Stories and Story-telling

by Angela M. Keyes

(1) The story will give pleasure. Educational thought is growing more and more cordial toward this value. Undisturbed by any charge of “soft pedagogy,” it finds wholesome pleasure, not merely relaxing, but constructive, building toward physical health, mental brightness, and moral virtue. Here is the story’s opportunity. Every one admits it is pleasure-giving. The stern-minded among us must realize that this is its deepest educational value. It is from the good pleasure the child gets from the story that will ripen good taste, good will, good effort, and all the other goods some teachers and parents regard as more substantial merit. Besides, joy appears to be here to stay. To attempt to take it out of the plan of things is, to say the least, short-sighted. American civilization is looking hopefully to the school for better national standards of pleasure. The school is under obligation to educate the children to enjoyment of wholesome pleasure.

(2) The story will stir and direct the imagination. We do not yet grant in practice the importance of the imagination. We do not purposefully exercise it, as we do, for example, the reason. We say glibly that imagination is at the root of the successful man’s arrival at material profit, of the explorer’s discovery and the practical scientist’s invention, of the poet’s song and the philanthropist’s vision of a state of society in which the kingdom of heaven will be nearer at hand; but we give little or no training to the imagination. Here again is the story’s opportunity. Through the story the interpretative story-teller may give the imagination consistent exercise.

(3) The story will arouse and direct the pupil’s feelings. The school to-day is emphasizing the necessity of educating the heart, the climactic third of the three great H’s,—the Head, the Hand, and the Heart. And psychologists are telling us that to educate a child to be kind, unselfish, filial, reverent, gentle, courageous, good-tempered, to educate him to admire goodness, justice, valor, to be sensible of beauty, to aspire and make effort toward excellence, is as practicable as to train him to do or to make something. It calls for more delicate but not different treatment; working not by dictation, but by magnetic suggestion. The story-teller may render a great service to the individual and to the community by helping to form right feeling-habit.

(4) The well-chosen story will cultivate the taste. Psychology is urging early direction also of the æsthetic sense. The story-teller, through her own joyous response to beauty, has it in her power to awaken and direct the children’s appreciation of beauty. It is she, too, who must help to lay the foundation for that better taste in novel or play that America eagerly desires, and that publisher and playwright say they stand ready to satisfy as soon as the public arrives at it.

(5) The story will help to form the child’s thought and language habit. As this is the value most often acknowledged in classroom practice—though not always by the best methods—it is not necessary to do more at this point than restate it. Mastery in thought and language is far-reaching usefulness, affecting individual growth and social harmony. The story, because of its easy, more or less artless composition and graphic diction, lends itself to starting right thought and language mode.

(6) Story-telling may help to stimulate and direct potential literary creativity. In spite of its breadth of view the school appears insensible to the rights of children born creative. The array of geniuses recently marshaled by a Chicago professor, that teachers pronounced hopeless dunces and in some cases drove from their classes, should set the school thinking. It is reaching out helpful hands to the little unfortunate ones, the blind and the deaf and the sick; but it continues to dismiss the divinely commissioned little sister or brother, with the platitude that his genius will survive if it be sufficiently sturdy. This is a specious half-truth unworthy of repetition. It is, besides, discrimination against the individual. The school is not meeting its obligation to all the children of the community. It will not do to lay the blame to the community’s “commercialized” standards. In spite of apparent emphasis on the useful arts, the community would not lose from the varied web of its civilization the bright thread of painting and music and story. Maturing thought is convincing it that the fine arts are finely utilitarian. Here, again, is the story’s opportunity. The simple materials and childlike fancy in it may stimulate gradually and naturally play of the creative imagination.

(7) Story-telling should be at least foreword for book-study of literature. The thoughtful teacher of literature to-day finds in the classic story all the elements of her material, and sees in the child listening to it the most promising student of literature. At the freely sympathetic period the child becomes familiar with the inner life of language as used to represent fundamental motive, character, and action. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that he should bring as basis for study of more advanced literature. The printed page will be informed with lively meaning, to which his imagination, feeling, and æsthetic sense can respond. It is largely the school’s neglect of oral foundation in literature, which, by the way, should not be confined to the lowest grades, that is at the root of feeble appreciation in book-study of literature.

(8) The story holds in it a greater value, as much greater as life is than literature; it will give knowledge of life. The writer might have said experience of life, because of the child’s strong tendency to be and to do what attracts him. Students of literature, to-day, are urging that it is not a mere “polishing” study, but the substantially useful subject from which we may get clear and inspiring knowledge of life. They would have literature recognized as the reflection of life, idealized, it may be, but therefore stronger reflection. As life is the occupation that all of us, no matter what our special vocation may be, must engage in together, a study that throws light on it is indispensable. Here is a great opportunity for the story. Every genuine story, sense or nonsense, is a glimpse of life, which will early give guiding knowledge and experience.