(2) The story is an illuminator of facts. The child gets his information by activities in relation to the environment, by exploration, observation, experimentation, with the everlasting play of the interpretative processes, and by responding to and accepting or rejecting the communicated interpretations put upon phenomena by his social group. In this process of interpretation there is the immediate environment which can be sensed, but is understood only through its reconstruction in the imagination, largely in linguistic terms; and the remote environment which cannot be sensed and which can be understood only as it is built in the imagination as an extension of the reconstructed sensed environment. In these reconstructive processes the story is the most powerful correlating and illuminating educational force we have, as may be indicated by a brief analysis.
The activities of the school curriculum dealing with the environment have two natural foci of interest for the child. (a) The civic-geographical-historical complex (when rightly organized just one subject) and (b) the physical-biological complex, which is now coming to be called “general science.” For the child these two groups of the environmental activities cover the whole of adult science, philosophy, and religion, and both require a tremendous reconstructive functioning of the imagination.
(a) The first group is a new coming correlation which naturally must carry with it organized communication or the larger share of language and literature. The investigation of the local social environment is the basis of all “civics,” “geography,” and “history.” It expands as civics. When the child projects his interpretations of any human activity into another environment so that he is reconstructing in his imagination the life habits and customs of the people in relation to the physical and biological characteristics of the country, he is studying geography. When he goes backward in time in this process, he is studying history.
In this concentric widening of the intellectual horizon concerning human life and its relationships to the environment, the imagination must reconstruct a world which it cannot sense. The facts may be gained from pictures, maps, descriptions, but to become functional in thought in any other than in a mere commercial sense, the reconstruction must touch the emotions so that the life and conditions of living of the people will be felt. When felt the life will be dwelt upon in imagination, and when dwelt upon in imagination it will function in the life activities of the child. Giving this vivid, felt insight into the life conditions of other people is the function of the story. Through the hunger to feel life the story reveals life.
(b) The story also functions for children in the interpretation of the physical-biological environment or “general science.”
Between six and fourteen years of age is the neglected period for science, and it is the age when the story may function in the biggest way as a natural educational tool. Yet so absorbed are school men in the problem of drilling children in the dissected elements of the written language that they do not even understand one of the two chief characteristics of child nature at this age,—the rapidly expanding curiosity concerning nature. It is the age of the first crude control of the “scientific instinct,” the tendency to experiment and explore. It is the age for fixing the questioning habit and building a common-sense confidence in and familiarity with nature. These results follow from the logical processes involved in the activities, not from being presented with the formalized and logical results of adult science. The child will have none of this latter if he can help it; he wants to do his own experimenting. In this process again the story gives the larger insight. The child acquires facts by experimentation, observation, exploration, but the larger meanings and relationships require imaginative reconstruction. The child can observe the fish or the fly at different stages of their development, but the story of the life history of the fish or fly gives what observation cannot supply. It is as fascinating as any fairy tale when told with the same consideration for dramatic form, and the story is true besides. The child cannot understand evolution as presented by Darwin, or by the teacher of biology in the high schools; but the child even of eight revels in the stories that carry the facts of evolution, and thus he gains a right feeling towards the wonderful meaning of the progress of natural things, which makes later thinking true and easy. So strong is the response to the story that even the history of physical things when set in a natural story form, stimulates.
The fairy tales of the future will be well-told stories from our sciences or human life and nature, the two natural centers of interest in the environment, and we may expect as results in public opinion a broader common sense and a lessened gullibility. In this organization of science and modern thought in story form for its larger use in education the professional story-teller has still a great unfinished task to perform. Its beginnings are in this book, and Mrs. Cather is already at work on a broader compilation of materials for a later volume. In this larger functioning of the story the old fairy tales and myths will take their place as historical data to give comparative insight into the beliefs of people in the past, a sympathetic understanding of their limitations in knowledge, and an appreciation of our privileges in civilization, due largely to the struggles of the past.
Clark W. Hetherington