Literature in the Elementary School

by Porter Lander MacClintock

The case was equally bad when literature was constituted the center of the scheme, and when it was attached to a scheme having some other center—geography, for example, or history. For in the first case it was altogether likely that some detail or aspect of the piece of literature, merely subsidiary in the literature, would be selected for emphasis and elevated into the correlating detail; the background or setting would be taken out for study and elaboration, crowding the action, the human and really literary elements, out of sight. As, for example—and it is an authentic example of a scheme of correlation—the first-grade children are given as the center of their work The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence; from this story we take out the dog, which we study as the type of digitigrade carnivora. Or—again an authentic example—having read to the first grade The Musicians of Bremen, as one of them happens to be a donkey, we seize the opportunity to teach in detail and over several weeks of time, the physical peculiarities of the donkey and his kinsman the horse, among many exercises drawing out of the children some speculation or information as to how much water or hay the horse consumes; to which hook we attach instruction as to weights and measures; and so on into the remote fringes of information about objects and persons used in the story only in the literary way.

In the second case, that in which literature is attached to some other center, in feeling about for some bit of literature to fit into a geographical fact, a meteorological condition, or a historical event, the teacher was quite likely to hit upon a third- or fourth-rate specimen, unsuitable for his children in other respects, and in teaching it he was likely to force from it a meaning and an emphasis that as literature it would not bear; as, when the children were studying the migration of birds, he taught them Bryant's "To a Waterfowl," emphasizing the migration and ignoring the true emphasis of the poem—the lesson of a guiding providence; or as, apropos of December weather, he set the fifth grade to reading Whittier's slow-moving, meditative, and much too mature "Snow-Bound."

As a matter of fact, no art yields kindly to any method of adjustment to other subjects that emphasizes the subject-matter or information material that may perchance be involved in the art. Information-giving is not the method nor the mission of art; the four, or five arts if we include acting, with which we may have to do in elementary discipline combine and play into one another without difficulty. It is not necessary to speak again of the close and easy association of literature with all the forms of acting that the children have, from marching, dancing, and simple gesture, on to the acting required in an organized drama. On the musical side, particularly the verse-form of literature, it combines most acceptably with music. A great many of the lyrics that are simple enough for the children to learn, and many of the verses that they write, are also adaptable as songs to be sung. And even when they cannot be set to melodies they share, in their spoken form, with the actual musical notes, in the training of the ear. The exercises in drawing, painting, and modeling co-operate to fine advantage for the objectifying of the visual images, of which the children get so large a store from literature. As a matter of fact, when the children are set the task of objectifying an inner image, it is most likely to be some figure or scene from literature that comes up for expression—Nausicaa throwing the ball, Robin Hood stringing his bow, Siegfried tempering his sword, Paul Revere mounting his horse, the lodge of old Nokomis. This is because the images and pictures they find in literature retain in the minds of the children the glow of imagination, the warmth of emotion, the vitality of a remembered joy. And it is true, as every teacher knows who has taught it aright, that a bit of literature arouses in the children a mood of creative imagination such as no other subject ever can awaken. This mood of imaginative creation instinctively expresses itself in literary composition, in drawing, painting, designing, modeling, acting, or music.

On the very surface of the problem of the correlations of literature lies the somewhat difficult question of the relation of the children's literature to their lessons in reading—as regards both their beginning to read and their later practice in reading. It remains true that with all our experimenting and in spite of all the enthusiasm we can muster, to the majority of children and in the hands of most teachers the mechanics of learning to read is drudgery. This drudgery literature should share with the other subjects in its due proportion. One would not ignore the fact that this "due proportion" may be very large—larger than that of any other subject. It is quite legitimate to employ the charm and interest of literature in the service of reading; and it would be a serious misfortune for the children to learn their reading entirely through the medium of colorless fact. We have agreed that there is such a thing as literary reading, different in many ways from the reading of history or science. Even the younger children can feel this, and can produce it if correctly guided. But they should not always be doing literary reading; they should acquire the colorless but good style of merely intellectual reading. This they will not do if in their early reading exercises they are given more than their due proportion of literature.

It is undoubtedly wise to make upon the teacher and the children the impression that reading is a tool, a key—perhaps we would better call it a gate through which one gets at many things—the joys and rewards of literature, to be sure, but also the images of history, the facts of nature, the details of handicraft. A reading-book, or any system of reading-lessons that contains nothing but literature is therefore a mistake.

From another point of view it is a misfortune to identify the reading-lessons with literature. As has been said more than once in these chapters, the alert teacher of our day is eager to emancipate literature again from its bondage to the printed page, and to set free once more its function as a truly social art; making it also once more a matter of the listening ear and the living voice.

To identify the reading-lessons of the younger children with their literature lessons is to keep them at things much too immature, and to retard their mental and artistic growth. They can apprehend and appreciate many things that they cannot read. It is a commonplace that a child's listening vocabulary is far in advance of his reading vocabulary, no matter how or how early he learns to read. Of course, this is the secret of the revolt against book-reading of the children who learn to read late—the simplicity of the thought and expression in the matter they are mechanically able to read, makes it unacceptable to them intellectually. It is in the literature received by his ear that a child grows and exercises his maturer powers. The older children should be taught and exercised in literary reading, the simple interpretative reading of their literature. The best results in this most profitable aspect of the teaching of literature can be obtained in the secondary period, when the children are expert enough as readers to think while they read, and when their voices are, as mere mechanical organs, more completely under control.

The objections to the association of drill in writing, in spelling, in grammar, and in compositions are of like kind. It may be granted that there is something in the fact that literature represents the most effective use of language, and is, all things considered, the most interesting kind of writing. Still this does not constitute a sufficient reason why the burden, and in all too many cases the odium, of teaching these things should attach to literature. It is a perfidious breaking of the promise of literature, or of any art, which should keep as much as possible of the atmosphere of play. Of course, drill in language and in written expression should be attached to every subject in the elementary curriculum; and this not only for the sake of relieving the literature from a burden of unattractive tasks, but because of the fact that the literary style and vocabulary are not good for all subjects and purposes, and the children should not be trained exclusively in these. On the large scale of things, it is a pity at any stage of the child's education to identify "English" with literature, since there is and should be so much English that is not literature, and so much literature that is not English.

One of the pleasantest and most profitable co-operations of literature is with the training in languages other than the vernacular. In those elementary classes where the children have instruction in either German or French—or, for the matter of that, in Spanish or Italian—every effort should be made in their use of story and verse to secure the characteristic and universal literary effect. The German lyric has all the beauty of music and of image that the English has; the French fairy-play has most of elements of dramatic art that the children could use in English translation.