This realism, this objectifying of thought, this living form of knowledge, is characteristic of all great writers in prose or verse. The novelist, the romancer, the poet, the orator, and even the essayist, will always put the breath of reality into his work by an infusion of concreteness, of graphic personification. The poet's fancy, building out of the abundant materials of sense-experience, is what gives color and warmth to all his thoughts. Strong writers make incessant use of figures of speech. Their thought must clothe itself with the whole panoply of imagery and graphic representation in order to be efficient in the warfare for truth.
What a lesson for the teacher! What models upon which to develop his style of thinking! If the teaching profession and its work could be weighed in the balance, the scale would fall on the side of the abstract with a heavy thud. Not that object lessons will save us. They only parody the truth. For the object lesson as a separate thing we have no use at all. But to ground every idea and every study in realism, to pass up steadily through real objects and experience to a perception of truths which have wide application, to science—this is the true philosophy of teaching.
The classic writers lead us even one grand step beyond realism. The fancy builds better than the cold reason. It adorns and ennobles thought till it becomes full-fledged for the flight toward the ideal.
As the poet, standing by the sea-shore, ponders the life that has been in the now empty shell washed up from the deep, his fancy discovers in the shell a resemblance to human life and destiny, and he cries:—
"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!"
Is it possible that one could fall under the sway of the poets and artists, appropriate their images and fruitful style of thought, be wrought upon by their fancies, and still remain dull and lifeless and prosaic in the class-room? No wonder that true literature has been called the literature of power, as distinguished from the literature of knowledge (supplementary readers, pure science, information books, etc.). The lives and works of our best writers contain an expansive spiritual energy, which, working into the mind of a teacher, breaks the shell of mechanism and formality. The artist gives bright tints and colors to ideas which would otherwise be faded and bleached.
The study of the best literature adapted to children in each age is a fruitful form of psychology and child study. The series of books selected for the different grades is supposed to be adapted to the children at each period. The books which suit the temper and taste of children in primary grades are peculiar in quality, and fit those pupils better than older ones. In intermediate classes the boyhood spirit, which delights in myth, physical deeds of prowess, etc., shows itself, and many of the stories, ballads, and longer poems breathe this spirit. In grammar grades the expanding, maturing minds of children leap forward to the appreciation of more complex and extended forms of literature which deal with some of the great problems of life more seriously, as "Snow-Bound," "Evangeline," "Roger de Coverley," "Merchant of Venice," etc.
Any poem or story which is suited to pupils of the common school may generally be used in several grades. Hawthorne's "Wonder Book," for instance, may be used anywhere from the third to the eighth grade by a skilful teacher. But for us the important question is, to what age of children is it best adapted? Where does its style of thought best fit the temper of the children? The eighth grade may read it and get pleasure and good from it, but it does not come up to the full measure of their needs. Children of the third grade cannot master it with sufficient ease, but in the latter part of the fourth or first part of the fifth grade it seems to exactly suit the wants, that is, the spiritual wants, of the children. It will vary, of course, in different schools and classes. Now, it is a problem for our serious consideration to determine what stories to use and just where each belongs, within reasonable limits. Let us inquire where the best culture effect can be realized from each book used, where it is calculated to work its best and strongest influence. To accomplish this result it is necessary to study equally the temper of the children and the quality of the books, to seek the proper food for the growing mind at its different stages. This is not chiefly a matter of simplicity or complexity of language. Our readers are largely graded by the difficulty of language. But literature should be distributed through the school grades according to its power to arouse thought and interest. Language will have to be regarded, but as secondary. Look first to the thought material which is to engage children's minds, and then force the language into subservice to that end. The final test to determine the place of a selection in the school course must be the experiment of the class-room. We may exercise our best judgment beforehand, and later find that a classic belongs one or two grades higher or lower than we thought.
We really need some comprehensive principle upon which to make the selection of materials as adapted to the nature (psychology) of children. The theory of the culture epochs of race history as parallel to child development offers at least a suggestion. A few of the great periods of history seem to correspond fairly well to certain epochs of child growth. The age of folk-lore and the fairy tale is often called the childhood of the race; the predominance of the imagination and of the childlike interpretation of things in nature reminds us strikingly of the fancies of children. We find also that the literary remains of this epoch in the world's history, the fairy tales, are the peculiar delight of children from four to six. In like manner the heroic age and its literary products seem to fascinate the children of nine to eleven years. In connection with this theory it is observed that the greatest poets of the world in different countries are those who have given poetic form and expression to the typical ideas and characters of certain epochs of history. So Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Scott. The best literature is, much of it, the precipitate of the thought and life of historical epochs in race development. Experiment has shown that much of this literature is peculiarly adapted to exert strong culture influence upon children. Emerson, in his "Essay on History," says: "What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period?" And again: "The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the world, he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions." The literary heritage of the chief culture epochs is destined therefore to enter as a powerful agent in the education of children in our schools, and the place of a piece of literature in history suggests at least its place in child culture.
The study of these literary masterpieces, the choicest of the world, while it offers a broad perspective of history, also enters deep into the psychology of children and their periods of growth and change. What a study for the teacher!