Literature in the Elementary School

by Porter Lander MacClintock

For example, there is the element of gesture, which in its elaborated form becomes technical acting. In its primitive and fundamental form it is instinctive with children—well-nigh purposeless at first, uncontrolled and fantastic like the early activities of their imagination, but easily organized and directed toward a purpose. The first step in this direction is the game. Some of the charming group-games the children learn even in the kindergarten are genuine dramatic art. Such games are, at any rate, the first opportunity to channel and to turn into something like artistic expression the children's ceaseless activity.

We have all learned to appreciate the social and physical value of play. We may well add now a respectful estimate of games as art. The group-game may seem at first glance far from the child's literary training; but, as a matter of fact, a good game which has in it, as a good game always has, an orderly process and a climax, is just such an artistic whole as a story. Besides, many of our best group-games are accompanied by a rhythmic chant, often by pretty or quaint verses, such as "Itisket, itasket, a green and yellow basket;" or, "How many miles to Babylon?" or "London bridge is falling down." Acting upon this hint, we may substitute for these verses more artistic lines, or we can furnish more artistic lines with the fitting game. And these activities, channeled and disciplined by the group-game, are receiving the best possible training for dramatic acting by and by.

We must consider dancing as a form of dramatic gesture, and as a training for it. We may all rejoice in the current change of attitude toward dancing, which bids fair to replace it in education and among the arts. We are learning again to regard it as such a controlling and refining of motion as makes an appeal to one's sense of beauty, not as the vulgar, one might almost say sordid, accomplishment it has been in average society for many generations. The rediscovery of the charming and simple folk-dances has given us a new art for the children, which we may substitute for the unnatural waltz, and the mongrel two-step we have been teaching them for years. A dance is a medium for expressing a mood, and a means of communicating it; like the games, it is a method of channeling and training activity. From this point of view one may see its two-fold relation: on the one hand, to the child's natural activities, taking them up, selecting among them, and combining them into a beautiful whole; on the other hand to dramatic acting, training and controlling the physical movements of gesture and pose and poise. Ideally it may have a closer connection with literature. Not only may dancing reflect a mood; it may tell a story or present a situation; many primitive dances were of this kind. In a previous chapter I have spoken of dancing as a method of motion to accompany spoken verse, as a means of deepening the sense of rhythm. It is possible to represent in this way, not only the movement of the words, but the mood of the lyric, and, mutatis mutandis, the events of the ballad. I have seen the fourth-year class present a little dance of "Hickory dickory dock" invented for them by their teacher, and another class a little older do a humorous dance of "There was a man in our town," than which two performances nothing could be more charming. Of course, these were not in any sense reproductions of the actions suggested by the jingles; there was no gesture that told of running up the clock, or scratching out his eyes; that would be the business of the old gesticulating elocution so deplorable in the artificiality of its would-be realism. The dances were felt to be merely the active response to the rhythm and the mood of the recited words—bits of dramatic tone-color, as it were.

One wonders why all teachers do not make a game of "Charades" a frequent class recreation and discipline, since it has in it so many elements of educational value—the contributions to the children's vocabulary, the sugar-coated persuasion to attend to spelling, the frequent need for the invention of dialogue, the sharpening of everybody's wits, and, best of all, the call for significant pantomime, genuine dramatic gesture, and the fun, which is always educative.

When we come to the element of impersonation, we are nearer the heart of dramatic art, and perhaps deeper into the circle of the child's interests and instincts as well. Imitation is one of the absolute and fundamental aspects of a child's activities. It is impossible to escape calling it an instinct, when one sees that it is deeper and more universal than any impulse or tendency. The interpretation put by more recent psychologists upon the term and the fact of imitation throws a new and grateful light upon it as a principle in drama. In the light of this interpretation, we can not longer think of imitation as a servile, and more or less formal, copying of the thing seen. We are now saying that in these activities of the children, when they are playing horse, or playing hunter, or playing soldier, they are not copying something they have seen or heard of; they are keeping house, they are hunting, they are marching and fighting. Not even bodily activity is a more incessant and absolute aspect of play than this of make-believe. Imaginative children, and those that have some variety of experience, are rarely at leisure to appear in their own characters—so constant is the dramatic and imitative impulse in exercise. Indeed, two little girls I knew, after a forenoon of unceasing and strenuous impersonation of a repertoire ranging from a door-mat and a cake of ice in the Delaware on through the ghost of the murdered Banquo, were finally obliged to sit down in utter weariness, when one of them suggested: "Now let's play we're just plain little girls." In the same nursery of four children the child who returned to the room after any absence always cautiously inquired of each of the others, before taking up affairs: "What are you being now?"

In certain hours of his study of literature and literary appreciation one is ready to believe that this impulse toward impersonation is the very fundamental fact in that appreciation. It is the door through which one enters into the situations and feelings which make up the life represented in the story, poem, or drama. This it is that gives that strange grip of reality to literature; it is this that turns the appreciation of literature into personal culture, so that in a very real sense one may substitute literature for experience. It is easy to utilize this passion very early, turning it in the direction of art. In the kindergarten they have long known how to adapt it in the play which they so wisely interchange and amalgamate with their games; and the little pantomimes of "Bo-peep" and "Little Boy Blue," of flocks of birds, of butterflies on the wing, and what not, are on the road to true dramatic art. But, alas! this is cut all too short in the school—the average school, where the scholars are converted immediately into the veriest little pitchers—all ears; and, instead of being twenty selves in a day, they are denied the privilege of being even one whole one. This gift for impersonation should, like all their imaginative experiences, be conserved by exercise and guidance; otherwise it remains merely chaotic and accidental, and very soon the child himself is ashamed of it and regards its exercise as a "baby" performance to be left behind in the kindergarten. This exercise and guidance may be given by training the children in little plays, which, to begin with, are not much more than pantomime, but which add, as they go on, other elements of the real drama—an organized action and dialogue.

Of course, there is the dramatic monologue—the recitation. But this does not meet the needs of the class. It is impossible that all the children should sympathetically impersonate the same character and realize the same experience. Neither does this sort of exercise—the recitation—give a chance for co-operation in the production of a bit of social art; it does not give them the discipline of apprehending and producing a large whole, and it tends to develop and foster an unendurable kind and degree of egoism.

Where are we to get these plays, since there are practically none of respectable literary quality ready to our hand? One must say "practically none," because there are a few in print which can be used, chiefly dramatizations of folk- and fairy-tales. But, for the most part, and just as it should be, the teacher and the class will have to make their own plays, until in the eighth grade or thereabouts they are ready for some literary drama. As will be pointed out later, these co-operatively produced dramas constitute the best possible return which the children can make of their literary training, and at the same time the best possible means of securing their apprehension of the story they use; since in recasting a story as a play they will come to know it as plot, as activity of persons, and as a structure made up of essential parts.

Almost the first thing the child sees is the fact that there is something organic and necessary about these divisions and subdivisions. He sees them separate themselves out from the narrative as things in themselves, and then reunite to form a complete whole again. It matters not whether the story be one that he has been taught, a historical episode, or a story invented by himself, the emphasis upon structure, upon organization, which is one of the elements of drama, will be helpful, as a matter of literary training.

As to the dialogue—the actual literature of this communal drama—we must be most indulgent, and on the whole uncritical. A marked peculiarity of the dramatizations of the little people, as indeed of those of their elders, is that they forget to be literature at all, so that what is not dumb-show must be set down as noise. It is a troublesome and delicate task for the teacher who is guiding them to manage to give the dialogue a tone better than mere commonplace and different from mere bombast. It is wisest, on the whole, to get them to choose stories and events that will sway their dialogue toward the bombastic and away from the commonplace; they will certainly be more spontaneous, and probably more artistic. And it is easy to set into every play some genuine gem of literature—a lyric to be sung, a little story to be told. It is desirable to introduce as much music as possible—really artistic little songs that fit into the atmosphere of the play and help to create it; it makes better "team-work." A dance too, always provided it harmonizes with the tone and spirit of the play, helps the feeling of co-operative production. The children's acting, in the sense of gesture and stage-business, is very likely to be stiff and artificial. Marches and dances that belong in the play make an imperative call for movement, and accustom them to action without self-consciousness and formality.