On the other hand, observation of things and movements does not necessarily involve this twofold act of analysis, introspective and objective, but only the latter—the objective analysis. It is granted that we all have frequent occasion to condemn poor methods of instruction as teaching words rather than things. But we admit that we mean empty sounds or characters rather than true words. Our suggestions for the correct method of teaching amount in this case simply to laying stress on the meaning of the word, and to setting the teaching process on the road of analysis of content rather than form. In the case of words used to store up external observation the teacher is told to repeat and make alive again the act of observation by which the word obtained its original meaning. In the case of a word expressing a relation between facts or events, the pupil is to be taken step by step through the process of reflection by which the idea was built up. Since the word, spoken and written, is the sole instrument by which reason can fix, preserve, and communicate both the data of sense and the relations discovered between them by reflection, no new method in education has been able to supplant in the school the branches, reading and penmanship. But the real improvements in method have led teachers to lay greater and greater stress on the internal factor of the word, on its meaning, and have in manifold ways shown how to repeat the original experiences that gave the meaning to concrete words, and the original comparisons and logical deductions by which the ideas of relations and causal processes arose in the mind and required abstract words to preserve and communicate them.
It has been claimed that it would be better to have first a basis of knowledge of things, and secondarily and subsequently a knowledge of words. But it has been replied to this, that the progress of the child in learning to talk indicates his ascent out of mere impressions into the possession of true knowledge. For he names objects only after he has made some synthesis of his impressions and has formed general ideas. He recognizes the same object under different circumstances of time and place, and also recognizes other objects belonging to the same class by and with names. Hence the use of the word indicates a higher degree of self-activity—the stage of mere impressions without words or signs being a comparatively passive state of mind. What we mean by things first and words afterward, is, therefore, not the apprehension of objects by passive impressions so much as the active investigation and experimenting which come after words are used, and the higher forms of analysis are called into being by that invention of reason known as language, which, as before said, is a synthesis of thing and thought, of outward sign and inward signification.
Rational investigation cannot precede the invention of language any more than blacksmithing can precede the invention of hammers, anvils, and pincers. For language is the necessary tool of thought used in the conduct of the analysis and synthesis of investigation.
Your Committee would sum up these considerations by saying that language rightfully forms the centre of instruction in the elementary school, but that progress in methods of teaching is to be made, as hitherto, chiefly by laying more stress on the internal side of the word, its meaning; using better graded steps to build up the chain of experience or the train of thought that the word expresses.
The first three years’ work of the child is occupied mainly with the mastery of the printed and written forms of the words of his colloquial vocabulary; words that he is already familiar enough with as sounds addressed to the ear. He has to become familiar with the new forms addressed to the eye, and it would be an unwise method to require him to learn many new words at the same time that he is learning to recognize his old words in their new shape. But as soon as he has acquired some facility in reading what is printed in the colloquial style, he may go on to selections from standard authors. The literary selections should be graded, and are graded in almost all series of readers used in our elementary schools, in such a way as to bring those containing the fewest words outside of the colloquial vocabulary into the lower books of the series, and increasing the difficulties, step by step, as the pupil grows in maturity. The selections are literary works of art possessing the required organic unity and a proper reflection of this unity in the details, as good works of art must do. But they portray situations of the soul, or scenes of life, or elaborated reflections, of which the child can obtain some grasp through his capacity to feel and think, although in scope and compass they far surpass his range. They are adapted, therefore, to lead him out of and beyond himself, as spiritual guides.
Literary style employs, besides words common to the colloquial vocabulary, words used in a semi-technical sense expressive of fine shades of thought and emotion. The literary work of art furnishes a happy expression for some situation of the soul, or some train of reflection hitherto unutterable in an adequate manner. If the pupil learns this literary production, he finds himself powerfully helped to understand both himself and his fellow-men. The most practical knowledge of all, it will be admitted, is a knowledge of human nature—a knowledge that enables one to combine with his fellow-men, and to share with them the physical and spiritual wealth of the race. Of this high character as humanizing or civilizing, are the favorite works of literature found in the school readers, about one hundred and fifty English and American writers being drawn upon for the material. Such are Shakespeare’s speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony, Hamlet’s and Macbeth’s soliloquies, Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Gray’s Elegy, Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade and Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, Byron’s Waterloo, Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Webster’s Reply to Hayne, The Trial of Knapp, and Bunker Hill oration, Scott’s Lochinvar, Marmion, and Roderick Dhu, Bryant’s Thanatopsis, Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, Paul Revere, and the Bridge, O’Hara’s Bivouac of the Dead, Campbell’s Hohenlinden, Collins’ How Sleep the Brave, Wolfe’s Burial of Sir John Moore, and other fine prose and poetry from Addison, Emerson, Franklin, The Bible, Hawthorne, Walter Scott, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Swift, Milton, Cooper, Whittier, Lowell, and the rest. The reading and study of fine selections in prose and verse furnish the chief æsthetic training of the elementary school. But this should be re-enforced by some study of photographic or other reproductions of the world’s great masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting. The frequent sight of these reproductions is good; the attempt to copy or sketch them with the pencil is better; best of all is an æsthetic lesson on their composition, attempting to describe in words the idea of the whole that gives the work its organic unity, and the devices adopted by the artist to reflect this idea in the details and re-enforce its strength. The æsthetic taste of teacher and pupil can be cultivated by such exercises, and once set on the road of development, this taste may improve through life.
A third phase of language study in the elementary school is formal grammar. The works of literary art in the readers, re-enforced as they ought to be by supplementary reading at home of the whole works from which the selections for the school readers are made, will educate the child in the use of a higher and better English style. Technical grammar never can do this. Only familiarity with fine English works will insure one a good and correct style. But grammar is the science of language, and as the first of the seven liberal arts it has long held sway in school as the disciplinary study par excellence. A survey of its educational value, subjective and objective, usually produces the conviction that it is to retain the first place in the future. Its chief objective advantage is, that it shows the structure of language, and the logical forms of subject, predicate, and modifier, thus revealing the essential nature of thought itself, the most important of all objects, because it is self-object. On the subjective or psychological side, grammar demonstrates its title to the first place by its use as a discipline in subtle analysis, in logical division and classification, in the art of questioning, and in the mental accomplishment of making exact definitions. Nor is this an empty, formal discipline, for its subject-matter, language, is a product of the reason of a people, not as individuals, but as a social whole, and the vocabulary holds in its store of words the generalized experience of that people, including sensuous observation and reflection, feeling and emotion, instinct and volition.
No formal labor on a great objective field is ever lost wholly, since at the very least it has the merit of familiarizing the pupil with the contents of some one extensive province that borders on his life, and with which he must come into correlation; but it is easy for any special formal discipline, when continued too long, to paralyze or arrest growth at that stage. The overcultivation of the verbal memory tends to arrest the growth of critical attention and reflection. Memory of accessory details too, so much prized in the school, is also cultivated often at the expense of an insight into the organizing principle of the whole and the casual nexus that binds the parts. So, too, the study of quantity, if carried to excess, may warp the mind into a habit of neglecting quality in its observation and reflection. As there is no subsumption in the quantitative judgment, but only dead equality or inequality (A is equal to or greater or less than B), there is a tendency to atrophy in the faculty of concrete syllogistic reasoning on the part of the person devoted exclusively to mathematics. For the normal syllogism uses judgments wherein the subject is subsumed under the predicate (This is a rose—the individual rose is subsumed under the class rose; Socrates is a man, etc.). Such reasoning concerns individuals in two aspects, first as concrete wholes and secondly as members of higher totalities or classes—species and genera. Thus, too, grammar, rich as it is in its contents, is only a formal discipline as respects the scientific, historic, or literary contents of language, and is indifferent to them. A training for four or five years in parsing and grammatical analysis practiced on literary works of art (Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Scott) is a training of the pupil into habits of indifference toward and neglect of the genius displayed in the literary work of art, and into habits of impertinent and trifling attention to elements employed as material or texture, and a corresponding neglect of the structural form, which alone is the work of the artist. A parallel to this would be the mason’s habit of noticing only the brick and mortar, or the stone and cement, in his inspection of the architecture, say of Sir Christopher Wren. A child overtrained to analyze and classify shades of color—examples of this one finds occasionally in a primary school whose specialty is “objective teaching”—might in later life visit an art gallery and make an inventory of colors without getting even a glimpse of a painting as a work of art. Such overstudy and misuse of grammar as one finds in the elementary school, it is feared, exists to some extent in secondary schools and even in colleges, in the work of mastering the classic authors.
Your Committee is unanimous in the conviction that formal grammar should not be allowed to usurp the place of a study of the literary work of art in accordance with literary method. The child can be gradually trained to see the technical “motives” of a poem or prose work of art and to enjoy the æsthetic inventions of the artist. The analysis of a work of art should discover the idea that gives it organic unity; the collision and the complication resulting; the solution and dénouement. Of course these things must be reached in the elementary school without even a mention of their technical terms. The subject of the piece is brought out; its reflection in the conditions of the time and place to heighten interest by showing its importance; its second and stronger reflection in the several details of its conflict and struggle; its reflection in the dénouement wherein its struggle ends in victory or defeat and the ethical or rational interests are vindicated,—and the results move outward, returning to the environment again in ever-widening circles,—something resembling this is to be found in every work of art, and there are salient features which can be briefly but profitably made subject of comment in familiar language with even the youngest pupils. There is an ethical and an æsthetical content to each work of art. It is profitable to point out both of these in the interest of the child’s growing insight into human nature. The ethical should, however, be kept in subordination to the æsthetical, but for the sake of the supreme interests of the ethical itself. Otherwise the study of a work of art degenerates into a goody goody performance, and its effects on the child are to cause a reaction against the moral. The child protects his inner individuality against effacement through external authority by taking an attitude of rebellion against stories with an appended moral. Herein the superiority of the æsthetical in literary art is to be seen. For the ethical motive is concealed by the poet, and the hero is painted with all his brittle individualism and self-seeking. His passions and his selfishness, gilded by fine traits of bravery and noble manners, interest the youth, interest us all. The established social and moral order seems to the ambitious hero to be an obstacle to the unfolding of the charms of individuality. The deed of violence gets done, and the Nemesis is aroused. Now his deed comes back on the individual doer, and our sympathy turns against him and we rejoice in his fall. Thus the æsthetical unity contains within it the ethical unity. The lesson of the great poet or novelist is taken to heart, whereas the ethical announcement by itself might have failed, especially with the most self-active and aspiring of the pupils. Aristotle pointed out in his Poetics this advantage of the æsthetic unity, which Plato in his Republic seems to have missed. Tragedy purges us of our passions, to use Aristotle’s expression, because we identify our own wrong inclinations with those of the hero, and by sympathy we suffer with him and see our intended deed returned upon us with tragic effect, and are thereby cured.
Your Committee has dwelt upon the æsthetic side of literature in this explicit manner because they believe that the general tendency in elementary schools is to neglect the literary art for the literary formalities which concern the mechanical material rather than the spiritual form. Those formal studies should not be discontinued, but subordinated to the higher study of literature.