The power to use good English and to express himself clearly and fittingly is cultivated from the very first. While this merit is purely incidental, it is none the less valuable. The persistence with which bad and uncouth words and phrases are employed by children in our common school, both in oral work and in composition, admonishes us to begin early to eradicate these faults. It seems often as if intermediate and grammar grades were more faulty and wretched in their use of English than primary grades. But there can be no doubt that early and persistent practice in the best forms of expression, especially in connection with interesting and appropriate thought matter, will greatly aid correctness, fluency, and confidence in speech. There is also a convincing pedagogical reason why children in the first primary should be held to the best models of spoken language. They enter the school better furnished with oral speech than with a knowledge of any school study. Their home experiences have wrought into close association and unity, word and thing. So intimate and living is the relation between word and thought or object, that a child really does not distinguish between them. This is the treasure with which he enters school, and it should not be wrapped up in a napkin. It should be unrolled at once and put to service. Oral speech is the capital with which a child enters the business of education; let him employ it.
A retrospect upon the various forms of school activity which spring, in practical work, from the use of a good fairy story, reveals how many-sided and inspiriting are its influences. Starting out with a rich content of thought peculiarly germane to childish interests, it calls for a full employment of the language resources already possessed by the children. In the effort to picture out, with pencil or chalk, his conceptions of the story, a child exercises his fanciful and creative wit, as well as the muscles of arms and eyes. A good story always finds its setting in the midst of nature or society, and touches up with a simple, homely, but poetic charm the commonest verities of human experience. The appeal to the sensibility and moral judgment of pupils is direct and spontaneous, because of the interests and sympathies that are inherent in persons, and touch directly the childish fancy. And, lastly, the irrepressible traditional demand that children shall learn to read, is fairly and honestly met and satisfied.
It is not claimed that fairy tales involve the sum total of primary instruction, but they are an illustration of how rich will be the fruitage of our educational effort if we consider first the highest needs and interests of children, and allow the formal arts to drop into their proper subordination. "The best is good enough for children," and when we select the best, the wide-reaching connections which are established between studies carry us a long step toward the now much-bruited correlation and concentration of studies.
BOOKS OF MATERIALS FOR TEACHERS
Classic Stories for the Little Ones. Public School Publishing Co., Bloomington, Ill.
Grimm's Fairy Tales (Wiltse). Ginn & Co.
German Fairy Tales (Grimm). Maynard, Merrill, & Co.
Grimm's German Household Tales. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.
Stories from Hans Andersen. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.
Andersen's Fairy Tales, two volumes. Part I and Part II. Ginn & Co.
Fairy Stories and Fables. American Book Co.
Fables and Folk Stories (Scudder). Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.
Rhymes and Jingles (Dodge). Scribner's Sons.
Fairy Stories for Children (Baldwin). American Book Co.
Songs and Stories. University Publishing Co.
Fairy Life. University Publishing Co.
Six Nursery Classics (O'Shea). D. C. Heath & Co.
Grimm's Fairy Tales. Educational Publishing Co.
A Book of Nursery Rhymes (Welch). D. C. Heath & Co.
Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.
Heart of Oak, No. I. D. C. Heath & Co.
Heart of Oak, No. II. D. C. Heath & Co.
The Eugene Field Book. Scribner's Sons.
Moral Education of Children (Adler). D. Appleton & Co. Chapter VI. on Fairy Tales.
Literature in Schools (Scudder). Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. Chapter on Nursery Classics.
THE FABLES
No group of stories has a more assured place in the literature for children than the Æsop's "Fables." Some of the commonest have been expanded into little stories which are presented orally to children in the first school year, as "The Lion and the Mouse," "The Ants and the Grasshoppers," "The Dog and his Shadow," and others. They are so simple and direct that they are used alongside the fairy tales for the earliest instruction of children.
As soon as children have acquired the rudiments of reading the Æsop's "Fables" are commonly used in the second and third school year as a reading book, and all the early reading books are partly made up from this material.
If we inquire into the qualities of these stories which have given them such a universal acceptance, we shall find that they contain in a simple, transparent form a good share of the world's wisdom. More recent researches indicate that they originated in India, and reached Europe through Persia and Arabia, being ascribed to Æsop. This indicates that like most early literature of lasting worth, they are products of the folk-mind rather than of a single writer, and it is the opinion of Adler that they express the ripened wisdom of the people under the forms of Oriental despotism. The sad and hopeless submission to a stronger power expressed by some of the fables, it is claimed, unfits them for use in our freer life to-day.
There are certain points in which their attractiveness to children is clearly manifest. The actors in the stories are usually animals, and the ready interest and sympathy of children for talking animals are at once appealed to. In all the early myths and fairy tales, human life seems to merge into that of the animals, as in "Hiawatha," and the fables likewise are a marked expression of this childlike tendency.