CHAPTER XVI THE CORRELATIONS OF LITERATURE
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.