The story is a phase of communication—the instinctive tendency to signal and transmit feelings and ideas and to respond to such expressions—and communication is associated with the social complex of instincts and emotions as indicated by these responses. Through the power of social sympathy in this complex, curiosity and the imagination are brought under the sway of communication, especially in the story. Indeed, the psychology of the story reveals how deeply social sympathy influences the imagination and controls curiosity. The primitive side of this social sympathy is seen in the responses of social animals to the calls of their kind, in the rush of dogs and men to the cries of battle. Its power over the imagination is shown in the swaying of the spectator to the movements of the athlete, his ejaculations and his cries of distress or delight. Through sympathy in imagination the spectator enters the contest. Further, so socially minded are we, and so dependent upon social guidance, that curiosity is nowhere so keen, nor the imagination so active, as in the communication of a life situation. Any incident or accumulation of incidents that we call a plot in the experience of an individual or group of individuals, grips the mind. This explains the fascination of the story. Gossip and scandal are the less worthy forms. The novel is exalted gossip or scandal; the drama the same acted out. They all feed the tremendous hunger for insight into life. They unroll the curtain on the content of life, or some phase of life. Hence the story is the natural form for revealing life. Communication, like life, may be either serious or frivolous; hence the story carries both functions. It pictures or expresses life in both phases. But the form of the story itself is pleasurable; and thus story-telling may degenerate into mere amusement. This possibly has led to both its abuse and its neglect. The fact that the story is so enjoyable to children has led teachers and parents to use it merely as amusement, irrespective of content, or even of artistic form. This tendency has been met by publishers. As proof, note the books exhibited at Christmas time in any bookshop. They show the enormous amount of trash set up in book form for child consumption. This is a more serious danger than the trash read by adults, because they are food for hungry minds at the growing age. The importance is shown of selecting stories according to recognized criteria. While the child enjoys the story, he has no judgment of values in the story other than its pleasure-giving qualities. As judgment is a product of education, so judging values is an adult function; the adult must study all stories, but not tell all stories. The story-teller must analyze the story plot, criticize the values, select and adapt stories to age periods and to other child needs. This task Mrs. Cather has performed in her book. The mere fact that the story amuses has caused a neglect of its larger functions in education. This is due to the traditional attitude toward the pleasurable in education. Education is life, and synonymous with the joys and griefs of life; but the traditions of the school when it was a place simply to master the three R’s, and the traditions of intellectualism, monkish The story amuses, but its function is not merely to amuse. Pleasure is not the aim of life, nor even its sole guide; it is an index of life, especially in the young. The point needs to be emphasized that the story is the carrier, always has been the carrier, and will remain the natural carrier of racial tradition or information (1) The highest and most difficult achievement in educational effort is the establishment of standards or ideals that function in judgment and behavior. The place of the story in moral education has been emphasized by many writers. Its place in developing an appreciation of artistic forms in language, in music, and in the graphic arts is splendidly illustrated in this book. Appreciation is an emotional response, primarily instinctive, but developed through experience and according to high or low artistic standards by social approval or disapproval. In the emotional response lies interest and in the character of the emotional response lies the character of the interest. The interest may be crude, vulgar, or vicious, or it may be ideal, but in either case it is a product of developed emotional habits. In the life of the child this emotional response precedes the intellectual judgment of artistic values which comes later and only through contrast and comparison, and the former is vastly more important in social significance for the pleasure of the mass than the latter. This development of the artistic emotional response may be cleverly guided through the story, as Mrs. Cather shows, and she gives a wealth of suggestions for the use of the teacher. But the story itself is a form of artistic expression and thus subject to the application of standardizing judgments. A good story must be judged by a double standard. It may be good in the sense that it is well Many stories are told because of their “beauty” of form, where the content is not true. Some such stories are valuable because of the standardizing sentiments they carry, but truth is as important at least as the Æsthetic. The human intellect evolved to interpret meanings and progressively perfect behavior adjustments. Each age of racial experience brings on its new interpretations, and broadly, each age makes advances upon that which preceded. Old theories fall, new truths arise; but old theories hold sway over the imagination of the masses long after the leaders have accepted higher truths because the old is well told while the new lacks the poetic expression of the artist. Literature is well-told information, yet under the guise of literature goblins and superstitions and worn-out theories parade in the imagination and thus mold ideals and behavior. The problem of the professional story-teller of the future is to tell the best information of the age in as fascinating a form as the old myths and fables are now told after years of repetition. Only in this way can contemporary popular opinion be kept Some stories are told though untrue, because they “develop the imagination,” but this by itself is a dangerous criterion. The function of the imagination is to reconstruct the world in mental terms which will guide behavior. The functioning of the imagination in any kind of images will develop “power,” but the power may be detrimental individually and socially if the images cause crooked thinking. Straight thinking depends on the imagination—on the kind of emotionalized images which habitually arise in any thought situation or problem. Just so far as stories are untrue and without great moral value, yet are fascinatingly told, so far do they encourage untrue imagining and emotional attitudes, and therefore untrue thinking. And inasmuch as the emotional response to the single interpretative concept, the single vision of life, is vastly stronger through tradition than the interest in the discovery of complex relationships,—and truth comes finally only through the latter,—the emotionalized habits of imagination in interpretation are profoundly important for democracy. Democracy cannot exist with a population of fuzzy thinkers. Story-telling, like all educational effort, must develop the imagination in mental terms that will function in life today. (2) The story is an illuminator of facts. The child gets his information by activities in relation to the environment, by exploration, observation, experimentation, with the everlasting play of the interpretative processes, and by responding to and accepting or rejecting The activities of the school curriculum dealing with the environment have two natural foci of interest for the child. (a) The civic-geographical-historical complex (when rightly organized just one subject) and (b) the physical-biological complex, which is now coming to be called “general science.” For the child these two groups of the environmental activities cover the whole of adult science, philosophy, and religion, and both require a tremendous reconstructive functioning of the imagination. (a) The first group is a new coming correlation which naturally must carry with it organized communication or the larger share of language and literature. The investigation of the local social environment is the basis of all “civics,” “geography,” and “history.” It expands as civics. When the child projects his interpretations of any human activity into another environment so that he is reconstructing in his imagination the life habits and customs of the people in relation to the physical and biological characteristics In this concentric widening of the intellectual horizon concerning human life and its relationships to the environment, the imagination must reconstruct a world which it cannot sense. The facts may be gained from pictures, maps, descriptions, but to become functional in thought in any other than in a mere commercial sense, the reconstruction must touch the emotions so that the life and conditions of living of the people will be felt. When felt the life will be dwelt upon in imagination, and when dwelt upon in imagination it will function in the life activities of the child. Giving this vivid, felt insight into the life conditions of other people is the function of the story. Through the hunger to feel life the story reveals life. (b) The story also functions for children in the interpretation of the physical-biological environment or “general science.” Between six and fourteen years of age is the neglected period for science, and it is the age when the story may function in the biggest way as a natural educational tool. Yet so absorbed are school men in the problem of drilling children in the dissected elements of the written language that they do not even understand one of the two chief characteristics of child nature at this age,—the rapidly expanding curiosity concerning nature. It is the age of the first crude control of the “scientific instinct,” the tendency to experiment and explore. It is the age for fixing the questioning habit and building a common-sense confidence in and The fairy tales of the future will be well-told stories from our sciences or human life and nature, the two natural centers of interest in the environment, and we may expect as results in public opinion a broader common sense and a lessened gullibility. In this organization of science and modern thought in story form for its larger use in education the professional story-teller has still a great unfinished task to perform. Clark W. Hetherington |