(1) _Give pleasure._
(2) _Stir and direct the imagination._
(3) _Arouse and direct the feelings._
(4) _Cultivate the taste._
(5) _Help to shape thought and language mode._
(6) _Stimulate and direct potential literary creativity._
(7) _Serve as foreword for book-study of literature._
(8) _Give knowledge of life._
(1) _The story will give pleasure._ Educational thought is growing
more and more cordial toward this value. Undisturbed by any charge of
“soft pedagogy,” it finds wholesome pleasure, not merely relaxing, but
constructive, building toward physical health, mental brightness, and
moral virtue. Here is the story’s opportunity. Every one admits it is
pleasure-giving. The stern-minded among us must realize that this is its
deepest educational value. It is from the good pleasure the child gets
from the story that will ripen good taste, good will, good effort, and
all the other goods some teachers and parents regard as more substantial
merit. Besides, joy appears to be here to stay. To attempt to take it
out of the plan of things is, to say the least, short-sighted. American
civilization is looking hopefully to the school for better national
standards of pleasure. The school is under obligation to educate the
children to enjoyment of wholesome pleasure.
(2) _The story will stir and direct the imagination._ We do not yet grant
in practice the importance of the imagination. We do not purposefully
exercise it, as we do, for example, the reason. We say glibly that
imagination is at the root of the successful man’s arrival at material
profit, of the explorer’s discovery and the practical scientist’s
invention, of the poet’s song and the philanthropist’s vision of a state
of society in which the kingdom of heaven will be nearer at hand; but we
give little or no training to the imagination. Here again is the story’s
opportunity. Through the story the interpretative story-teller may give
the imagination consistent exercise.
(3) _The story will arouse and direct the pupil’s feelings._ The
school to-day is emphasizing the necessity of educating the heart, the
climactic third of the three great H’s,—the Head, the Hand, and the
Heart. And psychologists are telling us that to educate a child to be
kind, unselfish, filial, reverent, gentle, courageous, good-tempered,
to educate him to admire goodness, justice, valor, to be sensible of
beauty, to aspire and make effort toward excellence, is as practicable
as to train him to do or to make something. It calls for more delicate
but not different treatment; working not by dictation, but by magnetic
suggestion. The story-teller may render a great service to the individual
and to the community by helping to form right feeling-habit.
(4) _The well-chosen story will cultivate the taste._ Psychology is
urging early direction also of the æsthetic sense. The story-teller,
through her own joyous response to beauty, has it in her power to awaken
and direct the children’s appreciation of beauty. It is she, too, who
must help to lay the foundation for that better taste in novel or play
that America eagerly desires, and that publisher and playwright say they
stand ready to satisfy as soon as the public arrives at it.
(5) _The story will help to form the child’s thought and language habit._
As this is the value most often acknowledged in classroom practice—though
not always by the best methods—it is not necessary to do more at this
point than restate it. Mastery in thought and language is far-reaching
usefulness, affecting individual growth and social harmony. The story,
because of its easy, more or less artless composition and graphic
diction, lends itself to starting right thought and language mode.
(6) _Story-telling may help to stimulate and direct potential literary
creativity._ In spite of its breadth of view the school appears
insensible to the rights of children born creative. The array of geniuses
recently marshaled by a Chicago professor, that teachers pronounced
hopeless dunces and in some cases drove from their classes, should set
the school thinking. It is reaching out helpful hands to the little
unfortunate ones, the blind and the deaf and the sick; but it continues
to dismiss the divinely commissioned little sister or brother, with the
platitude that his genius will survive if it be sufficiently sturdy.
This is a specious half-truth unworthy of repetition. It is, besides,
discrimination against the individual. The school is not meeting its
obligation to _all_ the children of the community. It will not do to lay
the blame to the community’s “commercialized” standards. In spite of
apparent emphasis on the useful arts, the community would not lose from
the varied web of its civilization the bright thread of painting and
music and story. Maturing thought is convincing it that the fine arts are
finely utilitarian. Here, again, is the story’s opportunity. The simple
materials and childlike fancy in it may stimulate gradually and naturally
play of the creative imagination.
(7) _Story-telling should be at least foreword for book-study of
literature._ The thoughtful teacher of literature to-day finds in the
classic story all the elements of her material, and sees in the child
listening to it the most promising student of literature. At the freely
sympathetic period the child becomes familiar with the inner life of
language as used to represent fundamental motive, character, and action.
This is precisely the kind of knowledge that he should bring as basis
for study of more advanced literature. The printed page will be informed
with lively meaning, to which his imagination, feeling, and æsthetic
sense can respond. It is largely the school’s neglect of oral foundation
in literature, which, by the way, should not be confined to the lowest
grades, that is at the root of feeble appreciation in book-study of
literature.
(8) The story holds in it a greater value, as much greater as life is
than literature; _it will give knowledge of life_. The writer might have
said experience of life, because of the child’s strong tendency to be
and to do what attracts him. Students of literature, to-day, are urging
that it is not a mere “polishing” study, but the substantially useful
subject from which we may get clear and inspiring knowledge of life. They
would have literature recognized as the reflection of life, idealized,
it may be, but therefore stronger reflection. As life is the occupation
that all of us, no matter what our special vocation may be, must engage
in together, a study that throws light on it is indispensable. Here is a
great opportunity for the story. Every genuine story, sense or nonsense,
is a glimpse of life, which will early give guiding knowledge and
experience.
The story-teller cannot, by the way, afford to ignore the evil in life.
You may have read the story of Kipling’s “kid”; how the parents in fond
but foolish love for their only son shut away from him all knowledge
that evil has come into the world, and how the son, grown to manhood,
enters army life, where he meets his first temptation and falls. The
moral of the tale is obvious. Though it is wise to keep in the wake of
their experience with evil, the story should help to provide the children
with knowledge and modes of conduct for the situations of real life. The
cunning story-teller, presenting this or that bit of life, from which
he has not made the mistake of taking out the evil already within the
child’s experience or presently to be met, touches the child into recoil
from evil and into admiration and imitation of the triumphant way of
virtue.
The story should, however, oftener engage children’s attention with good,
rather than evil, as the central, active force in life. And the story
told to the growing boy or girl, and to the youth, should prompt him to
fine and finer endeavor. It is a fatal error to assume that teachers and
parents cannot help to raise the community’s standards, that the best
the rising generation may carry out from home and school is negative
prudence, readiness to accept questionable social practices and ideals,
that they themselves may achieve worldly success. If each generation does
not leave the world a little better for its part in it, it has lived
in vain, and its “guides, philosophers, and friends,” the parents and
teachers of it, have denied their office. The story helping toward this
kind of constructivity should lead. It is to the habit formed in its
children that society must look for higher standards of living.
The story will widen the child’s outlook on life. On the wings of the
word the listener may fly away to the uttermost bounds of the earth. In
the story world he, if poor, may be rich; if sad, merry; if inarticulate,
he may find expression.
Though it is not exhaustive, this is an imposing array of reasons for
admitting the story to unquestioned educational dignity. If the school
feel the need of broad, scholarly precedent, it may find it in the work
or in the recorded opinions of such seers as the Lambs, Longfellow,
Carroll, Hawthorne, Scott, Stevenson, Browning, Ruskin, Froebel, Emerson.
As yet story-telling is largely left optional with the teacher. Should
it not be made a delightful school requirement? It addresses itself,
it is true, mainly to the æsthetic taste and the feelings, it does not
guarantee consequent action. But give it place early enough, and, if it
must bring it, the other good effect will be added unto it.
The best reason for admitting the story to scholastic dignity still
remains the best, its lasting charm for the children.