English composition as a social problem

Contents

Editor's Introduction v

Preface xi

I. The Sources of Composition Projects in Child-Activities i

Introduction

for speech. Defective motivation has been one of the greatest causes of poor instruction in composition. It is a fault persisting in practically all of our contemporaneous classroom work. The largest single problem with which the teacher has to deal to-day is that of getting adequate motivation into the composition period. Everywhere progressive teachers are experimenting in the hope of finding other means of making improved expression vital to elementary and high-school pupils.

One of the first conspicuous results has been an enrichment of the subject-matter dealt with. We have come to realize that the truth expressed by any one is seldom a purely intellectual matter. Ideas are colored by attitudes. It is this which gives them their vivacity, force, and charm. Yet not until recently have we aimed at the development of feelings, as well as ideas, as part of the content required for speech and writing. Our recent enrichment has developed the emotional side of self-expression, but in an accidental way. The effort was scarcely deliberate. The teacher realized that children were more readily enlisted in the recital of their personal experiences, which are always colored by personal attitude. But the explanation of this vii success, if given, was that the children were better informed. More in telle ctuaKty was sought by the teacher, but he was fortunate enough to find a vitalizing by-product in the subjective factors of personal experience.

Much of the failure of schools to develop any literary power beyond that of simple, direct exposition and narration is due to this neglect of feeling. If it were not for shades of feeling, what we know as literary style would not exist. Its fine variations of form are due not so much to differences of cold objective truth as to the subtle variations of attitude with which we confront reality. Poetic expression is different from the prosaic because of the dominance of the subjective factors in our desire to express ourselves. We shall never thoroughly enrich our composition-teaching until we accept the principle that the development of attitudes is as necessary as the development of an accurate comprehension of the varied world which we are to describe and discuss.

We must not make the mistake of assuming that training in composition is purely an individual matter. Most self-expression is for the purpose of social communication. We express ourselves in the presence of other people to gain viii

INTRODUCTION

appreciation or stimulation and to influence and control others. Our whole use of language has a social setting. This truth cannot be ignored in any effective accomplishment in the classroom. The futility of much of our past teaching has been due to our mental blindness to the social function of language. One has only to compare the situation of ordinary conversation with that of a class exercise in oral composition to realize how far we have forgotten the social genesis and purpose of speech. Worthy social conversation cannot be made at command of any person in authority. Ordinary human beings would not endure hearing the same item of discussion repeated by each person present. Nor would one care to say what every one else has already said. Yet these are some of the striking characteristics of a composition exercise. If we are to make our training real, we must naturalize it, which is to say that we must socialize our teaching of composition. Nothing is more important to the improvement of results than that we shall use the full psychology of linguistic intercourse in teaching people to talk and write.

The point of view of this book is novel. It will be radical in its reconstruction of teaching practice. Our need is to understand the full arguix ment for this new approach to the subject, and to understand what our gross educational experience and our special experimentation have to tell us about the new procedure. For guidance we offer the work of a thoughtful and progressive author, who knows through experience and thought the failures which must be avoided and the methods by which we shall achieve a result we have long striven for.

Preface

This study attempts a review of current practice in the teaching of EngKsh Composition in the light of present theories of education. Most of the modes of procedure discussed are, I believe, in fairly wide use in grades or in high schools to-day, although many of those objected to have doubtless been discarded by progressive teachers, and others noted have been only recently developed and are not generally known. Three points may be taken as the principal suggestions advanced: The first is the ideal of social teaching of composition; the English class is here presented as a group of good-spirited cooperators and critics working upon real projects. The second is the attempted handling of organization problems as we may suppose that children's minds will work best in mastering them. The third is the apparently fundamental distinction between matters essential for fixation in uncofi" scious habit, on the one hand, and equally esxi

PREFACE

sential expressional powers, on the other, to be developed through conscious application of composition principles.

Of my indebtedness to other writers, obviously the greatest is to Professor John Dewey, who has stated with most helpful cogency the ideals of education as a social problem. The basic study of the Teaching of English is of course that by Professors Carpenter, Baker, and Scott. Other more exact acknowledgments I have tried to give in footnotes. Chief of my debts for constructive suggestions and for criticisms in revision are to my former colleagues, Miss Edith White, Mr. H. C. Henderson, and Dr. E. O. Finkenbinder, of the Milwaukee State Normal School, and to Mr. C. H. Ward, of the Taft School. Among other friends who have given help too pervasive for more specific acknowledgment are Miss Ida M. Windate, of the Western College for Women, and Professors Joseph Jastrow, Karl Young, and C. S. Pendleton, of the University of Wisconsin, all of whom have been so good as to read parts of the manuscript. Many of my students, particularly in extension xii

PREFACE

classes, have been very real aids indeed. Above all I am indebted to Minnetta Sammis Leonard, who worked out the basic suggestion of types of child-activities as motive forces, and who has throughout given untiring encouragement and definite, essential help.

Sterling Andrus Leonard

Horace Mann School Teachers College, Columbia University September 20, 1916

ENGLISH COMPOSITION AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM

THE SOURCES OF COMPOSITION PROJECTS IN CHILD-ACTIVITIES

Nature provided for the communication of thought by planting with it in the receiving mind a fury to impart it.

Emerson, Education.

This study is an attempt to discover principles by which effectiveness of speaking and writing may be best developed in grades and in high school. We have to begin with — if we lay hold of it right — children's eager desire to express what interests them. But though the small child insists on your listening to his flood of remarks, he does not really care enough about their effect to attempt forming any sort of judgment of it. The most absent-minded pretense of heed or assent usually quite suits him. (And unfortunately, many people go through life but little better socialized in this respect.) For developing and socializing this crude activity of children, we find most valuable forces, first, in their curiosity in exploring their surroundings, and second, in their equally keen interest in the live account of other people's experiences, which they get at second-hand through oral or written accounts. Both these sources may suggest innumerable projects for speech and writing. But, what is more important, a child's absorption in accounts of others' experience can be skillfully moulded into truly cooperative work among the children of a group with vigorous but good-spirited criticism of one another's results.^

Good Subjects must come from Vital, Realized Experience

Where children say things without any idea of what they mean, — often for the mere taste of the words, as in repeating nonsense-rhymes, — we evidently do not have composition — the child's own presentation of his own ideas. Yet, because we have not always realized that true and living experience is the best source of expressible ideas, we have too often in school classes got nothing better than acceptable repetition of phrases. We know well enough in theory that only realized or "concrete" ideas — "effective"

* The relation between the idea of social education and the teaching of composition is best presented in Dr. Dewey's The School and Society, (ist ed.) pp. 65 ff.

as opposed to ''formal" knowledge, as Mr. Campagnac puts it ^ — can generate valuable and individual expression. We may well note also, what investigations have specially emphasized,^ that the major interests for a child are happenings full either of action or of interest in "persons" — first, in the child himself and next, in the animals and humans about him. But we have too often failed to view this matter altogether from the point of view of the child himself; we have determined what ideas he should have and have assigned him those; and so our composition materials have again and again been hopelessly abstract and futile.

For example, many a grade class in making a trip to the fire house have taken down religiously all that the chief told them of the number of men in the department, the amount of their salaries deducted for pensions, and the like, and have copied it cheerfully into themes — to the neglect, in the space they could give to the subject, of what they had themselves observed and

1 The Teaching of Composition, p. lo; cf . also Dewey's How We Think, pp. 135 f,, and Dr. Bachman's articles in the Elementary School Journal, May- June, 1915 (vol. xv, pp. 491 and

2 Barnes's Studies in Education, vol. i, pp. 15 and 203; Child-Study Monthly, vol. 11, pp. 152-67; etc.

realized and could express in their own way: how the men get dressed and down the poles, how the horses are petted and how they respond to an alarm, or how to ring in an alarm from the corner box. Their usual restatement of quite lifeless facts is in no real sense composition work.

It is clear that a child need not actually have set his eyes and fingers on a thing to realize it; it may be born alive of his own vigorous fancy, or he may have imagined it in following some one else's vivid account. Children do gain this enlargement of experience very early; in the first grade, they often study primitive life, and really feel themselves a part of it with their attempts to build hut and sledge and find sources of foodsupply.^ So far as their study of history and geography is thus real, it may provide excellent subject-matter and vigorous incentive to expression. But wherever school subjects present flat, indigestible facts, to be merely gathered and stored in memory, whatever the practical values of these as information or as materials for organization study, it appears certain that we ought to keep altogether clear of them as subjects for compositions.

1 For example, Teachers College Elementary School Course, Grades i and 2. • ^

Good Subjects must lead naturally to Expression in Words

It is to be noted, further, that many ideas which a child quite thoroughly reahzes and is deeply interested in may nevertheless arouse no impulse toward verbal expression. Thus, nothing should be called for in speech or in writing which naturally demands no expression, or which can be better expressed in some other way. In the early grades, certainly, subjects without action — descriptions of things, places, people not doing something — can be best handled in drawing or modeling, or else let alone; at least below the high school, subjects expressible in time order are probably always preferable. Again, we may well hold to the sound idea, formulated by Mr. Chubb, ^ that children should talk and ''write about things seen, rather than felt." There are unquestionably many deep impressions, from pictures such as the Sistine Madonna or the Song of the Lark, for instance, or from stories with an ideal not baldly stated but illustrated well, which we had better not analyze and force to expression. That children by preference express objective mat- ^ ^ Teaching of English, p. 184.

ters when unhampered with requirements is suggested by such studies as that of Miss Vostrowsky.^

A, FOUR TYPES OF CHILD -ACTIVITY AS SOURCES OF SUBJECT-MATTER

Good subjects, then, vv^e may define as such vital reaHzed experiences of the child's own as naturally call for verbal expression — not for drawing or pantomiming or simply for quiet, undisturbed growth. And such subjects are numberless in any child's life day by day. If we examine briefly the commonest types of child-interest and activity, we may discover what children most naturally talk or write about in school or outside it. A suggestive grouping about centers of typical interest is worked out in the University School at Columbia, Missouri; ^ these are (i) hearing or reading stories; (2) plays and games; (3) construction or handwork; and (4) careful observation of human and other activities or their realization from other people's accounts. Each of these interests provides a great deal of material for expression.

1 "Children's Stories," Barnes, Studies in Education, vol.

* Dewey, Schools of To-morrow, chap. iil.

Most obviously, his acquaintance with stories may suggest to the child the great funds of imaginative material at his own command. Thus is developed his fanciful elf-nature. And stories are not handled to the best end if they do not also help make him see the common things all about him as more truly interesting than before — full of mysteries, and of people just as worth while, once you know them, as prince or starveling of fairy books. Through his stories the child thus becomes a citizen of two worlds, the very real one of tales and the freshly mystic and strange one just around him. These story influences exhibit themselves in his play at dolls or pirates — indeed, throughout his reactions toward people and events; and they are sources of many subjects and of motives to expression.

The second and the third typical interests to be noted are children's zeal in games and in handwork and construction of many sorts. Incidents from play and the like fascinating activities appear to be the subject of subjects for children's talk. The methods of both games and handwork also interest children in proportion as they attempt more organized projects, and are the source of endless comment and discussion. If the school but gives occasion for these vivid and living interests to express themselves, we may. here gain a starting-ground of free and vigorous expression upon which to develop composition power.

The fourth type of child-activity to be considered begins with observing the activities of home and community and such nature processes as the ways of birds and insects. We may first encourage children to watch carefully the laying of asphalt pavements or the digging of cellars and to discuss and come to understand it in class. Group and individual expeditions for these purposes are likewise valuable, provided only the child does not simply repeat what he is told by workmen and others, but succeeds in relating in his own way what he has understood.

The Problem of digesting New Experi- ]

ENCES AT SeCOND-HaND

There soon appears the problem of helping children handle matters which they cannot themselves observe, but which they must come to know about if we would get them beyond the circle of their small immediate horizon. How are we to help them realize and express in their own way — not by unmeaningly parroting some one else — such things as they can learn about only through hearing or reading of them? To insure that the child manages the necessary digestion of such experiences, we may need to help him gain three desirable ends: (i) concrete basing of his subject-matter upon what he already fully realizes; (2) the fullest accuracy in crediting new ideas to their sources; and (3) adaptation of his expression to his actual audience, thus securing its reality to them. These are obviously requirements for handling new materials of direct sense-perception also; but they are the most fully essential, and at the same time are more difhcult to secure, when the subject is learned about indirectly.

(i) Through fusion of new with old ideas

This point is merely the usual necessary counsel that the child be helped always to realize new experiences by fusing them with .the old. First of all it is apparently well to use as school-composition subjects, in far greater proportion than we usually have done, what the child can set his own eyes and fingers upon and learn all about unaided by any one else's explanation; this should form the sound base for all later excursions. And then, as early as possible, we may well insist that the sources from which a child draws all his composition material — particularly where one of these sources is another person's account — shall be in ail cases more than one. We all realize that a child's recitation from his book of information about river deltas is many times as vivid if he builds it about an account of applying that information in looking for deltas in streams or making them in gutterways near by. But we may gain almost the same end by studying several accounts of any matter, adding probably the help of pictures, and making the recitation or theme a composite report of these sources. The more this simple principle of comprehending new ideas by linking and fusing them invariably with old ones is applied to composition subject-matter, the better we shall probably get on; it appears to be the first principle of success, particularly in compositions based on what one reads or hears about merely.

The purpose of this counsel is simply that a child's expression may be helped to remain always his own — the story his story, an outgrowth of his individual experience, which cannot be Kke that of any one else. We may test the value of any composition by the query: Does the child express his idea in a way to show the action of his own sense and mind upon it? This is sometimes difficult to determine, to be sure, since children naturally use the wording of their source of information; and this is right and useful, provided only their account is not mere lifeless copy from talk or book. Yet we can know well enough, provided we really know the child himself. Does he speak with natural vivacity of face and gesture? Is the healthy crudity of his blunt and inexact child-mind — his raw expression, and the staled phrasings he has borrowed here or there — often incongruously mixed with the finer and more precise wording he has just adopted? If so, the chance is that he has recast and fused what he has newly learned with previous experience, and so made it quite his own. A boy writing a story of Braddock's conference with Washington expressed thus the general's contempt of the colonial tactics: "^Not on your life; gentlemen don't fight like that,' cried General Braddock." The boy had the idea clearly in mind, and that is the prime requisite. At the same time, then, that we plan to help him sharpen his tools for finer or more exact statement, we may well be glad of this very rawness and crudity of his expression; for he has made a gain impossible to the II child who merely reflects the information he gets, with painful accuracy, from a bright, hard surface of mind.

(2) Through proper crediting 0} sources

In aid of this principle, wherever the children's accounts are in any part built on some one else's observation — whether in stories from local history, or industrial processes, or experiences from a wider environment — it is essential always, both in oral and written themes, that they credit as acurately as they can the source of their statements. A child may say, for example, *'This is what old Mr. Jones told me about when there were Indians all around here"; or, "I found this in So-and-so's Geography on page 10." By thus making quite unmistakable the sources of facts or opinions he cites, a child can make possible for himself and for his readers the fair rating of new ideas. And it is only as they learn early to tell in this simple way where they get what they have not directly perceived, beginning with their simple story reproductions and recitations about other new experiences, that children can establish the basis for habits of accuracy and honesty in thinking.

The need of testing statements Children may also come, by this route of examining and noting who said this or that, to understand and develop the scientific doubt which is essential to real training in thought. They will be spurred by other pupils' challenge to examine more carefully the bases of fact statements they have heard or read; and particularly they will, by countless such jolts, be assured both of the difference between observed facts and mere opinions and of the meager value of all opinions which are not backed with so much specific statement of concrete instances as makes conclusion from it safe. When a child insists that killing spiders brings rain and is scoffed at by his companions, we may help him to discover, through his effort to back his opinion, that much more than the authority and the chance instances he has been accepting must be secured as foundation for any solid belief. Thus, through investigating and experimenting, he may catch the first glimmer of a scientific habit of mind.

(j) Through adaptation of expression to one^s

audience ^As a third point in helping children to digestion of new experience, we must lead the class to demand always that each child adapt what he presents specifically to their understanding. Indeed, growth in the art of writing or speaking may be defined simply as a process of becoming increasingly *' reader-minded " — able, that is, to test one's own expression for its actual clearness and force to those he intends it for. The child must make his account real to the class by basing it altogether in their knowledge and experience. Thus he may not be permitted new technical terms which a bricklayer, for instance, has told him — hod or mortar and the like — without making clear to his audience just what these things are. In most composition work I have seen, not nearly enough is made of this, the crux and central principle of a social teaching of composition.

In view of the wide range of composition subject-matter that, we have noted, may be generated by children's interest in stories, play, hand-work, and observation, there seems to be no justification for assigning as composition subjects — whatever their importance in other school work — sterile, dry matter that does not represent to the children realized and vital experience. We have noted that realization is the fundamental test for both selection and presentation of material; we must in all ways help children, especially in handling ideas they get at second-hand, to the use and fusion of several sources of information, proper crediting of sources, and most of all, true adaptation of what they present to their audience, so that it becomes actual reality to them also. Thus we can hope to develop in children, first, power of distinguishing, in what they hear and read, between statements of fact and statements of opinion; and second, some true sense of their respective values.

B. VITAL MOTIVES AND PROJECTS FOR COMPOSITION

We are next concerned with the definite motives and the specific composition projects which may be developed out of these natural activities of children. There appears to be no need of guiding them toward a formal differentiation of their motives in attempting various problems. But usually, in fact, they respond to incentives which we may for our own convenience classify as of three types — projects more or less vaguely defined which they think it worth while to carry out. We may call these the

IS

"story-teller" motive, the 'teacher" motive, and the "community worker" motive — this last an interest in good-spirited cooperation upon projects suggested by school or other social needs.

I. The Story-Teller or Entertainer Motive

The story-teller motive (by this I of course mean the desire to tell stories, as distinguished from the interest in hearing them) apparently grows from the child's desire to rehearse his own exploits and real or fanciful adventures. It is pleasant for him to go over, simply for his own benefit, the most trivial happening.^ But besides this, a child finds that his effective telling of a story gives him -standing in his small community, whether he celebrates and sings himself or tells of other events. The attention of the group when he succeeds in making a picture live and move before them, their desire, perhaps stimulated by the teacher's suggestions, for more of specific detail — these may lead him to a new and genuine pleasure in holding the attention of others and gaining their commendation. This impulse — not for a long time very

\ 1 Campagnac, The Teaching cj Composition, p. 20. 16 altruistic, to be sure — has tremendous potentiality in the composition class. Their demand that the speaker make his picture and other sense-appeals clear and real experiences, once this is developed under skillful direction, stirs up an eager desire to transfer his experiences and his fancies into just as real ideas for his classmates.

Story types: Real and fanciful adventures

Simple chronicles of what the child has actually seen or done and tales modified or created by his fancy appear to be about equally good stimuli to expression; but they appeal to different children, or rather to different interests in any one child. Provided the stories are made real to their audience, they are successful

— though on ethical grounds it may be better to see that the child learns to label rightly his fanciful tales. The first-hand experience subjects may include accounts of home pleasures

— romps and story-hours and family expeditions — of vacation and holiday adventures, and of good times of the class group. The subjects will be wisely limited by the teacher's suggestion and influence to what is wholesome; gore and domestic scandal and stories priggish in their account of naughty children or of very good ones are perhaps about equally mischievous.

The chance to tell stories built with the aid of fancy fascinates most normal children; yet a teacher's blunt demand for an imaginative story may quench this interest for a long time if not for good. The imaginary play of children — Indians, house, or school — and excursions which they take with the heroes of their stories probably furnish the chief bulk of subjects. The outhne of a story to be filled in with specific detail as the children imagine it — the story of Faithful Fido, for instance — is one good opening. Another comes from starting a lively story, like that of Merlin's Cave,^ and letting the children finish it to suit themselves. Such a beginning as, " 'Well, Fred, what makes you so late?' asked his mother sharply," or, " 'Now you get right out of my kitchen!' cried Aunt Dinah," rarely fails in stimulating most original and happy response. The meeting of a wellknown story character in a new place or condition, and the party Mother Goose gave for her children, or Simple Simon and Jack Horner at a fair, are stirring topics. Pictures prove to ^ In Merry Tales, by Skinner. l8 be good in proportion as they effectively suggest a real story-situation. There appears to be little or no value in inducing children to describe the picture, but the class discussion may help them to look in it for hints of interesting happenings for their stories. Later, topics of this sort may be used with great effect in the effort to make history and geography lessons dramatically real. The meeting of Benjamin Franklin and Mr. Edison on the Styx House- Boat, or of fur-traders and Indians, and the dramatization of scenes in other lands are good examples, provided always the children, usually helped by discussion, have first conceived the affair as a true experience.

This is, indeed, the crux of the whole matter, particularly in subjects of the children's imagining. If these stories are to be more than a confused jumble and unreal stringing of detail, it is evident that they must tie as close to real experience as any other subjects given. This real experience may be that of other stories; but the most successful assignments of this sort appear to be those that introduce a mystic or fairy element into the child's actual surroundings — "If I had Aladdin's lamp, or the Tarnkappe,^^ for instance. As with children's composition subjects in general, we may safely assume that these topics are good in proportion as they suggest imagination of concrete matters, and as they are kept pretty clear of attempts to discuss emotions.

Class discussion to orient projects

The success of these projects probably depends just as much on the way in which they are presented as on the subject-matter itself; the children must have a real basis for understanding them, and especially they must be in the right spirit for setting out.^ The most effective aid in this appears to be the free discussion of the subject in class, where many children may suggest what they will have happen to start the story and perhaps to finish it, and thus give useful hints of new departures to those who are slower in getting a start. Given the right direction by the readiest children, this work need have no limit save the possible powers of each child enhanced by the inspiration of his fellows,