Literature in the Elementary School

by Porter Lander MacClintock

The literature we do give the children should correspond to the stage of their development in matching as nearly as may be, in tone and spirit their own activities and interests, or should be calculated to arouse in them those interests and activities they ought legitimately to have. It should be of that kind that gives a large free sweep of activity; that reveals character and conduct in their simpler, open aspects; that exhibits literary art phenomena in their plainer, more striking varieties. These qualities are to be found in chosen specimens of the three other species of literature—epic, fiction, lyric. Of course one must select from each of the three those specimens that do exhibit the qualities he seeks. He could not offer to children a developed epic in its entirety; but there are many things of the epic kind—ballads, hero-tales, fairy-sagas, certain detachable sections of the great epics themselves—precisely suited to them. We would not introduce them into a mature novel, but there are Märchen for them, tales of conquest and adventure, stories of other children's doings. They would be lost and bored in the presence of the elegy or the sonnet; but we may find jingles and songs, and later on odes, fit and right for them.

In the epic kind of literature we include not only the epic, but all those other poetic compositions whose principles of organization is narrative—ballad, pastoral, idyll, etc. The presupposition in favor of them as good for the children (and it is borne out by the demonstration) lies in these two facts: they are concerned with events and achievements, and are therefore likely to be active and objective; they proceed by the method of story—the easiest and most helpful for the child to follow and to grasp. It seems necessary to say again that the members of the epic group must be scanned as narrowly with reference to their fitness in subject-matter and suitability in form as those of any other group. There is a fallacy in the assumption that epic is a childlike thing, the product of the childhood of the race. This is akin to the amusing opinion that myth—Greek myth, for example—is a childlike accumulation of childish inventions. Nay, epic poetry, even those epics that seem most nearly folk-poetry—the Béowulf, for example—are built upon hoary civilizations, each of them having behind it an art-tradition already old. And if there is an unwarranted assumption in the theory that epic is childlike, there is an unwarrantable presumption in the theory that the mature person outgrows it—that its appeal is only to a primitive and undeveloped taste. The value to the child of the epic is in its objectivity and activity, its large horizons and big spaces. The taste for these things should survive and grow stronger, as should every good taste planted and fostered in childhood. The mature person but adds to his enjoyment of these things a deeper enjoyment as he grows to appreciate the finer details and subtler meanings hidden from the child. The merest primary child can love and enjoy the heroic or amusing adventures of Odysseus; he should enjoy them equally when he is forty; but by that time he will have added the ability to appreciate also the wealth of artistic detail, the profound knowledge of human nature, the large mental and religious atmosphere of the poem. For most of this added enjoyment the child has and should have no intellectual welcome, no space yet ready.

Therefore, in giving the great epics, the teacher must know what aspects, details, and episodes to pass by or to pass lightly over. And he must look carefully to the fitness of any piece of this kind he may consider. It is not sufficient that it have a story. For example Sohrab and Rustum is a little epic which fits perfectly certain seventh or eighth grades, because, in addition to a sufficiently good story, it has an atmosphere of vast spaces and large movements, a wealth of broad, noble details; and above all, it handles and evokes a simple, primitive emotion, a sorrow which is as impersonal as the sorrows of Odysseus—a true epic sorrow. In contrast, Enoch Arden, another piece of the epic kind, is not adapted to children of any age, because it displays a complex domestic and psychic situation which no child ought to be called upon to realize, while the emotion called for is both in kind and amount the sentimentality of adults. Even among the folk-ballads the same discrimination must guide us. Sir Patrick Spens is the boy's own; while the poignant pathos of Young Waters, true and piercing as it is, is not for the boy to feel.

So, as will be said many times, but always with meaning, we choose, when we are sane, not the novel, complex in plot, involved in motive, overcharged in emotional atmosphere, but the simple, direct-moving romance, the hero-tale, whose subject-matter and method are so broad and universal as to fit even the child. We can welcome, for example, the hearty boyishness of Quentin Durward or Kidnapped, where we could not pilot our elementary class safe through the social and ethical sophistications of The Heart of Midlothian, nor steer them intelligently through the involved structure and difficult narrative medium of The Master of Ballantrae.

So with the lyric form. If one's choice of a lyric lay between "The splendor falls on castle walls" and "Tears, idle tears," he would renounce the complex mature moods, the figures and allusions for which the child's experience has given him no preparation, the pervading tone of rich melancholy of the one, in favor of the buoyant objectivity and more obvious emotional mood of the other.

Through all the earlier years of the elementary school with some classes, and in some communities throughout the period, the literary experience of the children may best be made up from specimens of these three species. It may be, however, that certain seventh or eighth grades (merely to name the older children) will be found mature enough to profit by the study of certain of the more heroic literary dramas. The same tests of objectivity and simplicity must be applied in selecting these. We should choose, for example, the obvious, and boisterous fun of The Comedy of Errors, rather than the half-hidden satire of A Midsummer-Night's Dream; Julius Caesar, since it may fitly be taught as a heroic tragedy; Macbeth, which, however violent in motive and method, is still direct and simple enough to be within the child's imaginative realization.

In most schools also, we may count upon finding in these oldest children in the elementary grades some power of meditation, some interest in abstract questions, some appreciation of humor and wit, much love of eloquence; so that in this last year they may profitably read in class some essays. To be sure, we will choose, not Montaigne, but Bacon; not Pater, but John Burroughs; not Dream Children, but A Dissertation on Roast Pig. In short, we will avoid the critical and the mystical in essays, and give them objective out-of-door essays like Wake-Robin, humorous anecdotal essays like Old China, eloquent oratorical essays like Gladstone's Kin Beyond Sea.

Indeed, during this seventh and eighth grade period begins the child's hour of ripeness for eloquence and oratory. And it is wise and easy to meet and supply his interest with essays of the address variety, which do for him the characteristic services performed by the literary essay, at the same time that they satisfy his awakening hunger for the rolling music of the oratorical form, answer to his dawning interest in the big world and great questions, and help to build a bridge for him into the public speaking and dramatic aspects of his literary work that he will find, or ought to find, in the secondary school.

For want of a good term, I have used, in the title to this chapter, the word "elements" to designate all the details that go to make up the literary work of art. Into this term we cover, for mere convenience, and to avoid cumbering ourselves with a tiresome and profitless bit of syllabus-making, these and such matters: structure, story, plot, incident, character, verse, image, figure, epithet, and many other details used to produce the total effect of a bit of literature. It becomes necessary to inquire which among these elements we shall expect to find serviceable for our purpose. Of course, they are all valuable even for a child in the sense that they all contribute to the general effect upon his consciousness; but certain of them may profitably be brought into high light and deliberately impressed upon the class; others would best be left lying by for his adult appreciation.

Take for example, the matter of structure, by which we mean the larger plan or composition by virtue of which the bit of art—poem or story—has a beginning a middle and an end; by virtue of which it starts somewhere, proceeds in an orderly manner, and reaches a destination; as, for example, in our ever admirable The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence, where you have the sixpence found, the pig bought, the obstacles on the road home, the acquiescence of the cat, the unraveling of the difficulties, the safe return home—a most orderly interdependence and sequence of incidents; or, as an example of a different kind of structure, Stevenson's Foreign Lands: the child climbing the cherry tree sees his own garden at his feet, his neighbor's garden over the wall, follows the white road to its disappearance, traces the river to its vanishment, follows it in his mind's eye to its fall into the far-away sea, and then strays on and on into the other-world of his own fancy—a perfect vanishing perspective; or examine with this matter of structure in mind Tennyson's Bugle-Song, where you will find a balanced, orderly composition—the horn, the actual echo, the spiritual echo.