Besides, one hastens to add that every child should hear and should later on have a chance to read some of the free, wandering, fantastic things which his teacher cannot feel justified in giving to the class.
One is obliged to take some attitude in mediating the folk-tales to the modern child, toward the fact that we often find them reflecting a moral standard quite different from that which the average well-bred child is brought up by; and this situation is complicated by the fact that the children are too young to understand dramatically another moral standard. This aspect of the stories has been pretty well covered by the general discussion in the previous chapter. But, luckily, it is quite possible to reject all those folk-tales of questionable morals and objectionable taste and still have plenty to choose from. Be slow to reject a folk-tale unless the bit of immorality—a lie, an act of disloyalty, or irreverence—or the bit of coarseness really forms the pivot of the story. Only then is the story unsafe or incurable.
One must take an attitude, not only toward the morals of the folk-tale, but toward its manners as well. There is some violence in many of the most attractive nursery tales; many of them reflect a rather rough-and-tumble state of social communion; many exhibit a superfluity of bloodshed or other grisly physical horrors. We quickly grant that it is not wise to read enough of these, or to linger long enough over the forbidding details, to create a deep or an abiding atmosphere of terror. But it is certainly true that the modern child of six or seven has so little apperception material for physical horrors that they do not take any deep hold upon him. Indeed, the safety of modern life, and the absence of visible violence, have taken the emotional appeal out of many grim lessons of Spenser's and of Dante's. Murder in the Märchen is to the modern child actually a bit of fine art—merely a neat and convincing way of disposing of iniquitous elder brothers and hostile magicians. The fact that the child's experience and information enable him to make no image of the physiological sequelae of the cutting-off of heads, for instance, makes it easy for the teacher to carry him harmless past details that would seem brutal to his nervous and squeamish elders. And these details are never the point of emphasis in any good story. And on the whole, those persons whom the children like and are likely to incorporate into their "pattern," have manners either just or gentle even in the folk-tales.
It might be well to introduce among the folk-tales an occasional short story of contemporary life, recording the activities of persons such as the children actually know. This is not so important in this stage of their experience as it will be later; first because the folk-tales do not seem antiquated nor, if they are wisely selected, unduly fantastic to them, since they find themselves imaginatively so much at home with material and the method; and, in the second place, because in every well-regulated school their fact studies and occupation work are at this time concrete and charming, and keep them rightly and sufficiently in touch with the world of actuality.
Of course we must accompany and supplement the folk-tales by verses, since even at this age we may impress upon the children the music of speech, and some of the minor literary beauties. They will probably be delighted to repeat (in many classes many of the children will be learning them for the first time) the lovely hereditary jingles and ballads from Mother Goose—"The Crooked Man," "I Saw a Ship a-Sailing," "Sing a Song of Sixpence," the rhymes for games and for counting-out. There are a very few of Stevenson's simple enough for this period; and there may be a further choice among things found here and there, simple, objective, and perfectly musical. It is not so much the content and meaning of poetry that we can hope to impress upon little people under eight, as the music and motion of the verse. There will be, however, many members of every class who will be interested in the meaning, the images, and the persons, if there be persons. We will take all pains, therefore, to see that these be not unsuitable.
These—folk-tales and simple singing lyrics—with a fable or two told as anecdotes, and repeated until even the little children begin to see that there is something more than meets the eye—all graded and modified in the light of the personnel and experience of the actual class, may constitute the literature of the first two years of school.
CHAPTER VII MYTH AS LITERATURE
The presupposition that myth is par excellence the literary material for young children doubtless grew out of a misinterpretation of the so-called mythopoeic age in the children, and some fundamental misconception of the nature of myth and its relation to other folk and traditionary material. There is no place in this little book even to suggest the problems that surround the nature and genesis of myth. But it does seem desirable to make in a simple way a few distinctions that may serve to set us on the right road.