In calling the influx of artistic elements and methods into the school one phase of the education of the unconscious and deeper powers, we have a significant practical view-point, and are at the same time in touch with new results in science. As a practical ideal, we must aim to educate all the individual, not merely thought and voluntary movement. We wish to reach the inherited mechanisms of the organism; we wish to play upon all the potentialities of feeling and volition, and to utilize powers latent in the deposits of experience that the child has brought with him to the world.
These new results in science give to the well-worn principle that we must educate all the powers of the child a new meaning, and at least three important advances in psychology, in recent years, combine to put solid ground under our feet for a practical æsthetics, and give us principles by which we can coördinate the artistic elements and methods of the school.
The first of these advances is the genetic psychology that has arisen and flourished on the basis of Darwinian principles in biology, and which has shown the fundamental place of the feelings in education. The second is the new psycho-analysis, which, by showing the laws of the symbolic expression of hidden desires and feelings, has given us a new conception of the relation of art to life. The third new result is in the psychology of valuation, which has traced out, at least roughly, the course of development of the æsthetic and ethical states of consciousness.
New and incomplete and lacking in coördination as these principles are, they already yield us practical insights such as we have never been able to obtain from the older philosophies. We may confidently expect to see in time a solid science of the feelings, which will give us a “union of art and life” in a sound æstheticism in education: an æstheticism that will help to organize and control the fundamental feelings, and will overcome the superficial aloofness of our prevailing too formal and too detached art. This will be based upon the discovery that art, and the need of art, extend throughout all phases of human life; and that all true art must work in intimate union with practical affairs.
Considerations, such as these, seem essential for any study of the place of story telling, or any other art, in education.
II
The story telling “situation” is an artistic situation. It falls under the category of the beautiful, and is subject to all the general principles of æsthetics. Thus it stands in striking contrast with all formal methods of instruction, and all routine and unemotional learning. In such artistic situations the child is more fully present than in the formal school work, for he brings with him his deeper, unconscious nature.
The nature of the story as an educational art is best shown by its place in primitive life. Here the function of the story is clearly practical. By it religion, and all beliefs, morals, customs, and traditions are conveyed to the child. The folk-tales, the legends, the fairy-tales, the epics, and the myths of the world are not merely fanciful inventions of man; in a far more profound way than we yet fully understand, they express man’s most urgent needs and desires. Primitive man began early to express, in his stories, by means of a varied symbolism, his own hopes and wishes,—sometimes, thereby, keeping them alive through hard conditions, and passing them on to new generations; sometimes obtaining for them a vicarious satisfaction. These racial stories affect our feelings deeply, simply because there is continuity in evolution: because the past still lives in the present: because these stories are the products of universal needs, and symbolize or represent them. The story is thus a language of the feelings; it is a means of communication between the past and the unconscious and undeveloped potentialities of the present. The story is a symbolic language: its scenes and words are often trivial, but underneath them runs a deeper meaning. Everyone who has told stories must have felt this. We all know that when we tell a good story to a child, the child is receiving from us indescribable meanings, which the story itself conveys, but does not really contain or express,—and this sense of free-masonry of emotional meaning is the greatest charm of the story. One who feels this does not need to point a moral to a tale; and one who feels the need of the moral does not really tell his story.
Without knowing something about the nature of the æsthetic feelings and moods it is impossible to understand the scope of such an art as story telling. We are likely to think of æsthetic feeling as passive, or as merely “refining” in its effects: or, if inspiring, as mainly affecting the creative, artistic imagination. But this is not the case. All æsthetic feelings are intensely active. Because the responses are internal,—a play of forces within the organism—we are likely to overlook them altogether. In every æsthetic state, we have good reason to believe, there is a play of volitions, an active choosing, a drama of aroused and satisfied desire—definite, specific desire, which, though it may often be unconscious, if none the less real. And it is because of this drama of desire that æsthetic situations have meaning and value—educational value.