Viewed from our ethical standpoint, folklore does not always come up to the highest standard. There are objectionable features in many tales. In this respect they reflect the uncritical and even crude morals of the time. While this is true of some of the tales, in many the ethical teaching is pure, lofty and wholesome, and furnishes an element greatly needed in our primary schools. We have here held up for esteem and veneration these virtues of head and heart and action that lie at the base of a happy, considerate and industrious home life. Baseness, cruelty, ingratitude, and laziness are brought home to the individual in their consequences. The corresponding virtues are shown in their true relation to happiness and well being. This may not be the highest form of ethical activity, but it is the only kind of ethical teaching on a level with child thought. The morality of the stories is set forth in the concrete as a principle of action found valuable in the race’s history.
That such a content is a great desideratum for purposes of ethical instruction in our schools all will admit. The condition of religious thought is such as to preclude the use of sacred literature. Perhaps it would not afford so many advantages for purposes of ethical teaching in the first year of school life as literature closer to the childhood of the race in its origin. Some subject-matter that affords opportunity for the exercise of the ethical judgment is an imperative demand for our time. What is there more suitable than this embalmed judgment of the race as to what is valuable in conduct and character? Here are stored up in a form that appeals to the child material for generalizations as to the conditions of well-being and of happiness, as well as of a moral and a useful life. All that the race has thought, felt, and experienced is here at the service of the child. One is almost tempted to use the expression of Hegel and say that, in assimilating the ethical teaching of these racial literatures, the child is being suckled at the breast of the Universal Ethos.
THE LEGENDARY AND THE MYTHOLOGICAL THE CHILD’S NATURAL FOOD.
Even to casual observation there is close correspondence between child nature and the characteristics of the early literature of the race. Children are wholly in the imaginative on mythical level of thought. They are immersed in the sensuous. They refuse to be bound by the hard matter of fact. They will away and claim the world as their own through which to roam on the unfettered wing of fancy. They claim freedom to construct their own world and to people it with creatures of their own fabrication, independent of the shackles of time and space.
The child also feels himself a part of nature, not as something standing over against it. The separation has not yet come. He ascribes an equal and like personality to animate and inanimate objects. He is at home among animals and plants. There is spontaneous interest in all phases of nature, and inborn love for her creatures; and as to the ethical element, the child is not without points of contact for it. He is born with social impulses. He is not only to be a social creature, but is one at all stages of development. He is nothing if not social. The fiction of original, independent individuality which must be thrown off, given up, or eradicated before becoming a social being, is fast giving way to the natural or organic theories of social origin and growth. The very impulses which are sometimes cited to show the natural depravity of childhood are the vigorous reaching out of his nature toward a participation in the social life.
Thus there can be little doubt as to the fitness of legendary and mythological material for the needs of the child. It is his natural food. It fits in with his forms of thought—is in obvious relation to them. It meets the needs of activities already functioning. It discloses a world in which he can be at home. It falls in with his interpretation of this world, while the simple social life therein depicted appeals to his interest.
HOW ARE WE TO DISCRIMINATE AS TO MATERIAL TO BE SELECTED?
If this position is granted, how then, out of the vast richness of the material, are particular selections to be made? What principles should govern in our choice? As already hinted there are degrees of value, for purposes of instruction, in the immense treasury of folklore, myth and fable. It will be readily conceded that what is known as folklore has qualities rendering it of greatest value, for the first years of school life. It is simple and direct. Its conception of the world is that of pure naturalism. The formal myth and fable belong to later stages of mental development. The fable, too, has the objection of being explicitly didactic in its enforcement of the moral.