Literature in the Elementary School

by Porter Lander MacClintock

5. As a part of the artistic economy of the story, it should have a close unity—closer than we would demand of a story read to our children at home, and closer than we should demand for an adult novel. The threads of the action should be so closely related and interlinked that they are practically all in action all the time. This is particularly true for the younger children. It may not be too great a tax upon the patience and attention of the older children to leave the hero in imminent danger on his desert island, while we return for several chapters to the heroine in the crypts of the wicked duke's castle; but the little ones should not be asked to endure it.

The action should be all rounded up within the one design and stop at the artistic stopping-place. To appreciate this aspect of unity, read Grimm's Briar-Rose—that wonderful little masterpiece of structure—in comparison with Perrault's The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, which trails after it the ugly and inorganic episode of the ogre mother-in-law. Even in the cycles of stories the separate episodes should display these qualities of unity.

6. When we choose our standard class-story, we will have in mind other aspects of the principle of economy, or of due artistic measure. In such a story there should not be an undue appeal to any one emotion. Too much horror or disgust will undo the very effect one desires to produce. Such a story as The Dog of Flanders, for example, affords a sort of emotional spree of pity and pathos through which the steadier members of a class refuse to go, and which the more emotional members do not need. Especially should there not be any unnecessary profusion of magic, of supernatural agencies, of daring and danger. This brings us to the difficult point of the degree or kind of unlikelihood one may risk in such a story. When one is reading to the single child, or to a few children, or if one is a real dramatic genius, this unlikelihood is not so important a matter, because it is not difficult under either of those conditions to create an atmosphere of artistic faith in which any story "goes." But in a big class, with the ordinary teacher it is difficult; some inquisitive or skeptical minds will call for proof or detailed statement, and quite destroy the rapport demanded for the perfect appreciation of the story. In a class I once knew such a skeptic, who was indeed a mere scientific realist, brought the otherwise enraptured class violently to earth during the reading of the passage of Odysseus between the whirlpool and the cliff, by the sardonic suggestion that Scylla must have had a "rubber-neck." When it can be avoided, do not tempt your skeptic or your cynic by the kind or degree of unlikelihood liable to excite his protest.

7. The story should be serious. This does not preclude humorous and comic stuff. But the funny things should be sincerely funny, as contra-distinguished from those things that are ostentatiously childlike, elaborately accommodated to the infant mind, ironical, or sentimental, and the teacher must so know his story, and so honor it and his children, that he can render it to them whether it be an improbable adventure of Odysseus, or the merest horse-play of a folk-droll, sincerely and cordially.

8. In the earlier typical years of the elementary school, through the sixth grade (twelve-year-old children) at least, the persons of the story should be those who do things rather than those who become something else. They should display the striking, permanent qualities rather than the elusive, evolving qualities; they should act from simple and strong motives, not from obscure and complex ones. Only in the latest years, if at all within the period, should the class be asked to consider more intricate types, more subjective qualities, and more mixed motives. No mistake is likely to be made in this matter, if the stories and plays are well chosen from the point of view of fitness in other respects. Every teacher who is conscientious and informed, will realize that these persons in the stories contribute their quota—and a very large one—to that "copy," that ideal self, that broods over every child's inner life, inviting him on, giving him courage and hope, reproof and praise, leading him to whatever he attains of social and personal morality. And every such teacher can help the children to build into their ideals the permanent and valuable qualities of these persons of their story.

9. The story should be ethically sound. On this point one would like to make discriminating statements. One does not teach literature in order to teach morals and he cannot ask that his fairy-tale should turn out a sermon, or that his hero-tale deliberately inculcate this or that virtue. Indeed, literature may be completely unmoral, and still safely serve the purposes of amusement and of distinctively literary training—as witness the nursery rhymes, the Garden of Verses, Alice in Wonderland. But if it be immoral, it is also artistically unsound, and does not yield satisfactory literary results. No teacher is in danger of teaching a story which depicts the attractions of vice or glorifies some roguish hero. But let him beware also of those less obvious immoralities, where the success of a story turns upon some piece of unjustifiable trickery or disobedience, or irreverence, or some more serious immorality, which thus has placed upon it the weight of approval. In the chapbook tale of Jack and the Bean-Stalk, to take a chance example, the hero's successful adventures hinge upon a piece of folly and disobedience; the kindergartenized version of The Three Bears excuses an unpardonable breach of manners. The pivotal issue, the central spring of a story must be ethically strong, so as to bear the closest inspection and to justify itself in the fierce light of class discussion.

Of course, one should be cautious here, so as not to seem merely puritanical or Pecksniffian. Subtlety is the savage virtue; along with horse-play it is the child's substitute for both wit and humor. The wiles and devices of Odysseus only endear him the more to his sympathetic child-followers, as they did to Pallas Athene herself. We cannot give to the classes the things best for them in other ways, and exclude all tales in which wiliness or subtlety constitutes the method, if not the motive. But we can do this: we can see to it that the trick tends to the securing of final justice, and we can discriminate between mere deceitful trickiness and that subtlety which is, as in the case of Odysseus, quickness of wit or steady intellectual dominance. And we must make many allowances, setting ourselves free in the child's moral world as it really is to him, by constant imaginative sympathy. According to the nursery code there is no harm in playing a trick upon a giant; by very virtue of being a giant, with the advantage of size on his side, and more than likely stupid besides, he is fair game for any nimble-witted hero. The children and their heroes use the deliciously frank and entirely satisfying argument of the fisherman who freed the monstrous Afreet from the bottle: "This is an Afreet, and I am a man, and Allah has given me sound reason. Therefore I will now plot his destruction." The butcher and the hen-wife, hereditary villains of the folk-tales, are such unpitied victims. The misfortunes of Kluge Else, of Hans in Luck, and of the countless other noodles, are but the proper fruit of their folly. Every child will instinctively—and indeed ultimately—justify the legal quibble by which Portia defeats Shylock, as but the just visitation upon his cunningly devised cruelty. Let it be a clear case of the biter bitten, and of the injustice or stupidity of the original biter, and one need not fear the result—certainly not the artistic result—upon the sensible child or upon the average class—the average class being, in the end, always a sensible child.

At the same time one hastens to say that to use a large number of such stories would place the children in an atmosphere of trickery and petty scheming which would be most undesirable. I have read with a group of children where the presence of one incurably slippery member so poisoned the air that it would have been unwise to study even one story in which success was achieved by the use of a trick or a bit of subtlety.

Let your stories be ethically sound, even the stratagems and wiles making for justice, and the right sort of mercy.