Story Telling and Education
BY GEORGE EVERETT PARTRIDGE, Ph.D.
The recent revival of story telling raises many interesting questions, both practical and theoretical. Considered as a part of a larger movement,—an effort to control and utilize the powers concealed within the instincts and unconscious forces of the mind—story telling takes a place in a problem which we can hardly be mistaken in calling one of the most important of our day. We have tended to value, in education, only that which we can see and fully understand; but now, as we begin seriously to employ arts in the school, and in the arts to subordinate knowledge to feeling, to use methods that yield no immediate or practical return, we demand an increasing faith in the powers of receptivity and inner response of the child, and we must learn more and more to detect, and to be satisfied with, unseen and remote effects.
In the art-invasion of the school, which is one aspect of this movement toward a wider education, it is difficult to see how, in the near future, we can be carried too far. We have been in the habit of emphasizing so much the learning process, that we are in danger of preventing the free and experimental attitude toward these new interests that seems needed at the present time. We are likely to have too little, rather than too much, faith in the play motives, the æsthetic moods, and the subconscious powers. We shall still want the child to express, to dramatize, to be examined upon, everything he receives: to externalize every response, even in the most intimate regions of feeling.
In calling the influx of artistic elements and methods into the school one phase of the education of the unconscious and deeper powers, we have a significant practical view-point, and are at the same time in touch with new results in science. As a practical ideal, we must aim to educate all the individual, not merely thought and voluntary movement. We wish to reach the inherited mechanisms of the organism; we wish to play upon all the potentialities of feeling and volition, and to utilize powers latent in the deposits of experience that the child has brought with him to the world.
These new results in science give to the well-worn principle that we must educate all the powers of the child a new meaning, and at least three important advances in psychology, in recent years, combine to put solid ground under our feet for a practical æsthetics, and give us principles by which we can coördinate the artistic elements and methods of the school.
The first of these advances is the genetic psychology that has arisen and flourished on the basis of Darwinian principles in biology, and which has shown the fundamental place of the feelings in education. The second is the new psycho-analysis, which, by showing the laws of the symbolic expression of hidden desires and feelings, has given us a new conception of the relation of art to life. The third new result is in the psychology of valuation, which has traced out, at least roughly, the course of development of the æsthetic and ethical states of consciousness.
New and incomplete and lacking in coördination as these principles are, they already yield us practical insights such as we have never been able to obtain from the older philosophies. We may confidently expect to see in time a solid science of the feelings, which will give us a “union of art and life” in a sound æstheticism in education: an æstheticism that will help to organize and control the fundamental feelings, and will overcome the superficial aloofness of our prevailing too formal and too detached art. This will be based upon the discovery that art, and the need of art, extend throughout all phases of human life; and that all true art must work in intimate union with practical affairs.
Considerations, such as these, seem essential for any study of the place of story telling, or any other art, in education.