Teaching will be good art when the child's growth is a perfect fit to the uses of his life, when subject-matter brings to him influences he needs and can use. Teaching will be good art when it breaks up old habits, starts new ones, strengthens good traits, and weakens bad ones; when it gives a new attitude of cheerfulness in life or of thoughtfulness for others or of reason in all things. It will be good art when under it the child wants to do something and learns how to do it. Teaching will be great art when under it the child continually attains self-activity, self-development, and self-consciousness, when he continually grows so that he may finally contribute his utmost portion to the highest evolution of the race. Teaching will be great art when it touches the emotions of the child,—when history calls forth a warm indignation against wrong, when mathematics strengthens a noble love of truth or literature creates a strong satisfaction in justice. This is the poetry of teaching, because mere subject-matter becomes a criticism of life. Teaching will be great art when you, the teacher, through the humble means of your presentation of subject-matter, furnish the child at the same time with ideas, perceptions, and opinions which are your personal criticism of life. Teaching will be great art when you, the teacher, have worked up into your own character a portion of life which is of value, so that the child coming in touch with you knows an influence more powerful than anything you can do or say. Teaching will then awaken in the child a social relation of abiding confidence, of secure trust, of faith unshakable. And this relation will then create for the teacher the obligation to keep this trust inviolable, to practice daily, noblesse oblige. Teaching will be great art when with the subject-matter the artist gives love, a great universal kindness that thinks not of itself but, being no respecter of persons, looks upon each child in the light of that child's own best realization. This penetrating sympathy, this great understanding, will call forth from the child an answering love, which grows daily into a larger humanity of soul until the child, in time too, comes to have a universal sympathy. This is the true greatness of teaching. This it is which brings the child into harmony with the Divine love which speaks in all God's handiwork and brings him into that unity with God which is the mystery of Froebel's teaching.
During the story-telling one must ask, "In all this what is the part the child has to play?" In the telling the teacher has aimed to give what there is in the tale. The child's part is to receive what there is in the tale, the emotion, the imagination, the truth, and the form embodied in the tale. The content of feeling, of portrayal, of truth, and of language he receives, he will in some way transmit before the school day is ended, even if in forms obscure and hidden. Long years afterwards, he may exhibit this same emotion, imagination, truth and form, in deeds that proclaim loudly the return from his fairy tales. However, if the child is being surrounded by pragmatic influences through his teachers he will soon become aware that his feelings are useless unless he does something because of them; that what he sees is worthless unless he sees to some purpose; that it is somewhat fruitless to know the truth and not use it; and if words have in their form expressed the life of the tale, he is more dead than words not to express the life that teems within his own soul. The little child grows gradually into the responsibility for action, for expression, into a consciousness of purpose and a knowledge of his own problems. But each opportunity he is given to announce his own initiative breaks down the inhibition of inaction and aids him to become a free achieving spirit. As the child listens to the tale he is a thinking human creature; but in the return which he makes to his tale he becomes a quickened creator. The use which he makes of the ideas he has gained through his fairy tales, will be the work of his creative imagination.
Fairy tales, though perfectly ordinary subject-matter, may become the means of the greatest end in education, the development in the child of the power of consciousness. The special appeal to the various powers and capacities of the child mind, such as emotion, imagination, memory, and reason, here have been viewed separately. But in life action the mind is a unit. Thinking is therefore best developed through subject-matter which focuses the various powers of the child. The one element which makes the child manipulate his emotion, imagination, memory, and reason, is the presence of a problem. The problem is the best chance for the child to secure the adjustment of means to ends. This adjustment of means to ends in a problem situation, is real thinking and is the use of the highest power of which man is capable, that of functional consciousness. The real need of doing things is the best element essential to the problem. Through a problem which expresses such a genuine need, to learn to know himself, to realize his capacities and his limitations, and to secure for himself the evolution of his own character until it adapts, not itself to its environment, but its environment to its own uses and masters circumstances for its own purposes—this is the high hill to which education must look, "from which cometh its strength." The little child, in listening to a fairy tale, in seeing in it a problem of real need, and in working it out, may win some of this strength. We have previously seen that fairy tales, because of their universal elements, are subject-matter rich in possible problems.
During the story-telling what is the part the child has to play? The part of the child in all this may be to listen to the story because he has some problem of his own to work out through the literature, because he has some purpose of his own in listening, because he enjoys the story and wishes to find out what there is in it, or because he expects it to show him what he may afterwards wish to do with it. In any case the child's part is to see the characters and what they do, to follow the sequence of the tale, and to realize the life of the story through the telling. He may have something to say about the story at the close of the telling, he may wish to compare its motifs with similar motifs in other tales, or he may wish to talk about the life exhibited by the story. The various studies of the curriculum every day are following more closely the Greek ideal and giving the child daily exercise to keep the channels of expression free and open. And when the well-selected fairy tale which is art is told, through imitation and invention it awakens in the child the art-impulse and tends to carry him from appreciation to expression. If before the telling the story-teller has asked herself, "What variety of creative reaction will this tale arouse in the child?" and if she has told the story in the way to bring forward the best possibility for creative reaction the nature of the tale affords, she will help to make clear to the child what he himself will want to do with the story. She will help him to see a way to use the story to enter into his everyday life. The return of creative reaction possible to the child will be that in harmony with his natural instincts or large general interests. These instincts, as indicated by Professor John Dewey, in The School and Society, are:—
(1) the instinct of conversation or communication;
(2) the instinct of inquiry or finding out things;
(3) the instinct of construction or making things; and
(4) the instinct of artistic expression or [of imitating and combining things].
(1) The instinct of conversation. The little child likes to talk. If you have ever listened to a little girl of five artlessly proceeding to tell a story, such as Little Black Sambo, which she had gathered from looking at a neighbor's book, but which she had not yet mastered sufficiently to grasp its central theme, reiterating the particular incidents with the enthusiasm and joy and narrative tone of the story-teller, you realized how the child likes to talk. For there appeared the charm of the story-telling mode distinct from the story it told.
Because of this instinct of conversation one form of creative reaction may be language expression. The oral reproduction of the story re-experiences the story anew. The teacher may help here by creating a situation for the re-telling. A teacher might put a little foreign boy through rapid paces in learning English by selecting a story like The Sparrow and the Crow and by managing that in the re-telling the little foreigner would be the Crow who makes the repetitive speeches, who must go to the Pond and say:—