Throughout these talks I have tried to deal with the teaching of literature in practical fashion, not letting theory lead me to forget the conditions actually existing. To consider an ideal state of things might be interesting, but it would hardly help the teacher bothered by the difficulties of every-day school-work. I have intended always to keep well within the field of ordinary experience, and to make suggestions applicable to average teaching. How well I have succeeded can be judged better by teachers than by me; but I wish in closing to insist that at least I believe that what I have said is every-day common sense.
I have throughout assumed always that no teacher worthy of the name can be content with merely formal or conventional results, but will be determined that pupils shall be brought to some understanding of what literature really is and of why it is worthy of serious attention—to some appreciation, in a word, of literature as an art. If an instructor could be satisfied with fitting boys and girls for examinations, nothing could be simpler or easier; but I am sure that I am right in believing that our public-school teachers are eagerly anxious to make of this study all that is possible in the line of developing and ennobling their pupils.
Every earnest teacher knows that literature cannot be taught by arbitrary methods. The handling of classes studying the masterpieces of genius must be shaped by the knowledge and the inspiration of the individual teacher or it is naught. Neither I nor another may give a receipt for strengthening the imagination, for instilling taste, for arousing enthusiasm. All that any book of this sort can effect, and all that I have endeavored to do, is to protest against methods that are formal and deadening, to offer suggestions which may—even if only by disagreement—help to make definite the teacher's individual ideas, and to warn against dangers which beset the path of all of us to whom is committed the high office of teaching this noble art.
The idea which I have hoped most strongly to enforce is the possibility of arousing in children, even in those bred without refining or intellectual influences, an appreciation of the spirit and the teachings of the great writers, a love for good books which may lead them to go on with the study after they have passed beyond the school-room. The best literature is so essentially human, it so truly and so irresistibly appeals to natural instincts and interests, that for its appreciation nothing is needed but that it be understood. To produce and to cultivate such understanding should be, I believe, the chief aim of any course in literature.
The understanding and the appreciation must of course vary according to the temperament and the responsiveness of the child. Miracles are not to be expected. No teacher need suppose that the street Arab and the newsboy will lie down with Browning and rise up with Chaucer; that Sally and Molly will give up chewing gum for Shakespeare, or that Tom, Dick, and Harry will prefer Wordsworth to football. In his own way and to his own degree, however, each child will enjoy whatever literature he has comprehended. As far as he can be made to care for anything not directly personal or appealing to the senses, he may be made to care for this. Nature has taken care of the matter of fitting children to understand and to love literature as it has prepared them to desire life. To bring the young into appreciation of the best that has been thought and recorded by man, there is but one way: make them familiar with it.
It is a mistake to suppose, moreover, that an especial sort of books is needed for children. A selection there should be, and it is manifestly necessary to exercise common sense in choice of works for study. A class that will be deeply interested in "Macbeth" would be simply puzzled and bored by "Troilus and Cressida." Childish games for the intellect there may be, as there are childish amusements for the body; but so far as serious training is concerned there is neither adult literature nor juvenile literature, but simply literature.
The range of the mind of a child is limited, and the experience demanded for the simplest comprehension of a work may be necessarily beyond the possible reach of child life.[240:1] The limitations of youth have, however, and should have, the same effect in literature as in life. They restrict the comprehension and the appreciation of the facts of existence, and equally they restrict the comprehension and the appreciation of the facts in what is read. The impressions which the child takes from what he sees or from what he reads are not those of his elders, although this is less generally true of emotions than of facts. The important point is that the impressions shall be vital and wholesome, and above all else that they be true with the actual verity of human experience. We all commit errors in the conclusions we draw from life; and children will make mistakes in the lessons they draw from books. Books which are wise and sane, however, will sooner or later correct any misconceptions they beget, just as life in time makes clear the false conclusions which life itself has produced.
I have spoken more or less about the enjoyment of this study by children, and it is difficult if not impossible to conceive that if a class is rightly handled most children will not find the work a pleasure. It is necessary, however, to be a little on our guard in the practical application of the principle that children get nothing out of literature unless they enjoy it. They certainly cannot enjoy it unless they get something out of it; but it will hardly do to make the enjoyment of a class too entirely the test by which to decide what work the class shall do. Pupils should be stimulated to solid effort in the way of application and concentration, and I have already pointed out that in mastering the difficulties of literary language they should be made to do whatever drudgery is needed, whether they are inclined to it or not. They cannot, moreover, read with intelligence anything with real thought in it, until they have learned concentration of mind. Children, like their elders, value most what has cost something to attain, and facile enjoyment may mean after-indifference.
The contagion of enthusiasm is one of the means by which children are most surely induced to put forth their best efforts to understand and to assimilate. If the teacher is genuinely enthusiastic in his love for a masterpiece, even if this be something that might seem to be over the heads of the children, he arouses them in a way impossible of attainment by any other means. A boy once said to me with that shrewdness which is characteristic of youth, "My teacher didn't like that book, and we all knew it by the way she praised it." Sham enthusiasm does not deceive children; but they are always impressed by the genuine, and no influence is more powerful.
The most serious obstacle which teachers of literature to-day meet with, I am inclined to think, is the difficulty children have in seizing abstract ideas.[241:1] So long as study and instruction are confined to the concrete and the particular the pupil works with good will and intelligence. The moment the boundary is crossed into the region of the general, he becomes confused, baffled, and unable to follow. The algebra of life is too much for the brain which is accustomed to deal only with definite values. What is evidently needed all along the line is the cultivation of the reasoning powers in the ability to deal with abstract thought. Personally I believe that this could be best secured by the simplification of the work in the lower grades, and by the introduction of thorough courses in English grammar and the old-fashioned mental arithmetic. If some forty per cent. of the present curriculum could be suppressed altogether, and then ten per cent. of the time gained given to these two admirable branches, the results of training in the lower grades, I am convinced, would show an enormous improvement. I may be wrong in this, and in any case we must deal with things as they exist; and the teacher of literature must accept the fact that he has largely to train his class in breadth of thinking. He will be able to deal with generalizations only so far as he is assured that his students will grasp them, and this will generally mean so far as he is able to teach them to deal with this class of ideas.
This book has stretched beyond the limits which in the beginning were set for it, and in the end the one thing of which I am most conscious is of having accomplished the emphasizing of the difficulties of the branch of work with which it is concerned. If I have done nothing more than that, I have discouraged where I meant to help; and I can only hope that at least between the lines if not in the actual statements may be found by the earnest and hard-working teachers of the land—that class too little appreciated and worthy so much honor—hints which will make easier and more effective their dealing with this most important and most difficult requirement of the modern curriculum.
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