With the sunshine on thy face,
Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;
From my heart I give thee joy!
I was once a barefoot boy!
It is only to discourage him, to ask him to feel like an adult who looks back upon the joys of boyhood. One hears this selection read in an affected voice and manner, where it is clear that the child is simply trying to imitate his teacher. But such experiences simply go to prove the contention that children should not be called upon to represent emotions far removed from their own experience.
But how shall we get our pupils to express emotions beyond their experience? The answer is: the teacher should strive to find those experiences in the child’s life that are similar to those of the selection to be read. We have shown how this might be done in the line from Wolsey’s speech. The child has experienced regret; let us make use of this experience to get him to feel something of Wolsey’s feeling. Again (and this applies largely to advanced classes), it is by no means necessary that the pupil should ever have come into contact with the picture that stirs the writer, in order to represent the latter’s feelings. It is the joy that the lover of nature feels that finds expression in these lines:
How the robin feeds her young,
How the oriole’s nest is hung;
Where the whitest lilies blow,
Where the freshest berries grow,