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ing and language is to minister to the cultivation of literary taste. Most of our higher-grade work in literature has been a failure because there have been no adequate foundations in the development of a taste for literary form and feeling in the lower grades. A literary taste for the complex types found in our complex classic literature is no more to be expected without an adequate preliminary training in the simple foundational elements of literature, than is a sudden understanding of complex reasonings in advanced arithmetic without a preliminary training in the simple stages of primary number.

Taste in oral reading and language will depend on the child's obtaining increased power to appreciate the various elements of beauty. In literature this beauty may be contributed from three sources-One source is the beauty of material. Some words are more beautiful intrinsically to the ear than other words. The mere sound of "harsh" is less pleasing than the sound of "gentleness." Gold is a more beautiful material than lead, silk than cotton. The beauty of form such as we find in rhyme, meter, etc., is another source. Certain vases are of more beautiful form than others. The third source is the beauty of meaning. The subject of one poem may revive associations of feeling far more delightful than certain others. In literature all three of these elements contribute to its beauty, and the training of children's taste in literature thru the story and the poem must take into account the growing sensitiveness of the child to the beauty of sound, of form, and of meaning. The extent of a child's appreciation of these elements will necessarily depend upon his experience. It is the business of the teacher to give such stories and such poems as will be within the child's maturity and to add to his life such experiences as will make the appreciation of more difficult forms and meanings possible. Usually the teacher has committed two errors: (1) The classical stories and poems have been given to the child regardless of their inadaptability and the child's mastery has been merely mechanical and memoriter. (2) Or, the teacher has pandered to the present power of the child and provided no new experiences which creates growth in taste so that more difficult and more beautiful literary creations may ultimately come within his literary reach. The "Mother Goose" rhymes, which seem absurd to many human beings because of their lack of meaning in terms of common-sense, are dearly loved by children because of the appeal made by their sound and rhythm. The beginnings of two elements of beauty are present. While the beauty of meaning may to a considerable extent be absent, the "Mother Goose" rhymes may be most useful at the beginning of literary work for other elements contributed. Many classics may be loved by children for musical sound and pleasant form, while a considerable part of the beauty of their meaning may be quite lost. It is thus that many of us have learned a "memory gem" the full beauty and meaning of which came late in life.

The story and the poem purely because they are different literary forms. will render a different service in that teaching which has as its object the cultivation of taste for beautiful things in language. The poem will be to children

more appealing for the beauty of its sound and form, and will therefore be memorized and repeated precisely as the master-mind created it. While the story, because its appeal is in its selected meaning and their ordered arrangement in plot and narrative, will scarcely ever be memorized verbatim, but will be learned from the standpoint of the development of its thoughts in their narrative order with little regard for the exact words which originally clothed the story. Here the child will repeat the essential charm of the story even though he may use his own language. It will be the same with other literary forms. The aesthetic qualities contributed by each will need to be studied and its use in teaching controlled by the essential qualities which it contributes. When we have made more conscious and studied use of literary forms in teaching, breaking away from the slavery of traditional treatment, the literary side of instruction in oral reading and oral language will find some new and more potent factors than it has ever known before.

II. STORY-TELLING AND THE POEM

EMMA C. DAVIS, SUPERVISOR, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, CLEVELAND, OHIO

The consideration of the relation of story-telling to oral reading and oral language leads at once to the question of the relation which these bear to the educational process and this in turn looks forward to the educational aim.

What is education and what is its goal, may be answered in brief as "character building," with all that this implies, and the two great factors that life employs to this end are the individual experiences and activities, and the experiences of other people portrayed or communicated either by word of mouth or thru literature and other arts.

The great strides in progress made in the earlier civilization were due to many agencies, not the least important of which was story-telling. The recounting of heroic deeds in the Sagas, the explanation of natural forces and their manifestations in myths and the interpretations of life in the folklore and fables, told from generation to generation, constituted a traditional literature which, beginning in the most primitive and childish myth, advanced to the noble epic of the Greek.

These agencies of the past for the education of the race we now seek to revive. The youthful mind holds its view of the universe as a "vague, unorganized synthesis" of all the constantly inrushing sense preceptions, the unrelated concepts and impressions, immature opinions, judgments, and feelings-all the items and influences that have come into his experience and contribute to his mental and spiritual interpretation of the physical and psychical universe; and the educational process is a leading up to a final consciousness, thru the transmutation by the means of synthesis, analysis, and ultimately of resynthesis of this vague sense of the unity of all things into as clear and all-embracing a concept of the meaning of life and immortality as the human soul is capable of. And as we ponder it, does it not seem clear what part the story and poem

play in this process? What interpretations of life, what self-revelations, what insights, what clarifications, what harmonizing influences, what unifying effects, what explanations in terms of the imagination are possible thru stories and poems which, if properly selected, have power to reveal the world to the child. and the child to himself.

The range, adaptation, and selection of stories and poems for such use are themes, each important in itself and worthy of full consideration, which can be but briefly touched upon here.

Since it is thru stories and poems largely that, either by contrast or coincidence, our ideas of life are revealed to us, and our ideals created, a full range would require that every phase of life and all sorts and degrees of experience be touched upon, and the entire gamut of emotion sounded. In this wide range the variations and types are many and should include some of the rhymes and jingles, and cumulative-repetition stories of the nursery period; folklore stories, myths, fables, fairy tales, and fanciful stories of classic origin; stories of heroes and heroic deeds; ballads and some lyric poems and always and everywhere poems which convey exalted ideals or pictures of beauty and harmony. Every poem worthy a place in education, embodies and reveals some phase of eternal, universal experience which the human spirit recognizes as such and this leads on to self-revelation and self-expression of the highest type. There is too little appreciation of the fact that the poem is a form of art of greatest power to move the human heart, to enlighten the finite mind, to convey shades of thought and feeling which are inexpressible in prose, and to appeal to that prescience of immortality we must nurture all we can.

The array of types noted above is given in an unorganized way; a most careful gradation and arrangement is required to meet the different attitudes and needs of the progressive stages of psychic growth, but this adaptation is again a theme in itself.

Not less important than adaptation is the selection of stories within the range, for not all folklore, ancient tho it be, not all myths nor all classic tales are to be given the children. Perhaps I shall be deemed heretical by some, but I am sustained by high authority, when I make the statement that some of the most commonly accepted classical stories are unethical in influence and should be eliminated from the list. I do believe that strong, vigorous tales touching the heights and depths of human feeling and human experience should be given and that goody-goody tales are worse than none, vitiating standards or creating anæmic tastes; but deceit, trickery, and wanton lying and stealing rewarded by success is not an ideal of life and "luck" to put before children; there are hosts of other stories full of life and action and near to childish hearts to substitute for such as these.

I have failed of my endeavor if I have not demonstrated how deep lies the source of influence of the story and the poem upon the oral language and oral reading.

As for the practical results, the outward testimony of the value and the

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indispensability of the story and poem as a part of the educative process, we have not far to seek.

We have seen how story and poem may touch the whole range of life—a magic touch at which thought and feeling spring to greet the pictured thought and feeling; experience matches experience and is illumined; words and expressions come into consciousness to clothe thought in speech and the language power expands.

The expansion in language which comes in this most vital way, is reinforced and made permanent thru the wonderful power of memory and imitation of children; the new language forms in which the stories are clothed thus becoming usually a part of their regular language stock. This effect is very easily discernible and I find it again and again in schools where the teacher is truly "a story-teller." This form of language development transcends in value that which comes thru conversations upon actual activities and experiences, valuable as these are for other purposes, because these being intelligible by the use of the more common words and forms, make less demand upon the language power and add comparatively little to the vocabulary, whereas the literature in which most stories are embodied supplies a higher type and wider scope of language as well as an enriched content to already familiar words.

One of the most subtle ways in which the story and poem influences the child and his self-expression in oral language and oral reading is thru the imagination, "the stuff that dreams are made of." But it is the dreamers of the world who feed the fires that supply the motive power of all progress, realistic as well as idealistic; Isaac Newton was a dreamer, and so was Gutenberg, and so were Pestalozzi and Froebel-these were dreamers that were also doers.

It is the imagination that transmutes knowledge into power and knits together the ideal and the real. It is this endowment of the human mind of which we educators take too little account. It is, or should be, stimulated by story-telling, that it may vitally and directly influence the oral reading and language. It is thru the exercise of the imagination that the child thinks the thought, thrills to the emotion, and lives the experience of the story, and it is the quality and degree of this response that makes the good or the poor reader.

In the oral reading or in the telling of a story, the child seeks to express this response not alone in words but by looks and gestures, by inflections and modulations of the voice; and here the dramatic instinct comes into play, another endowment which has been too much repressed by the school and by parental interference thru lack of knowledge and appreciation of it as a vital essence of expression.

In summing up the argument for story-telling as an educative factor, we find that it lends its aid in reflecting and interpreting life experiences, in inspiring and evolving thought, in quickening and fostering emotion, and that by reflexive action, it becomes an effective instrument in the development of language expression, thru accumulation of vocabulary, enrichment of content,

and increase in control and power of formulation, and, on the side of oral reading, it enhances appreciation, gives training in interpretation, and greatly stimulates and exercises all forms of expressive delivery.

But whatever may be said of the immense importance of these factors, there is always that one other factor without which we cannot reckon-the teacher; for after all, the effectiveness of any educational agency depends upon the teacher.

Is it reading or story-telling? Then the teacher must be a model reader or story-teller, with all that this implies of insight, of sympathy, of imagination, of dramatic control, of the power to judge and appreciate what is truly good in literature and above all she must have the skill of the raconteur.

I would have story-telling and the ability to read poetry a part of the theory and practice examination for teachers' certificates. Every teacher who has not had such special training should feel it her bounden duty to "go to school" and acquire this most difficult and delicate but most indispensable of arts. We may organize our forces and officer the educational ranks with great leaders, we may plan the campaign of education with highest skill, and yet all without avail unless the teacher is imbued with the professional spirit and realizes the heights and the possibilities of her vocation and aspires to be an artist.

As far back as 1835, Mazzini said:

Science, the arts, and every form of human knowledge await the coming of one who shall link and unite them all in a single idea of civilization, and concentrate them all in one sole aim. They await his coming, and he is destined to appear.

While we all recognize that education as an art has been practiced in some guise since the dawn of civilization, and that the late past and present centuries have witnessed giant strides in the evolution of a science of education, we must admit that there still remains for the on-coming generation the formulation of a philosophy of education.

And I believe that the one whom we await, the one by whom shall be wrought out thru the actualities of experience this culminating triumph of civilization, is not a single individual, but that Messianic host-the corporate body of the teachers of the race. And with this interpretation of Mazzini's prophecy granted, our responsibility looms large and clear, for we, the teachers. of today, are the teachers of the teachers of tomorrow.

III. DRAMATIZING

THOMAS C. BLAISDELL, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE, LANSING, MICH.

As I entered I saw that the children were playing a story. In front of the schoolroom a dozen boys and girls were moving about. They had their elbows lifted from their sides, and some kept flapping them up and down, while others occasionally stretched their heads forward and hissed. One boy stood apart, with a pointer in his hand. In the rear of the room a lad sat on the floor reading. The play was Maximilian and the Goose Boy.

Soon Maximilian closed his book. He rose. He looked up thru the trees

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