Literature in the Elementary School

by Porter Lander MacClintock

Every child should ideally have free access to a collection of books got together with reference to his needs and tastes. It may be serviceable to indicate the kind and number of books that might be included in such a library of a child up to his fourteenth year.

There should be in such a collection several biographies. On the whole, let them be of the older, idealizing type, not of the modern young university instructor's virtuously iconoclastic type. Children get at their history first through heroic and dramatic figures and events. In their earlier years it is the imagination that appropriates the images and events of history. It is therefore only good pedagogy to present the figures on their heroic and ideal side. Let these biographies include the record of different sorts of men—a statesman, a pioneer, a preacher, a soldier, an explorer, an inventor, a missionary, a business man, a man of letters—so that many types of character and kinds of experience may be reflected.

As the children grow older, they will dip into history for the images—the persons and detachable events. The search for facts and philosophy will come many years later. Some tempting books of history should appear on their shelves; The Dutch Republic, The Conquest of Mexico, Parkman's romantic narratives, and John Fiske's; if possible the illustrated edition of Green's History of the English People. Most of the history they get from their own reading, however, should be what they get from the biographies of the central figures in the events—Columbus, William of Orange, Francis Drake, and all the other picturesque and heroic persons. Other historical reading would best be done under guidance and in connection with the work in school.

There should be a few books of travel and exploration. Among these there should be some of the original sources, if possible the Bradford Journal, the Jesuit Relations, the Lewis and Clark Journals. Froissart and Marco Polo should be included; the fable-making travelers perform a very useful function. To these may be added a few most recent explorations—African, Arctic, Andean, Thibetan.

Children, barring the exceptional child, will not read formal science; but it may develop or help on a desirable taste and interest to have some of the many pretty out-door books in their collection—not romances of the wild, but simpler treatises about the things to be found in the door-yard and the home woodland. And when a child develops a taste or a gift in any scientific direction, he should have access, as easy as possible, to some good reference books suited to his needs. All children should have access to some of the more popular technical and scientific journals which give interesting accounts of current discoveries and inventions.

By way of nature and animal books we will include the Jungle Books, an expurgated edition of Reynard the Fox, Aesop's Fables, and, of course, Uncle Remus. Other semi-scientific nature-writers will doubtless appear in most collections of children's books—and may do no harm.

A book of Greek myth seriously and beautifully told should be accessible. No other myth is so beautiful or so imaginative, or so artistically put together. The children do not need to have to do with many myths until they know something about interpreting them. Of course, they should have access to the Bible in some attractive form. A large illustrated edition—Doré's or Tissot's—will please and instruct them from their earliest days. This is one of the cases in which pictures—good and imaginative pictures—form a desirable gateway into a realm where the children are not naturally at home, and where they need the help of a great and serious artist in finding their way. Of course, poor and materialistic pictures are a misfortune, especially those that attempt to body forth preternatural events and supernatural beings. Doré's pictures are not undesirable, because they often help a child to a noble and imaginative conception of a thing he is himself powerless to construct; while Tissot's are good because they set forth with beauty and richness of detail the many phases of life which the child must try to image in reading the Hebrew stories—from the nomadic simplicity of the saga of pastoral Abraham to the luxurious refinements of the Romanized and cosmopolitan Jerusalem.

The little scholar should find on his shelves Lanier's King Arthur, Pyle's Robin Hood, Palmer's Odyssey, some translation of the Iliad; in short, some form of each of the great hero-tales; a selected few of Scott's romances—Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Guy Mannering, Anne of Geierstein; a few of Cooper's; Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, William Morris' prose tales, a pair of Quiller-Couch's, and as many of Joseph Conrad's; these might constitute his romances. But unless he is a very unusual child, he will never read in these masters, if he is given masses of cheap and easy reading, such as the Henty books and the Alger series; or if he finds in his mother's sitting-room a stack of "the season's best sellers" and the ten-cent magazines. The cheap and easy style and the commonplace material of this sort of books offer the line of least resistance to the young reader. They flow into his mind without effort on his part, while, if he would apprehend the masters, he must actively co-operate with them at every step, arousing his best powers to comprehend their expressions and to grasp their ideas. One would hesitate to say that there is absolutely no use for books of the Henty and Alger type. One can imagine a child whose every bent was against reading, being enticed to begin by some such easy and commonplace experience. And one can imagine their being useful to wean children away from really vicious books. In a certain boys' club I know, organized in a social settlement, which was really a reorganization of a gang, these particular books were for a year or so an acceptable substitute for the bloody romances they had been reading. Many of those boys have never passed beyond them; but to many others they were, as was hoped, stepping-stones to better things. There is no place for them in the ideal collection of children's books. Certain books, harmless and as recreation even desirable, will inevitably make their appearance on the children's shelves—Miss Alcott's, Mrs. Richards', and others of the many series of girls' books and boys' books; they are doubtless innocent enough, and to be discouraged only when they keep the children from something better worth while; to be encouraged, on the other hand, only for those children who must be tempted by easy reading into any habit of using books. To be sure, you will probably find that your child has found one of them, perhaps a whole series, to which for a certain period she seems to have given her whole heart; but if treated with wisdom this symptom will disappear, and you will find her at some surprisingly early day re-reading the tournament at Ashby, and patronizingly alluding to the time when she was enslaved to "The Little General" series, or the "Under the Roses" or the "Eight Half-Sisters" series, or any other particular juveniles, as "when I was a child."

In the matter of fairy-tales one must discriminate and renounce quite resolutely. It is not good for a child who has early mastered that edged tool of reading to have access to all fairy-tales and all kinds of fairy-tales. Eschew all the modern ones. Of course, if you have a personal friend who has written a book of them, for reasons other than literary your children will read them. But as to those you choose freely for them let them have Grimm and Perrault, and the Arabian Nights, and after a while Andersen; which, together with what they will pick up here and there in magazines and in their friends' houses, will be enough.