Essential principles of teaching reading and literature in the intermediate grades and the high school

Front matter

Class _ 1 3 IS7£ Book AuAi

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT

IPPINCOTT'S EDUCATIONAL GUIDES

Preface

This study considers the teaching of reading and of literature from the third grade through the high school; the separate problems of primary reading are not attempted. There is here no discussion of " classroom methods " except to illustrate how principles of choice or of procedure have been carried out in actual schoolrooms. It is probable that a compendium of devices and modes of operation is oftener misused for literal imitation than regarded in the light of basic and fundamental ideas.

This is no record of specific scientific or experimental study; it is simply a statement of essential principles upon which it is proposed such research should be planned, and a summary of the best available studies heretofore as a basis for further work of this sort. No claim is made to originality in the material here presented, particularly in the attempt to review in elementary fashion the basic standards of excellence in literature ( in Chapter I ) .

The fundamental and central idea of this study is that children's reading of literature should be always an achievement of realized, true, and significant experience. In development of this idea the following matters of procedure are presented as essential : —

I. Securing better literary equipment for the teacher of English ; actual conditions and possible remedies are canvassed (Chapter II). II. Beginning where children actually are in taste

and comprehension (Chapter III).

III. Selecting literature for schools according to specific criteria (a) of excellence and (b) of adaptability to children's powers, needs, and interests

6 PREFACE

(Chapter IV, illustrated by lists of books in Appendix II).

IV. Separating definitely (a) the teaching of reading — mastering the technique of comprehension, which requires whole-hearted and conscious purpose for its most effective pursuit — from (b) the teaching of literature — securing realization of enriching experience, which comes not of conscious purpose, but of unaffected and eager pursuit of fresh and significant aspects of life. V. Determining individual children's exact ability in understanding what they read, by means of objective measurements, and working from that point to raise the level of their power in reading or study (Chapters V and VI).

VI. Effecting apprehension of excellent literature, through (a) freedom of choice and adherence, (b) genuine and cooperative help in realization of new experience, and (c) free literary and dramatic expression of what the pupil gets from his book. (Chapters VII through X).

The principles of method discussed are based upon three fundamental educational doctrines : ( i ) We must begin where children actually are; (2) we must secure altogether significant and valuable materials of study; (3) and we must help pupils (a) to realize the immediate worth to them of both subject matter and technique and (b) to approach great literature in a spirit of unaffected curiosity about fresh aspects of life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My indebtedness for criticism and for ideas is enormous. The aid of published works, including the fundamental study of the Teaching of English by Carpenter, Baker and Scott and the writings of Dr. Dewey and Dr. E. L. Thorndike, is perhaps sufficiently noted throughout the book and the bibliographies. I am particularly grateful to Mrs. Dorothy Canfield Fisher and to Messrs. Henry Holt and Company, the holders of the copyright, for permission to include the pages from Understood Betsy, 'and and to Dr. Thorndike, Dr. J. F. Hosic, Mr. S. A. Courtis, Dr. H. A. Brown, Dr. M. A. Jordan, Mr. Earl R. Glenn, of the Lincoln School of Teachers College, Columbia University, and Professor Brander Matthews for the right to use quotations from highly valuable studies. I am indebted to Mr. C. T. Logan and the Virginia Teacher for printing a preliminary study to the first chapter and to Professor H. G. Paul, of the University of Illinois, for including Chapter VIII in a recent number of the Bulletin of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English.

The contribution of ideas freely given in conferences and discussions is more difficult to acknowledge duly, and impossible to appreciate sufficiently. I have learned much from classes of university graduates and undergraduates, " who while I taught them have taught me," as well as from my high-school and grade-school pupils. To my good friend Mr. Lucius T. Gould, of the University of Wisconsin, and to Dr. Ernest Horn, of the University of Iowa, I owe ideas too pervasively flowing

8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

through these pages to permit of specific mention; the title page of a study like this should read " his and his friends'." The courteous and constructive criticism, also, of those who have read chapters of the manuscript is most inadequately noticed by thanks. Professors H. B. Lathrop, of the University of Wisconsin, Rollo S. Lyman, of Chicago University, and C. S. Thomas, of Harvard University, the School of Education; Mr. C. H. Ward, of the Taft School; Principal C. S. Springmeyer, of Public School 85, Brooklyn; my former colleagues Miss Lida Lee Tall, now of the Eastern Maryland State Normal School, Dr. Harold O. Rugg, and Miss Anne T. Eaton, of the Lincoln School of Teachers College — all have read thick and forbidding sections of the manuscript. Mrs. Emma Sheridan Fry and Miss Ina M. Perego, have both criticized helpfully the final chapter. Dr. Dudley A. Miles, of Evander Childs High School, and Professors Karl Young, of the University of Wisconsin, W. S. Hinchman, of Haverford College, and Franklin T. Baker, of Teachers College, Columbia University, have given their time so generously as to compass the whole of the study, and have shown a care and cogency in revision and suggestion which have made possible much that is best in the final book.

For help on the lists of books for children's reading (Appendix II) I am indebted to the compilers of such bibliographies as are noted in the "List of Lists of Children's Reading," and most, of course, to those who have permitted me to include the series for special grades and subjects, which are credited to their donors. In addition to these I have had the benefit of criticism from Miss Esse Chamberlain of Oak Park High School ; Miss Alice Louise Marsh of Southwestern High School, Detroit; Miss Frances Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Education,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 9

the University of Cincinnati ; and, particularly, Miss Clara N. Hawkes of Cicero Township High School, Illinois, whose valuable work on the Curriculum Committee of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English has done much to define the idea of fundamentals in the teaching of literature.

Above all, I owe to my mother, Mrs. Eva Andrus Leonard, not only my first induction into great and fine literature, but the further help of clear criticisms and careful experiments which have enabled me to tie this study closer to the needs and problems of the public schools in our large cities to-day.

The University of Wisconsin, Madison.

February 8, 1922.

Table Of Contents

I. The Enrichment of Experience Through Genuine Literature 17

A. Realizable Presentation of Life in Literature.

B. Truth to Human Experience.

Chapter I The Enrichment Of Experience Through Literature

The effect of genuine literature is an enriching or enhancement of our experience, both through broadening our horizons beyond what we can actually see and touch, and through sharpening our perception and understanding of what is immediately about us. This effect has been compared to an opening in blank walls of windows which look out upon fair prospects or bleak, and chiefly upon human affairs going forward. The outstanding value of such experiences is their inevitable influence upon our own thought and actions. From such glimpses into fresh reality, whenever it is genuine and worth while, we turn inevitably to considering, criticizing, and valuing our own immediate contact with reality. We thus derive new light upon our relations with ourselves and with others, upon our constant struggle to make adjustments between ourselves and a complex and difficult universe.

WHAT EXPERIENCE IS

What do we mean when we speak of experience, whether gained " at first hand " or through the reading of books? Dr. Dewey has defined it as doing something to things and having them do something to us in return. " When we experience something we act upon

2 17 it, we do something with it ; then we undergo or suffer the consequences. . . . We learn something." 1 Such is, obviously, our experience of cold metal or jagged stones, of delicious tastes or choking fumes. But what of experiences " at second hand," in tale or poem ? What is it that we do to the matter in a book?

A. REALIZABLE PRESENTATION OF LIFE IN LITERATURE

Our essential and really active contribution in reading literature is bringing to it memories of our related past experiences. When we see phrases like Rupert Brooke's " the blue, bitter smoke of wood," or Masefield's

A wet road, heaving, shining And wild with seagulls' cries

we may be able to recall specific sense perceptions such as the writer suggests. We may, that is, produce at his suggestion memories of definite past sensations of our own (percepts). When we do this, we have actually that inexplainable but quite everyday delight, a realised experience through the mere reading of black, printed letters. But unless we actually make our own contribution in this way, the process is not real reading, but only mystification or dull mechanical eye-exercise; it is neither real nor enjoyable experience. All that an author can possibly supply, as Mr. Kerf oot expresses it, is much like a sheet of music: a great deal of experience and some technical training are required of a reader before he can make anything of it. 2 We can put into what we read any detail that

1 John Dewey: Democracy and Education (Macmillan, 1917), pp. 163, 171, 272-6, 321-3.

2 J. B. Kerf oot: How to Read, Chapters I and II, (Boston, 1919). And of course men's recall of perceptions varies even more than their observation — notably various — of the same events. No two men see or report the same details ; of course no two see identical pictures, or hear the same sounds, in reading the story of David or of Odysseus.

we have previously observed with our own five or seven senses, and we can put in no other detail.

NEW EXPERIENCE THROUGH LITERATURE

Is literature, then, capable only of giving us over again experiences we have already had? It does this perhaps oftenest, and thus gives us both distinct pleasure in recalling past sense-impressions — even unpleasant ones — and a useful deepening and fixing of their effects. But literature, as we know, can dp a great deal more than merely this.

Provided specific experiences are present in our memories, we can at a writer's suggestion recombine these in such fashion that experiences entirely distinctive and new result. In reading Henry Esmond we may see, in clear pictures, the ruffles and patches and ribbons ; we may hear the click of swords, and in some degree feel even the keen sword-thrust and the quick gasp of dismay at the end of the duelling. How it is possible for us to do things so remarkable — even roughly and incorrectly as we all do them — how we can see abbeys, and hear sounds of Roman war-trumpets, and know quite cordially persons that are far beyond our horizons of possibility — this we shall take occasion to discuss at another place. But we all know that it is possible, because it does happen to us. After reading Captains Courageous we are sure we have had most of the sensations of being aboard a fishing smack off the Grand Banks; if we happen later to meet this experience actually, we are aware of a strange familiarity. And we know Mr. Pickwick and Becky Sharp — can picture what they would say or do in this and that situation — quite as intimately as we know many of our own family, more intimately than most of our acquaintances.

We have noted that we can use for this purpose no materials save recalled sense-experiences which we have already had. In possession of a store of these we can, with the juggling, magical reconstruction of imagination, dramatize scenes and actions altogether new. What we thus produce at the helpful suggestion of poet or dramatist is often so utterly different from our former perceptions as to suggest a chemical compound, like harmless necessary salt out of fizzing sodium and ghastly chlorine. Yet if we look closely we can never find anything except the elements of our past experiences built into the new one. It is impossible to put into the dramatization that goes on in our reading either properties or costumes, personal traits or actions, which we have not already perceived and can remember. 3 The challenge to imagine anything whatever with other than these elements has never been met; ghost or centaur, satyr or giaour is but a recombination of familiar elements. The devil of the illustrators has a goat foot, a spear-barbed tail, horns, and red tights.

So it is with reconstructing a story like Captains Courageous. What the reader has experienced of fish and fishing tackle, of boats and bodies of water, of fog and storm — all this he must put together in new ways into a pageant of the Grand Banks and the Gloucester fleet. Thus, instead of treading merely old and worn ways, like crones nodding and cackling over threadbare stories, we set foot on new paths, and so we cannot but develop new ideas and feel differently toward fate and fellowmen. If, however, we are unable to put together the perceptional elements of the author's story — whether because we lack those elements or because we do not take the trouble — we can, in an expressive phrase, make nothing of it. We

3 J. B. Kerfoot: How to Read, Chapter I, pp. ioff.

4?

must do our part; for us that is equally essential with the author's constructive labor.

UNREALIZED STATEMENTS

For much that we read, of course, we cannot achieve such realization or imaginative experiencing. The usual school text, for example, with a flat array of statements about the Greek gods and their influences and interrelations, gives us little or nothing to realize. All one can do with the facts baldly and dully arrayed is to " commit them to memory," restate them more or less accurately at requirement, and then remember or forget them with varying completeness. Of course such information is often of real use: it may provide a certain pleasure of recognition in new reading; frequently it has practical utility. The essential ability to get needed facts from text and reference books is discussed in its proper place later. 4 But information is too commonly mere words learned and parroted, with little understanding of meaning or value, and no realization as experience. Mrs. Wharton's Jane 5 kept all sorts of data from her reading " in cold storage in her mind." She never did anything -^ to this matter — never organized it into conclusions with */ bearing on thought or conduct; she merely poured the facts forth, with maddening accuracy, in and out of season. Books of knowledge and information have value and even give pleasure ; but they are obviously no part of literature. \ Only vividly realized, concrete experience, and the best ways of securing it through books and making it fruitful in life, are of real concern in the teaching of literature. /

* Chapter VI, p. 168.

B Edith Wharton- "The Mission of Jane," in The Descent of Man.

Contrast with the compendium of mythological facts the legend of Demeter and Proserpina as retold in The Age of Fable, of that of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius' Golden Book 6 or in William Morris' Earthly Paradise. There you can see some of the mere facts of mythic lore incarnated, and moving in beautiful story. So with the tedious facts of hero-tale and epic. No one ever found the chronologies of these stories in handbooks either enriching or vital; but no one, surely, has read with senses alert the story of Odysseus swimming to land, or of the Trojan King in Achilles' tent, without vivid and moving realization.

The following sentences illustrate admirably the meaningless conventional description which abounds in third-rate books; it is wholly without concrete, realizable detail. ( This is a fair sample of Mr. H. B. Wright : 7 . . . There was something about the girl on the quickstepping, spirited horse that challenged attention. The khaki-clad figure was so richly alive — there -was such a wealth of vitality; such an abundance of young woman's strength; such a glow of red blood expressed in every curved line and revealed in every graceful movement — that the attraction was irresistible. To look at Barbara Worth was pleasure ; to be near her was delight.

" THE CULTIVATION OF THE EMOTIONS "

The whole question of the value and importance of a piece of literature depends simply on what happens inside one, when he reads it, or afterwards ; it is solely a matter of its effect upon him. Now, the effect of much verse and of many novels and plays is mere arousal of one's emotions about nothing in particular, simply because they

8 Translated in Pater's Marius the Epicurean. T The Winning of Barbara Worth, p. 63 (Book Supply Company Chicago, 1911.)

have often been aroused by the same stimulus before — as when the popular novelist or " sob-story" reporter plays on feelings by using commonplace conventional themes like a lover's heartbreak, a foreclosed mortgage, 8 a motherin-law's death, or " ruthless and despotic oppression." These stock phrases have no real meaning, based in their own experience, to nine persons in ten. Yet they can always be counted upon to stir the great public to vague splurges of feeling, or laughter, or loose sobs. Common, race-old feelings, rooted in instinct, are always ready to be touched off on little or no occasion; having been so stirred, they are ever readier to respond to merely a phrase or an echo. So the emotions are loosened and their controls become weakened.

Of course such mere emotional arousal, in the fashion of revival meetings or cheap political speeches, is in a sense experience ; in a loose sense everything is experience. And this cheap emotion is all that many readers of popular stories are capable of getting from their literature, of incredible adventures and worn old love-situations. But this sort of thing is not experience in our sense, of "doing something to things and undergoing the consequences." It is merely taking emotional stimuli direct, as though the heart or the tear-glands were stirred by electric shocks or by drugs. Literature of this type is popular with sixteenyear-olds of all ages, because it conducts them by what may be called the "emotional short-circuit." Instead of insuring that readers " sense " anything genuine, instead of giving them a basis of new and richer experience, it drains-off feeling over old and worn paths and floods out the intelligence. Such literature — and the like music and painting — extends the domination over men's minds of what Professor W. S. Hinchman calls " small logic and

8 Mr. Stephen Leacock plays cleverly on certain of these themes in his Nonsense Novels.

unnecessary tears." It has produced the apt condemnation of much fiction and oratory and drama as a sort of " intellectual saloon."

What, then, of the usually accepted definition of the purpose of literature as a " cultivation of the emotions?" What of the emotional element which is recognized as an essential ingredient of genuine literature? These are fundamental questions, and we shall need to consider them carefully.

THE BASIS OF TRUE EMOTION

The simplest one-celled animal, when it comes upon a particle of food, doubtless feels agreeable emotion as it absorbs this; as it recoils from an unpleasantly sharp fragment it no doubt feels pain. These feelings are useful guides that form its experience and make possible its survival and propagation. Throughout the domain of living creatures there is likewise no real sense-perception, no "sensing" of anything, without some feeling about it — liking, aversion, disgust, fear, or keen interest. 9 On the other hand, no arousal of emotion that is not caused by sensory experience or a recollection of such experience (precepts) is of any significant value as experience.

As we have noted, deliberate attempts to stir up excitement or sobs or terror or passion are constantly made by hectic and hysterical appeal. They are successful because these instinctive feelings are easily set loose, as animals are stampeded at a cry of alarm. It is the fault of third-rate musicians to force a lugubrious nuance and note, and of resourceless poets to dissolve in tears on no perceivable provocation. The easy arousal of excitement is illustrated in any story of quite incredible perils, or

8 Of course a neutral state of boredom or lack of feeling means merely a faint stimulus, or such worn channels of sensation that no reaction occurs.

in the absurd but pernicious situations of passion which Robert Chambers invents liberally. It is easily detected in the lowest depths of fiction and verse, in bad and lurid magazines, and in uncounted children's books. No intelligent person, for example, can read critically the second chapter of Wright's Re-creation of Brian Kent without discovering the ludicrousness of its amazing bombast.

We do not, however, often observe how widely prevalent is this trick in much work which has some right to rank as literature. Examine, for instance, this account of a slave market :

. . . There, in the bright November sunlight, a sight met his eyes which turned him sick and dizzy.

Against the walls and pillars of the building already grimy with soot, crouched a score of miserable human beings waiting to be sold at auction. Mr. Lynch's slave pen had been disgorged that morning. Old and young, husband and wife — the moment was come for all and each. How hard the stones ! And what more pitiless than the gaze of their fellow creatures in the crowd below ! Oh friends, • we who live in peace and plenty amongst oufown families, how little do we realize the terror and misery and the dumb heartaches of those days. Stephen thought with agony of seeing his own mother sold before him in that way. And the building in front of him was lifted from its foundations and rocked even as shall the temples on the judgment day.

The oily auctioneer was inviting the people to pinch the wares. Men came forward and looked into their mouths, and one brute, unshaven and with filthy linen, snatched a child from its mother's lap. Stephen shuddered with the sharpest pain he had ever known. . . .

Hark! was that the sing-song voice of the auctioneer? He was selling the cattle. High and low, caressing and menacing, he teased and exhorted them to buy. They were bidding for the possession of souls, bidding in the currency of the Great Republic. And between the eager shouts came a moan of sheer despair. What was the attendant doing now? He was tearing two of them from a last embrace. 10

Do you remember the Ohio Congressman in Uncle Tom's Cabin, who returned home from Washington to find Eliza and her baby in his house? He had been so little moved by fervid abolition oratory as to vote for the Fugitive Slave Bill; but he immediately aided the escape of these fugitive slaves. It is concrete experience like his — actually seeing and sensing — that moves men powerfully. Of such experience Mr. Churchill gives us little; more could have been done, with such details as would make us inescapably to see these "miserable human beings" — perhaps a helpless gesture of agony like that in Rodin's Age of Bronze, or the strains of the auction song, "Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen/' or dumb looks backward. Instead of trusting to such specific details as he has given, and to any American reader's memories of similar experiences secured in Uncle Tom's Cabin and similar books, Mr. Churchill must attempt to stir us up by excited apostrophe — "Oh friends!" and the like — and by a dizzying and apocryphal vision of judgment. In a word, he is so eager to get at our emotions and rend them, to force us into feeling his horror and hatred, that he abandons the one altogether certain road to that end. 11

An effective contrast with this is presented in a story of De Maupassant's. When the French woman, Mother Sauvage, 12 after getting cruelly detailed word of her son's

10 Winston Churchill : The Crisis. By special arrangement with and permission of the Macmillan Company.

11 1 am not, obviously assuming that Mr. Churchill is fairly represented by the passage quoted, but simply illustrating that this method of trying to turn on emotion as if from a tap or to squeeze it out with the bare hands, common though it be, is neither so sure nor so permanent in effect as the presentation of concrete sense-experience.

"De Maupassant: The Odd Number (Harper, 1889).

death in battle, skins a rabbit which the German soldiers have brought in, and the blood runs over her hands, we need no indication of either her emotions or her imaginings.

Writers who work the " emotional short-circuit " may indeed " make 'em weep" freely; but they never really achieve that realization of genuine human emotion which is alone a permanent, significant influence in the reader's experience. Exaggerated appeal to the emotions may exist along with vivid and concrete presentation, as sometimes in Bjornson and Dickens. But those who freely 1 'fiddle harmonics on the sensual string" are a source of real peril. 13

PRESENTATION OF INTERPRETATIONS OR CONCLUSIONS

When a writer wants to impart conclusions or interpretations — his dearest beliefs in morals or politics or social theory — his most clear and direct course would seem to be a logical and perspicuous statement of his idea. But such a statement alone will not get others either to see or to accept his point ; to assume this is unwarranted as to suppose that any one is enabled to realise facts boldly stated in texts and tabulations. Men adopt and act upon opinions for various reasons, many of them stupid prejudices and taboos. But what gives a show of permanent authority to any belief is oftenest some concrete and personal experience apparently supporting it. One instance is enough to confirm most men in a not too impossible or unpalatable belief. Two or three examples are, for untrained minds, absolute and incontrovertible proof. A student of mine cited two incursions of black cats into her sister's home, each followed by a child's death, as complete evidence of direct causation. Obviously super-

" See A. H. R. Fairchild : The Teaching of Poetry (Boston, 1914), p. 69.

stition of this sort is much worse than absurd; we need full analysis of scientific proof, in all our schools, to counteract loose thinking. Such, nevertheless, is the fact of human reasoning as it works now ; it accepts direct, personal sense-experience, and next to that the report of someone else's concrete experience, as the safest hold on reality.

Literature which presents conclusions or interpretations effectively, we can easily discover, makes full use of this fact. It usually backs its statements by concrete details seeming to confirm them. In Antony's speech the use of dead Caesar's wounds and of the terms of the will — "to every several man, seventy-five drachmas" — fully covers all bareness of logical proof, and furnishes convincing illustration of the effectiveness of sensory experience.

Often, indeed, a speaker can safely assume in his audience a common body of definitely conceived, sensory experience. The fear of ambition, pride, and a crown were so fixed in Roman tradition as to be only a little less potent than Caesar's blood and his reported gift of drachmas. So, the audience at the Gettysburg dedication had close in the background of their minds dramatic scenes of bravery at Valley Forge and Yorktown, of daring men issuing the Declaration of Independence and subduing narrower loyalties to the necessity of a constitution. Without these very concrete and vivid traditions, the words " our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty," though beautiful in sound, would have meant little or nothing. But these, readily imagined, in the presence of the agony of the Civil War, brought with them their inevitable emotion, and made Lincoln's hearers susceptible to the new interpretation which he put upon that day.

So for the ideas and conclusions developed in books of science, and history, and economics : It is essential that definite experience is or actually has been lived through by the reader, or vividly imagined by him, so that in his reading it is before him in dramatic form. 14

Even the ideals which most deeply influence us, whether consciously or but vaguely realized, are probably without exception traceable to very real experiences that we have undergone, in actual life, or in plays or books or lively family tradition; and it is these fundamental experiences which give our ideals their powerful validity. Only by a like process can interpretations of duty or polity or economics be more than mere words, without solidity of meaning or permanence of influence on feeling and hence on conduct. They will stand else with bare unrealized statements of fact in books of information; you can do nothing to them but memorize them; and, having done nothing significant with them, you discover that they will do nothing for or to you.