big one, beside the illustrated Bible, the one big volume of Shakespeare with Gilbert's pictures—an inexhaustible mine of life and art; Engelmann and Anderson's Atlas of the Homeric Poems, a Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, and an encyclopedia that the older children can use, should have a place on these shelves.
It is so often said as to amount to a mere convention that the best possible literary experience for a child is to be turned loose to browse (they always say "browse") in a grown-up library. One always finds a malicious pleasure in detecting in these people (and they are always to be found in great plenty) those baby impressions, still uncorrected that they got of many books in the course of their browsing. Of course, in a house where there are many books the children will experiment, will taste of many dishes, and possibly devour many things not intended for them. From some of these they will take no serious harm, while in many other cases they will get a permanent warp of judgment or of feeling. It would seem to me wise to guide the child in his explorations, giving him plenty of those grown-up things that you believe to be good for him, and heading him off as long as possible from the others. For all your caution, however, children will be found buried in Tom Jones, mousing about in Montaigne, chuckling over Tristram Shandy, and befuddling themselves with Ghosts and Anna Karénina. In these cases we can only hope that nature has mercifully ordained that, not having the necessary apperception experience, they will not get at the real truth of these books, and that they will have the luck—rare, to be sure—to remove and correct their mistaken impressions in some subsequent reading.
The ideal co-operation between home, school, Sunday school, and library is yet to be brought about; teacher and parents can do much to promote it. As a step toward this co-operation they should provide every child who reads in a library with a list of books. The imaginative books in the list given out by the public libraries are practically all juveniles, apparently chosen mainly for the purpose of amusing children who have no books in their homes. These things are undoubtedly amusing; they are superficially appetizing; and they have the same effect that the soda fountain at the corner drug-shop has upon the children's appetite for true nourishment—they take the edge off his hunger so that he has no relish for his bread and butter, though he has had nothing to eat but a hint of cheap flavor, a dash of formaldehyde, a spoonful of poor milk, and a glassful of effervescence. The lists given by parents and teachers may change all this, but only if they include good things, beautiful and interesting enough to make these wasteful juveniles seem unattractive.
Every schoolroom in which the children are old enough to be interested, and every family should devise a method of digesting the news of the world every day or every week, so that the children may have some knowledge of current events. Of course, there are children who cannot be kept from reading the morning paper—crimes, sports, and all. Such a child's family should choose its newspaper with all possible care Every self-respecting family where there are children should be willing to submit to the very small sacrifice of foregoing the Sunday paper, to save the little people from the flood of commonplace, of triviality, and of ribaldry that overwhelms them from these monstrous productions.
Perhaps no well-brought-up child would be quite well equipped if he has not had The Youth's Companion and St. Nicholas in his childhood; but it is a mistake to let them linger too long in these periodicals, whose contents are somewhat fragmentary as literature, and not quite large enough or full enough as to current events and interests. It is wise to turn the children as soon as possible to the mature and more thorough magazines, among which should be included a technical and scientific journal. By all means do not subject them to the temptation of the various story-magazines—those cheap and easy chronicles of the questionable affairs of undergraduates and chorus girls, of Nietzschean superhumanity gone to seed, of imitations of the imitated psychology of the wild, all rendered in the English of third-year college themes. If the adult members of the family must have these things, let them be kept, along with "the season's best sellers," out of easy reach of the children.
It should not need to be said that there has been no attempt in the foregoing discussion to recommend every good thing, or to give an exhaustive list of such things in any one line; no more has there been an effort to give warning of all things undesirable, but merely, as in the whole book, to state the underlying principles of choice, with just enough specific examples to make clear their application.
The list of titles in literature given below must be taken as free suggestion, not at all as dogmatic requirement; least of all should it be regarded as an exhaustive and definitive programme. Throughout this little book there has been a deliberate effort to mention no more examples and specimens than would serve to support and illustrate the principles stated or the theories advanced, so as to keep out of it the wearing atmosphere of interminable lists, and to leave those who might accept the doctrines quite free to apply them in the selection of their own specimens. So now in the plan appended the titles have been carefully sifted and resolutely limited. It should not be necessary to say that it is not intended that all the specimens mentioned in any one year should be given within that year in every school—perhaps in any school; or that they should necessarily be given in the year to which they are here assigned. They are rather designed to indicate the kind of thing one would choose for the average classes in the average school, and to suggest things that go well together. I have even ventured to hope that those who read the book will also take the pains to read all the specimens mentioned in the programme, so as to catch their spirit and atmosphere, and after that choose quite freely for themselves these or other titles. The field of choice is especially wide among the folk-tales; all those mentioned are good, and suitable for the places in which they are put. But there are others good and suitable, which may, indeed, better satisfy the needs of some special teacher or class. In some schools, no doubt, it will be well to give a third year of folk-tales and simple lyrics before beginning the hero-tales. In that case the whole course would be pushed along a year, making for the last or eighth year a combination of bits taken from the seventh and eighth years suggested here. The course is planned for a school whose children go on into high school; though one can see little reason for a different course in literature for those children who stop with a grammar-school education. What we covet for such children is not knowledge of much literature, nor knowledge of any literature in particular, but a taste for wholesome books and some trustworthy habits of reading. These results are best secured when a few suitable and beautiful things have been lovingly taught and joyfully apprehended. Children thus provided will keep on reading; if they have been really fed on Julius Caesar or The Tempest they will hunger for more Shakespeare; if they have taken delight in Treasure Island they will pursue Stevenson and find Scott and Cooper. The chances for implanting in them some living and abiding love of books are much better if we teach them in school the things they may easily master and completely contain, than if we try to supply them with what only an adult reader can expect to appropriate, which therefore takes on the character of a task, or remains in their minds a mere chaotic mass.
The plan of the course is simple and obvious enough. Indeed, the main idea is first of all merely that of putting into each year such things as will delight and train a child of that age in literary ways. With this is joined the equally simple and reasonable purpose of giving in each year an acceptable variety looking toward the development of a generous taste—a story, a heroic poem, a musical lyric or two, a bit of fun, a group of fables. Throughout the programme there has been a conscious attempt to use things every teacher knows or may very easily find, and of associating things that harmonize in spirit.
For the first two years the folk-tales form the core of the course. To the folk-tales is joined a group of simple lyrics, many of them the more formal and expressive of the traditionary rhymes. As a matter of course, in a school where these first- and second-year children have not already had in kindergarten or in the home nursery the simpler rhymes and jingles—"Little Boy Blue," "Jack Horner," "There Was a Man in Our Town"—they should be taught.
In the third year Robinson Crusoe constitutes the large core. As suggested in another chapter it is well to treat this story as if it were a cycle, taking it in episodes, and interweaving with it other bits of literature which harmonize with it, either reinforcing it or counteracting it. It may easily happen that a teacher would select a quite different group of poems for study along with Robinson Crusoe, according as he emphasized some other aspect of the story and according to the maturity of his children. This programme assumes a pretty mature third-year group. It may be in many schools well to transfer, as I have suggested, this whole arrangement to the fourth year.
The fifth- and sixth-year work is arranged upon a similar plan—that of constituting a story or a story-cycle the center of the work, and associating with it shorter and supplementary bits. While the poems in both cases are such as harmonize in subject or idea with aspects of the two stories that will inevitably appear in the teaching, they have not been chosen solely from that point of view; they are also in every case beautiful as detached poems, and ideally, at least, suitable for the children. Every experienced teacher will have other verses and stories in mind which may be added to those given or substituted for them. Some of them will be useful, not as class studies necessarily, but as a part of that "reserve stock" that every teacher has, from which he draws from time to time something to read to his class which they are not expecting.
In the programme for the sixth year an alternative is suggested. Many teachers will find enough in the Arthur stories to form the core of the literature for the year. Others will find material for the whole year's stories in the Norwegian and Icelandic sagas. Many will not like the suggestion of giving the antidote of the chivalric romances—Don Quixote. Many will prefer to drop hero-tales and romances in favor of more modern stories. Such a group of stories is suggested introducing the stories that call for interpretation, and the apprehending of a secondary meaning. This paves the way for the stories of the seventh year which call for some genuine literary interpretation. In the seventh year programme the two dramatic bits of Yeats's are suggested, not only because they are charming in themselves, and are in charming artistic contrast, but because they can easily be staged and acted, and are full of suggestion of the kind of thing the children can do themselves. The Pot of Broth is the dramatization of a well-known folk-droll, and The Hour-Glass is a morality calling for no complexity of dialogue, of staging, or of dramatic motive—the kind of play the children can most easily produce both as literature and as acting.
As suggested in a previous chapter, during this and the following year each child should be encouraged or required to learn a poem or a story of his own choosing, which he presents to the class. This will greatly enrich the class programme. Only one fable is suggested—one of Fontaine's, the interpretation or moral of which should now be given by the class; many other fables may be used in the same way, if this exercise seems to be profitable.
As every observer of schools knows, it is the eighth-year children who need most accommodation and understanding. The programme offered is designed for the normal class in the average school—when the children are really passing into the secondary stage and should be preparing to go into high school without crossing a chasm. But it may need much modification for those eighth-year classes in which there are belated children and unevenly developed children. It is quite possible that Julius Caesar, The Tempest, and Sohrab and Rustum may prove impracticable for such a class, and that something easier would have to be substituted. In no case can we hope to teach the two plays exhaustively, either as regards their form or their content. But both these plays are of that kind of great art that has many levels to which one may climb in turn, with his growing maturity. And the beauty of both these plays is that in case the class is precocious and does inquire deeply into them, there is nothing in the political philosophy of Julius Caesar or in the spiritual and social philosophy of The Tempest that may not be safely explained to them. This programme makes no mention, as may be seen, of the many minor lyrics and bits of drama and story that will be added from many sources and in many connections: from their home reading; from the teacher's reserve stock; from their reading lessons; from their work in other languages; from their preparation for festivals and celebrations; from suggestions of weather and season; from occasional current periodicals, and possibly from other sources.
And when all is said, one must say again that there cannot be a strictly normalized and fixed curriculum in literature since in this subject more than in any other the personnel of the class must be considered; their typical inheritance, their tradition, their social grade, their community, their other interests, their passing preoccupation and almost their daily mood, are factors in the problem. The teacher who is sensitive to these matters in his class will soon emancipate himself from the fixed curriculum. Let him at the same time be sensitive to the emphasis and appeal of each bit of art he chooses for them, and he cannot fail. Whatever his results they will be good.
After so long a preamble follows the list of specimens:
First Year
Second Year
Third Year