CHAPTER VI

READING IN THE PRIMARY GRADES

I. WHAT TO READ

In this chapter we shall consider in general terms what to read. First of all, then, upon what principles shall the literature we use be selected? We may answer briefly that we must take into account the tastes and interests of the child; his powers of comprehension and appreciation; the needs of his emotional nature, as they determine the growth of character; and the scope, purpose, and structure of the course of study, by which the relation of English work to the other subjects of study is determined.

Let us dispose of the last point, correlation, first. Clearly, the nature and the extent of the correlation attempted will depend upon the general conception of education that underlies the course. In one case the correlating centre is geography, in another history, and so on. We shall not discuss here the claims of competing theories and schemes, Herbartian, Froebelian, and other. Our aim here is to consider,

from the English teacher's point of view, what those

conditions are upon which any correlation of English with other studies ought to be carried out. We have especially in mind the danger which threatens literature when it falls into the benevolent hands of the system-maker and correlator, - the danger, namely, of losing sight of the fact that this study has claims of its own, which must be satisfied before the question of correlation is broached, and must be included in the curriculum with full recognition of these claims. Too often literature is reduced to the rôle of mere maid-in-waiting upon any and every usurper who commands her good offices.

Here is the danger; in this very fact that literature can be so accommodating. She has all kinds of wares (including even dry goods), in that eclectic pack of hers which is so easily rifled by the crotchet-monger. There is no large interest of life, nature, science, man, that is not the subject of her glorification and imaginative interpretation. She presses her claims in the interests of a complete, many-sided humanity. Her inexorable demand, however, is that everything she offers shall be seen from her own proper point of view, under the transfiguring aspect of beauty. The hobbyrider should dismount in her presence. Too often, however, he forgets his manners. The naturalist will lay violent hands upon her Bryants and Whittiers and Wordsworths to give a fillip to his nature-work. The historian will divert the historical plays of Shakespeare,

the historical romances of Scott and Kingsley, to bald historical uses, treating them as so many documents to give interest and concrete detail to his work. Once hand over Literature to any of these amiable devotees, intent only upon subject-matter and its illustrative uses, and she will soon be perverted from her true office to that of a mere huckster of knowledge. Once let the touchstone of choice be, not literary and poetic, but utilitarian and scientific, and your school readers will be a welter of trash (from the literary point of view), designed to subserve the minor purposes of miscellaneous information. We speak from observation: "Hiawatha," for example, will become a treatise on Indian civilization, or (more imposingly) the Indian culture-epoch; and good old Robinson Crusoe transformed (as we have often found him of late in the primary school) to a practising pedagogue who teaches little boys and girls how to count and weigh and measure, while his companionable Friday is reduced to a museum specimen of primitive man. This is an outrage. There is no reason, of course, why the general interests appealed to in reading "Hiawatha" or "Robinson Crusoe" should not be utilized in a secondary way in connection with work in other departments; but what we protest against is the practice of using these romances as pegs for all sorts of pedagogical livery. Thus, in using a poem like Tennyson's "Brook," our aim will be, instead of developing the geographical interest and knowledge of

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the child, to help him to love brooks, to feel their manifold beauty and their life as a manifestation of the wonderful life that "rolls through all things." These works, when they are used at all for literary purposes, must make their appeal primarily and mainly to the child's imagination and sympathies, to his idealizing instinct, to his epic and dramatic tendencies. Nothing should be done to weaken or destroy these effects. Wise correlation will not do so;-correlation that is not forced, but is almost insensibly achieved; correlation that allows literature to be treated primarily as such, and only secondarily as aiding other studies.

Inevitably, also, that other unfortunate tendency gains headway when the effort to correlate is vigorous,

that is, the tendency to select second-rate literature, because it lends itself to the scheme of correlation. We have already criticised this failing, however; so we will now pass on to consider the other criteria by which our selection of reading matter should be guided.

As to the tastes and interests of the child, which are the best gauges of his comprehension, Comenius pointed out long ago that the child begins by being sweepingly encyclopedic in its interests. This must be recognized in our choice of literature, particularly in the early years. It must be varied, with gentle emphasis upon those interests which are found to be dominant in each period of growth. Always, however, these interests must be regarded as means or opportunities

whereby we may quicken and nourish those faculties of "admiration, hope and love," of courage and loyalty, which are the roots of worthy character and the sources of noble delight.

It is the larger things that are with a child from the first. There is great Nature everywhere around him. Even in the city he is vaguely conscious of the majestic march and the panoramic changes of her seasons, those great primitive facts which are the background of the myths fashioned in the childhood of the race. Demeter, mother earth, with her dower of life and her gifts of day and night, the vast sky and the restless sea and the immovable hills, let us strive to preserve in the child some awed, poetic sense of the presence of these familiar things.

But nearer to him than Nature is the human drama. Its simplest forms are found in the family, with its birthdays and festival occasions, its stories of ancestral experience and prowess, its cherished memories of parent and grandparent. Here are the foundations of historic and epic appreciation. This elementary interest in history is furthered by the anniversary celebrations of great national and world-significant events, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Christmas, New Year, Easter, etc.; by the public commemoration of the great figures and heroes of history and legend, Washington, Lincoln, and Columbus; the host who give names to our streets and buildings;