HERO-TALES AND ROMANCES
In the days before books, when a tale was a tale, they knew how to
conserve interest and economize material. When a hero had gained some
popular favor, had established his character, had drawn about him a
circle of friends, and had just proved himself worthy of our love, he
was not lightly cast aside for a new and unknown hero. He was given new
conquests, new sorrows were heaped upon him, new minstrels arose to sing
his fame, until there gathered about him and his group of friends many,
many songs and tales. Luckily, in many cases there came a great artist,
bard or romancer, who gathered these scattered songs and tales together,
gave them a greater or less coherence and something of unity, and so
preserved them. Some of these cycles of hero-tales are adapted for the
delight and discipline of the elementary children. From the cosy and
homely atmosphere of the _Maerchen_--the mother-and nurse-stories--they
would pass naturally to the wider and bolder world of the epic tales.
The spirit of these tales harmonizes easily with the general tone of
their work. They are simple and bold in spirit, full of action,
generous and noble in plan and idea; they conserve interest and
attention by centering about a single person or a group; they are made
up of separable adventures or incidents, which take shape, or with a
little editing from the teacher may be made to take shape, as manageable
and artistic wholes; it is easy to associate other bits of literature
with them, because, in the first place, the tales themselves reflect
aspects of life and nature that have appealed to artists in all ages,
and because they have themselves inspired many more modern artists. It
is therefore easy to constitute one of these cycles the center of the
work in literature for some long period--in some cases for a whole
year--joining to it such harmonious or contrasted bits of literature as
the class may seem to need.
Some consideration of the best known and most available of the
hero-tales may help in the matter of choosing.
The _Iliad_ is not available without a great deal of editing and
rearranging for such use in class. There are several reasons for this,
the first being its want of an easily grasped unity. Doubtless the
mature and experienced reader finds the essential unity of the _Iliad_
more satisfying and artistic than that which comes of a more compact and
complete plot. But the children cannot easily see that the history of
Achilles' wrath and love is a complete thing. To them the action seems
to be suspended, the events left without issue, the poem unprovided with
a legitimate ending. The organization and the organizing principle are
obscure to children, since Achilles' emotional history cannot easily be
made clear or interesting to them. Homer's splendid art in glorifying
Hector and dignifying the Trojan cause as a means of reinforcing
Achilles' triumph, and deepening the sense of the Greek victory, is
likely to be lost on the children, while it leaves them with a
hopelessly divided sympathy. Helen, to a mature mind so full of interest
ethical and artistic, is beyond the comprehension of the children as
anything more than a lay figure. The vast enrichment of epic detail that
has gathered into the _Iliad_, constituting it for the grown-up lover of
all the arts an inexhaustible mine of archaic, artistic, and psychic
wealth, has, except in a few picturesque details, which the teacher must
make special effort to bring before them, no charm for the children,
seeming to them to cumber and delay the action. So the _Iliad_ as it
stands is not serviceable for the grades in literature.
But, as we all know, the poems that form the _Iliad_ were songs out of a
much larger cycle. If one desires to use sections of the _Iliad_, then,
it is comparatively easy to collect out of all the material a complete
and unified form of the legend of the siege and downfall of Troy--using
the Homeric episodes when it is possible. From sources other than the
_Iliad_ must be gathered the causes of the war, the education of
Achilles, the summons of Odysseus, the sacrifice of Iphegenia, the death
of Achilles, the building of the wooden horse, and the fall of Troy.
Into this can be inserted in their places the parts selected from the
_Iliad_--perhaps the quarrel in the assembly from the second book; the
deeds of Diomedes, from the fifth and sixth; the visit of Hector within
the city and his farewell to Andromache, from the sixth; the Trojan
triumph, in the seventh; the vengeance upon Dolon, in the tenth; the
main incidents of the battle among the ships; the deeds and death of
Patroclus; Achilles' arming and his appearance in the fight; the main
incidents of the funeral of Patroclus; the visit of Priam to Achilles.
These should be arranged in a sort of "say and sing" narrative, the
events previous to the action of the _Iliad_, and those subsequent to
it, to be told in prose narrative; those taken from the _Iliad_ itself
to be read or recited in some poetical form, linked together, of course,
by a running and rapid narrative. Only a verse translation--or, if a
prose translation, one much more picturesque and eloquent than any we
have yet had--will at all represent the nobility of the _Iliad_.
Bryant's translation is the best we now have, and it is too formal and
difficult to be understood by the children to whom one desires to give
the hero-tales.
One can easily see that an arrangement of the _Iliad_ made under all
these conditions would not finally convey to the children many of the
best things we want to give them in their literature.
The case is quite different with the _Odyssey_. It is the child's own
cycle, full of the interests and elements that delight him while they
cultivate him. The adventures are linked together by the central hero,
and by the design of getting him home; the cycle, therefore, presents a
clear unity, and a unity of the kind that takes hold upon the children.
The adventures themselves organize easily into smaller separable wholes.
They are always interesting, offering us the varieties of the grotesque,
the humorous, the sensational, the horrible, the beautiful, the sublime;
and they are practically all on the imaginative level of the children in
the classes to which they are otherwise adapted. The details are
charming and adapted to interest the children, with very little effort
on the part of the teacher. It is quite unnecessary to point out how the
occupations and employments, the beautiful buildings and
objects--plates, cups, clasps--the raft, the palace and garden of
Alcinoous, the loom of Penelope, the lustrous woven robes, the cottage
of the good Eumaeus, the noble swineherd, build up a world full of
charm, not only for the grown-up reader, but for children if they are
being properly taught. There is throughout the poem what Pater called
the atmosphere of refined craftsmanship, and all the occupations and
tasks of men here appear surrounded by the entrancing halo of art.
Odysseus combines in himself all those characteristics that endear a
hero to the child and the childlike mind. He is active and ever-ready;
strong, too, beyond the measure of any ordinary man; quick in the
battle; good at a game, resourceful and handy in any emergency; subtle
and quickwitted; full of tricks and riddles; equipped at every point for
the effective undoing of his foes. Inevitably in any class of modern
children as old as the nine-ten-year grade the delicate problem of
Odysseus' moral character will come up for discussion. It is not likely
that children younger than this will open the matter themselves, or take
any vital interest in the discussion. For, as I have said elsewhere,
subtlety is a child's virtue, and any device by which their hero, who is
in the main just, outwits or removes hostile forces, is acceptable. For
the older children, who are somewhat "instructed," and who on the
average will have acquired sufficient dramatic sympathy to apprehend an
alien standard, a few words as to the Greek notions of truthfulness,
together with a few explanations as to the privileges allowed to an
adventurer hard beset by trickery and stupidity, will generally clear
the ground; these explanations should take the emphasis from this aspect
of Odysseus' character and leave the children free to place it where it
belongs. If the _Odyssey_ were used with children older than ten, their
questions as to Odysseus' truthfulness might afford a good occasion for
warning them to expect some human imperfections in a hero with whom in
most respects they are in complete sympathy. This point of view,
acquired somewhat early, saves one many shocks and misconceptions in
later reading. It should not be necessary to say that the discussion of
Odysseus should not amount to "character-study," and should not drift
anywhere near hair-splitting moral discriminations.
All teachers will agree that it is better to start the _Odyssey_ with
the fifth book--the experience of Odysseus himself--leaving the
_Telemachiad_ unread, or to be read later. Into his few introductory
stories the teacher should fit some account of the iniquities of the
suitors and the fact of the journey of Telemachus--this to pave the way
for the delightful story of his return. For our generation--and, one is
tempted to believe, for several generations to come--Professor Palmer's
prose translation of the _Odyssey_ is the ideal reading version. For the
sake of the slight heightening of style, the class might occasionally
hear recited a passage in Bryant's verse translation. But the poetical,
musical, faintly archaic prose of Professor Palmer has caught perfectly
the gentle spiritual tone of the _Odyssey_.
I have known a class of nine-ten-year children conducted through the
_Odyssey_ making a side interest of the _Realien_, the pottery and
weaving, and metal working. Such hand-work was a part of their school
tasks, and there were collections of pottery and fabrics which they
could be taken to see. The experience seemed to co-operate with their
own hand-work to develop in them some of that artistic love of beautiful
things--things costly, but not expensive--that pervades the _Iliad_ and
the _Odyssey_; and they were distinctly helped on toward that attitude
we desire for every child, that of "reverence for the life of man upon
the earth." The _Odyssey_ will be used, however, in schools where there
is no handwork and no chance of seeing collections of suitable objects.
Pictures are of some service in getting the image of objects--colored
prints of Greek pottery and costume. Engelmann and Anderson's _Atlas of
the Homeric Poems_ seems to help and interest the children, though there
is constant danger that the archaic forms will seem merely ludicrous to
many of them. The teacher may correct this by explaining them as
decoration and as traditional figures. But we should not depend much
upon black-and-white print to help young children to visualize objects
and scenes in which color and motion are all-important.
Now, what follows must be taken as suggestive, and not as a pat formula:
You can enrich your central bit of literature by other literature in one
of two ways--by reinforcing the impression derived from the main story,
or counteracting it And every long story or cycle of stories,
particularly the heroic cycles, has its characteristic atmosphere that
needs both to be reinforced and to be counteracted. It is true, too,
that practically all the stories we use for the elementary children are
translations or derived versions of some sort, and do not therefore
exhibit the smaller beauties of literary form. It is therefore well to
join with them poems or other bits of literature which emphasize the
matter of inevitableness of form.
By way of enlarging and varying the atmosphere of the _Odyssey_, we
should not add other Greek things, because we are not trying to teach
our class about Greek civilization, nor to initiate them into the Greek
spirit, still less to give them instruction in Greek legend and
mythology. We should rather read them ballads and lyrics which harmonize
with the human spirit of the _Odyssey_, or which supply something which
the _Odyssey_ fails to give. For example, since there is so much of the
sea in the story, it would be a good moment to teach the children some
of the fine things in English verse about the water. They will certainly
notice the characteristic Greek dread and terror of the sea--"the
unvintaged, unpastured, homeless brine." It would be well to balance
this in their minds by some of those verses which reflect the English
mastery of the sea and the romance of modern sea-going--some of
Kipling's sea-ballads, for example, or such simple things as Barry
Cornwall's "The sea, the sea, the open sea."
We should not fail to build upon another dominant note in the _Odyssey_
much that we should like the children to have--the note of home and
home-coming, the hearth-stone, and the sheltering roof. Of the exciting
adventure and the joy of physical contest they will get enough from the
stories themselves. It is not necessary to say again that the judgments
given here as to the actual practical choice, are always to be taken as
suggestions, not as hard and fast directions. Every teacher may have,
and should have, his own idea, both as to how his central bit of
literature should be supplemented, and as to whether or not it needs
supplementing. Later I shall give the titles of certain of these minor
things--still by way of suggestion; ballads and lyrics that have been
found to harmonize with the _Odyssey_ either as enforcement or addition.
Most elementary schools have found now the value of the _Robin Hood_
legend. The bluff, open qualities, the effective activities, the
wholesome objectivity of these activities, the breezy atmosphere with
which the stories surround themselves, make them acceptable in many
aspects. Teachers are saved most of the labor of making their own digest
of the Robin Hood material by Howard Pyle's _Robin Hood_. In this he has
drawn together the whole legend, using not only the English ballads, but
Scott and Peacock, and whatever scattered hints and details he could
gather from what must have been a pretty exhaustive reading of English
romantic literature. Everywhere there are charming reminiscences of
Chaucer, of Spenser, of Shakespeare; echoes of ballad and song and
romance; making, on the whole, a notable introduction to literature and
the literary method. One quickly finds that it is much too literary in
places for younger children and has to be simplified; here and there are
long idyllic descriptions that the fifth grade, eager for the story,
will not brook; occasionally a page of false sentimentality that the
teacher with a true ear will infallibly detect and skip. But these minor
things can be forgiven in view of the sheer energy, the marvelous
objectivity, the epic colorlessness, of the book as a whole. Readings
from the ballads themselves should be interspersed, read by the teacher
to the class. These readings should again be arranged in the
_cont-fable_ fashion, turning into suitable form the less interesting
passages, and then reading in their original verse form the dramatic and
picturesque parts. It need not be said that much better poems may be
found than those which Pyle has composed for his _Robin Hood_.
Timid parents and teachers who have never used these stories have some
misgivings as to the effect of the strenuous, not to say lawless,
atmosphere. They say that the burden of approval is placed upon an
outlaw, who constantly and successfully flouts the officers and
processes of the law; that the merry-men are, after all, the gang; that
the multiplicity of quarrels and cracked crowns accustoms the children
to blood and violence; in short, that the legitimate outcome of a
genuine dramatic sympathy with the story is general Hooliganism. The
good teachers who have used the stories never say these things because
they never see these results. It needs but a word to transfer the
emphasis from Robin Hood's outlawry to the cruel and unjust laws against
which he stood; to keep to the front his generosity to his men, his
tenderness toward those in trouble, his sense of personal honor, his
readiness to accept and acknowledge a fair defeat, the loyalty of his
men. It is the transfiguration of the gang; and as a social matter it is
the transfiguration rather than the destruction of the gang which we
desire to accomplish. One hastens to acknowledge, however, that the
rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the stories calls for some antidote,
which we may find partly in the literature we choose to accompany this
cycle. Very naturally one thinks of the greenwood, and at once finds
many bits that fit into the scenic background of the story and introduce
the gentler aspects of the woods and woodland things.
With the _Odyssey_ we should choose some things to reinforce the love of
home and the longing for the hearth-fire, and we must use some of the
same things to provide an element otherwise lacking in the _Robin Hood_,
and to modify the fascination of the wildwood life and the unattached
condition. Some of the ideas on the surface of the stories may be
enlarged and enriched--as loyalty and devotion to a leader. There is a
fine opportunity to launch into the children's experience upon the wave
of their enthusiasm for Robin Hood, other and nobler ideals of the
leader and the hero; though we must never expect the child, glowing with
the satisfaction of deeds done, to give any appreciation worth
considering to the suffering hero or to the heroism of peace. This
properly belongs to a much later period--to what it is not mere jargon
to call the lyric age, when some more effective appeal can be made to
those powers that come of introspection.
The cycles of stories of King Arthur unquestionably contain much that
should contribute to the pleasure and wholesome culture of the
elementary child. Epic activity, bold and generous deeds tempered by
gentleness and reverence--this is the atmosphere of the best of the
Arthur stories, and it is precisely the atmosphere into which one longs
to lead the older children of the elementary school. But these good and
suitable Arthur stories are so tied up with others entirely unsuitable
that the choosing and arranging of them becomes the task of the expert
psychologist and critic. When one chooses stories out of this legend, he
must do with his material--his Malory, his Chretien, his _Mabinogion_,
his Tennyson--as these collectors and artists did with theirs: regard it
as the stuff of human nature and life, a storehouse of treasures out of
which he may draw according to his pleasure or his need. In this case it
is the safe pleasure and the artistic needs of his children that will
dictate his choice. And he must know thoroughly well his stories and his
children; for the pitfalls are many--quite as many in Chretien de Troyes
and Malory as in Tennyson.
The first of the pitfalls to be avoided is that fantastic feudal
gallantry which Chretien and Malory substituted for the forthright
chivalric business and earnestness of the older legendary stories. In
the _Song of Roland_ one fights for reasons of patriotism or religion;
in the Arthur romances, and others of their type, one fights for his
lady's sake. In the elementary grades the children are still
undifferentiated human beings, and should be kept so. To thrust upon
them suggestions of "ladies" to be "won" and to be "served" is to usher
them into an unknown world, an undemocratic and unbrotherly world from
which we should like to keep them, especially the girls, as long as
possible. While it is not easy to leave out this element in choosing
material from these cycles, it is possible to treat it lightly, since
there is in the same material a sufficiency of lions to be hunted,
giants to be overcome, and hostile Paynims to be exterminated.
Everyone who has ever read much with children knows that to normal
children before their thirteenth year the psychology and _modus
operandi_ of love and love-making, innocent or guilty, are so alien as
to pass harmlessly by them as a mere bit of the machinery of a story,
when these notions do constitute such a bit of machinery in a story
otherwise suitable. But it is a mistake to choose matter which obliges
us to linger with the little people over these experiences or to
emphasize them. He who would retell the Arthur stories must be wary
here, so difficult is it to put together any series of the adventures
that will at all represent the material, and constitute a whole, without
using the scarlet thread of guilty passion, or substituting for it
something "nice" but wishy-washy. We have only to compare the grim
justice of Malory's Modred with Tennyson's sentimental and unconvincing
handling of his character and function.
When Malory wove into the Arthur cycle the legend of the Holy Grail, he
introduced an element very hard to handle for children--that religious
mysticism, not to say fanaticism, which Tennyson chose to set as the
pivotal motive of the downfall of the Table Round. Tennyson, writing for
mature modern readers a deeply symbolistic poem, and presenting a whole
cycle, could, stroke by stroke, build up the impression of this burning
zeal, this hypnotic trance of enthusiasm, that led men away after
wandering fires, forgetting labor and duty. But simplified to fit the
comprehension of the wholesome twelve-year-old it is likely to appear a
vague and mistaken piety, producing a practical effect quite out of
proportion to its importance.
To the modern teacher, with the witchery of the Tennysonian music in his
blood, it is all but impossible to keep out of prominence that symbolism
which lay obvious upon the surface, even in the _Morte d'Arthur_, but
which Tennyson heightened into an almost oppressive system of
sophisticated and parochial doctrine. An occasional symbolistic nut to
crack is not a bad thing for the older children of the grades. But would
it not be a mistake to immerse them in a great system of symbolism? To
the younger children the sacred outside appearance, the entrancing
_Schein_, of things is best, and symbolistic art only baffles them or
unduly forces their powers.
The spirit of dilettante adventure which pervades the mediaeval romances
gives them a tone entirely different from that of the epics. In these
latter the activities attach themselves to deeds that have to be done,
to misfortunes that the hero would willingly have avoided. Some of these
sought-out adventures have crept insidiously into Howard Pyle's _Robin
Hood_; but they are entirely foreign to the spirit of the original epos.
The idea of "worshipfully winning worship," of seeking adventure for
mere adventure's sake, or for the mere display of one's own powers, or
for the sake of getting trained, is a corrupting one in our society, and
should not be implanted in our children's consciousness. Like the old
epic heroes, what we have to do we will do--often boldly; but, like the
old epic heroes, we will do it because it needs to be done.
We can get together a series of stories from the Arthur romance that
will touch but lightly the exaggerated, false devotion to ladies; that
will leave out of sight the guilty passion which lies at the center of
Malory's poem and of most of the other literary versions; that will put
into a minor place the mystical religious element that lingers about the
Holy Grail side of the romance; that will make little of the symbolism,
ignore the dilettante and merely amateur adventure, handling the heroic
rather than the romantic deeds--that will do all these things and still
be a romance of King Arthur. He who would make such a version must
choose out from Malory or _The Mabinogion_, material that belongs in
such a series. Or he may find his material more sifted for him in
Lanier's _The Boy's King Arthur_, and _Knightly Legends of Wales_. Let
him make much of Arthur, simple of nature, guileless and strong, looking
to conquest and the good of his people rather than to his own "worship"
or to his own love-affairs; let him by no means neglect Merlin, the most
permanently interesting figure; he is Odysseus among the Greeks, the
sacred bard among the warriors, Tusitala in Samoa, the subtle one,
always so appealing and so satisfying to a child's imagination--the
embodiment of that intellectual dominance which, be it wisdom or magic,
always stands beside epic achievement in the child's estimation. And
having got it together, he may reassure himself, as regards his epos of
King Arthur, that there is no one Arthur; that the whole legend is a
mine out of which every student may draw a treasure; or, to change the
figure, a great, beautiful field in which many people may gather grain
according to their need and their taste.
Much later when, as growing youth, they are waking up to certain mature
social problems, the children will be ready for the style and matter of
Tennyson's _Idylls_. But they will not get the characteristic value of
the legend till, as mature and experienced readers of books and livers
of life, they come back to Malory and Chretien de Troyes.
Many wise teachers will dissent wholly from this view of the Arthur
stories, and in many schools they are presented in some form in the
fourth or fifth grade, and read in the _Idylls of the King_ in the
seventh and eighth. Suggestions for literature to accompany them will be
found in a later chapter.
Anybody who has read thus far can easily foretell what will be said
about the Siegfried legend. In the huge accumulation of sagas, romances,
and operas that now go to make up the legend, there are all sorts of
material--much of it totally unsuited for children. So far as I have
been able to find, there has not yet been made--certainly not in
English--a collection of the stories good in itself and good for
children. The teacher must do his own sifting and arranging, if it seems
well to study the Siegfried stories within the grades. The collection
of the stories that makes up the _Niebelungen Lied_ is particularly poor
in fitting material, being sordid and coarse in the domestic parts, and
tediously bloody in the heroic parts. Among the mass of stories given by
Morris and Magnussen in the _Voelsunga Saga_, and in Morris' _Sigurd the
Volsung_, one may find material for making his own epos of Siegfried,
simple, heroic, triumphant--the Siegfried who killed Fafnir, escaped the
snares of Regin, got the Nibelung treasure, rode through the magic fire
and freed Brunhild. You may be sure some old saga-singer closed the
story here and so may we. This leaves for a much later day in the
child's life the tragic Siegfried, whose domestic experience, with its
sordid motives, its bitter quarrels and ugly subterfuges, is surely not
beautiful or fitting for the children; and whose treacherous taking-off
is followed by a vengeance too grim and too merely fatalistic to be
planted in a child's consciousness.
As we find a sort of canon of fairy-tales, so we find a somewhat
accredited list of hero-tales, and the five we have discussed comprise
it. Occasionally a teacher may enrich his material by an episode from
_The Cid_, from the _Song of Roland_, from the heroic sagas of Iceland,
from some other mediaeval romance; but they will not detain him long,
nor will any one of them constitute a really good center for a prolonged
study.
In the later years of this period certain classes and certain schools
may find it well to read some of the literary stories of adventure, such
as _Ivanhoe_, or _Treasure Island_, or _The Last of the Mohicans_. In
the really great stories of adventure we find many of the things we know
to be good for the children--the "large room," the open atmosphere,
forest, sea, prairie, all the most disastrous chances of war and of
travel, noble deeds and generous character. Every parent and teacher
recognizes the danger which lies in the child's having too much even of
good story of adventure. And this sort of story is the peculiar field of
the cheap story-teller, in whose work the weaknesses and dangers of the
species especially abound. Since the "out-put" of such stories is
enormous, and since the children's access to them, in communities where
they can buy books, or have the use of a public library, is practically
unlimited, all teachers and parents should know the marks of the
undesirable story of adventure, and be able to guard against it. The
weakness and dangers of such a story are these:
1. The details are exaggerated until the event is too striking and too
highly flavored, so as to corrupt the taste and create an appetite that
continues to demand gross satisfaction.
2. There are likely to be too many sensations. The inartistic story of
adventure does not work up its incidents with an accumulation of details
and an effect of the passage of time that gives it verisimilitude, but
rushes forward with a crude and ill-digested happening on every five
pages. It is hard to believe that any artistic impression is made upon
children whose minds are excited and jaded by such books. They are a
mere indulgence.
3. In all but the best adventure the strain of suspense and surprise is
more than the children should be asked to endure. Too many experiences
of long tension and final hair-breadth escape weaken a child's credence
and harden his emotions so as to ruin his power of responding to such
appeals. The devices of suspense and surprise are employed, to be sure,
by the masters, but generally in due amount; while they are invariably
overworked by the cheap writer of adventure.
4. The facts of life and history are distorted and discolored. This is
the condemnation of such books as the Henty books. They profess to
attach themselves to historical events or periods, while as a matter of
fact, they have nothing of the event or the period in them, except a few
names and reflections of the most obvious aspects of the mere surface
facts. As reflection of a period, or as illumination of an event in it,
they are worse than useless--they are absurdly misleading. Only a
genius, or a student who has immersed himself in the matter, can produce
a story whose psychology, sociology, and archaeology will throw real
light upon a bygone age or event. There are such stories, but they are
not for elementary children; or, if they are, only as adventure, not as
history. No one who chooses books for children should be misled by these
cheap manufactured stories which claim as their reason for being that
they have a historical background. After all, it is Scott who has given
us the best big stories of adventure. _Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_,
_Anne of Geierstein_, _Guy Mannering_, with the proper condensations and
adaptations, are of the best. Cooper, in certain of the Leatherstocking
novels, creates the atmosphere of really great adventure. Stevenson knew
the art of writing a "rattling good story," which yet keeps that balance
of judgment and sense of proportion, that faithfulness to the truth (not
the fact) of experience, which prevent its ever degenerating into
sensationalism. Quiller-Couch and Joseph Conrad are two more modern
writers who have achieved in many cases the level of great stories of
adventure.
It is not probable that children who are given the older epics and
romances in school will have time for these more modern romances of
adventure in the class. But whoever guides their out-of-school reading,
be it parent or teacher, should have in mind these few simple grounds of
choice.