THE CORRELATIONS OF LITERATURE
The term "correlation" is not to be used in this chapter in the
specialized and technical sense that it has taken on in pedagogical
discussion. It will be used, with apologies, to designate all
connections of literature with any other subject or discipline in the
elementary curriculum.
No one interested in education can have failed to notice the fact that
the doctrines of concentration, correlation, condensation, by whatever
name called or under whatever aspect approached, have undergone many
modifications and shifts of emphasis. Like every other educational
doctrine that has much of the truth in it, it was welcomed in the early
days of its promulgation as the final solution, and seemed for a time to
sweep out of existence, or into its own radius, every other theory or
practice.
One is obliged to wonder if educational people are peculiarly liable to
be caught by a formula or an apparently axiomatic statement, build
everything upon it, and silence every question by a reverential appeal
to it. Such seemed to be the attitude toward the doctrine of correlation
when it first sifted down from the savants to the actual teachers in
the actual schools; and many and monumental were the follies committed
in the name of this pedagogical religion. Modified and adapted under
actual practical conditions, and criticized by the present generation of
educational philosophers, it has come down to the school of today--that
is to say, the school that is sensitive enough and free enough to
respond quickly to new thinking--as, on the one hand, a protest against
isolation and abstraction, and on the other hand, an appeal for such a
conservation of the unity and naturalness of the child's consciousness
as is consistent with the natural and legitimate use of material. In its
present form the doctrine no longer justifies the violent wresting of
subjects and topics from their natural settings, to be fitted together
in some merely logical and theoretical system of instruction.
In the days of determined and thoroughgoing correlation no department of
discipline suffered more than the arts; and none of the other arts
suffered as did literature. This is not difficult to account for. Music
and painting are quite professedly and obviously unconcerned with
subject-matter--are, as a rule, entirely empty of definite intellectual
content. But literature has ideas, it embodies concrete images,
mentions specific objects, reflects experience, and sometimes even uses
actual persons and historical events; above all, it employs the same
medium of expression as the other subjects. All these matters made
literature the peculiar prey of the ardent correlationists; to each or
any, perhaps to all, of these phenomena in literature they could attach
bodies of teaching in technical subjects, and systems of discipline in
formal training.
The case was equally bad when literature was constituted the center of
the scheme, and when it was attached to a scheme having some other
center--geography, for example, or history. For in the first case it was
altogether likely that some detail or aspect of the piece of literature,
merely subsidiary in the literature, would be selected for emphasis and
elevated into the correlating detail; the background or setting would be
taken out for study and elaboration, crowding the action, the human and
really literary elements, out of sight. As, for example--and it is an
authentic example of a scheme of correlation--the first-grade children
are given as the center of their work _The Old Woman Who Found the
Sixpence_; from this story we take out the dog, which we study as the
type of _digitigrade carnivora_. Or--again an authentic example--having
read to the first grade _The Musicians of Bremen_, as one of them
happens to be a donkey, we seize the opportunity to teach in detail and
over several weeks of time, the physical peculiarities of the donkey and
his kinsman the horse, among many exercises drawing out of the children
some speculation or information as to how much water or hay the horse
consumes; to which hook we attach instruction as to weights and
measures; and so on into the remote fringes of information about objects
and persons used in the story only in the literary way.
In the second case, that in which literature is attached to some other
center, in feeling about for some bit of literature to fit into a
geographical fact, a meteorological condition, or a historical event,
the teacher was quite likely to hit upon a third- or fourth-rate
specimen, unsuitable for his children in other respects, and in teaching
it he was likely to force from it a meaning and an emphasis that as
literature it would not bear; as, when the children were studying the
migration of birds, he taught them Bryant's "To a Waterfowl,"
emphasizing the migration and ignoring the true emphasis of the
poem--the lesson of a guiding providence; or as, _apropos_ of December
weather, he set the fifth grade to reading Whittier's slow-moving,
meditative, and much too mature "Snow-Bound."
As a matter of fact, no art yields kindly to any method of adjustment
to other subjects that emphasizes the subject-matter or information
material that may perchance be involved in the art. Information-giving
is not the method nor the mission of art; the four, or five arts if we
include acting, with which we may have to do in elementary discipline
combine and play into one another without difficulty. It is not
necessary to speak again of the close and easy association of literature
with all the forms of acting that the children have, from marching,
dancing, and simple gesture, on to the acting required in an organized
drama. On the musical side, particularly the verse-form of literature,
it combines most acceptably with music. A great many of the lyrics that
are simple enough for the children to learn, and many of the verses that
they write, are also adaptable as songs to be sung. And even when they
cannot be set to melodies they share, in their spoken form, with the
actual musical notes, in the training of the ear. The exercises in
drawing, painting, and modeling co-operate to fine advantage for the
objectifying of the visual images, of which the children get so large a
store from literature. As a matter of fact, when the children are set
the task of objectifying an inner image, it is most likely to be some
figure or scene from literature that comes up for expression--Nausicaa
throwing the ball, Robin Hood stringing his bow, Siegfried tempering his
sword, Paul Revere mounting his horse, the lodge of old Nokomis. This is
because the images and pictures they find in literature retain in the
minds of the children the glow of imagination, the warmth of emotion,
the vitality of a remembered joy. And it is true, as every teacher knows
who has taught it aright, that a bit of literature arouses in the
children a mood of creative imagination such as no other subject ever
can awaken. This mood of imaginative creation instinctively expresses
itself in literary composition, in drawing, painting, designing,
modeling, acting, or music.
On the very surface of the problem of the correlations of literature
lies the somewhat difficult question of the relation of the children's
literature to their lessons in reading--as regards both their beginning
to read and their later practice in reading. It remains true that with
all our experimenting and in spite of all the enthusiasm we can muster,
to the majority of children and in the hands of most teachers the
mechanics of learning to read is drudgery. This drudgery literature
should share with the other subjects in its due proportion. One would
not ignore the fact that this "due proportion" may be very
large--larger than that of any other subject. It is quite legitimate to
employ the charm and interest of literature in the service of reading;
and it would be a serious misfortune for the children to learn their
reading entirely through the medium of colorless fact. We have agreed
that there is such a thing as literary reading, different in many ways
from the reading of history or science. Even the younger children can
feel this, and can produce it if correctly guided. But they should not
always be doing literary reading; they should acquire the colorless but
good style of merely intellectual reading. This they will not do if in
their early reading exercises they are given more than their due
proportion of literature.
It is undoubtedly wise to make upon the teacher and the children the
impression that reading is a tool, a key--perhaps we would better call
it a gate through which one gets at many things--the joys and rewards of
literature, to be sure, but also the images of history, the facts of
nature, the details of handicraft. A reading-book, or any system of
reading-lessons that contains nothing but literature is therefore a
mistake.
From another point of view it is a misfortune to identify the
reading-lessons with literature. As has been said more than once in
these chapters, the alert teacher of our day is eager to emancipate
literature again from its bondage to the printed page, and to set free
once more its function as a truly social art; making it also once more a
matter of the listening ear and the living voice.
To identify the reading-lessons of the younger children with their
literature lessons is to keep them at things much too immature, and to
retard their mental and artistic growth. They can apprehend and
appreciate many things that they cannot read. It is a commonplace that a
child's listening vocabulary is far in advance of his reading
vocabulary, no matter how or how early he learns to read. Of course,
this is the secret of the revolt against book-reading of the children
who learn to read late--the simplicity of the thought and expression in
the matter they are mechanically able to read, makes it unacceptable to
them intellectually. It is in the literature received by his ear that a
child grows and exercises his maturer powers. The older children should
be taught and exercised in literary reading, the simple interpretative
reading of their literature. The best results in this most profitable
aspect of the teaching of literature can be obtained in the secondary
period, when the children are expert enough as readers to think while
they read, and when their voices are, as mere mechanical organs, more
completely under control.
The objections to the association of drill in writing, in spelling, in
grammar, and in compositions are of like kind. It may be granted that
there is something in the fact that literature represents the most
effective use of language, and is, all things considered, the most
interesting kind of writing. Still this does not constitute a sufficient
reason why the burden, and in all too many cases the odium, of teaching
these things should attach to literature. It is a perfidious breaking of
the promise of literature, or of any art, which should keep as much as
possible of the atmosphere of play. Of course, drill in language and in
written expression should be attached to every subject in the elementary
curriculum; and this not only for the sake of relieving the literature
from a burden of unattractive tasks, but because of the fact that the
literary style and vocabulary are not good for all subjects and
purposes, and the children should not be trained exclusively in these.
On the large scale of things, it is a pity at any stage of the child's
education to identify "English" with literature, since there is and
should be so much English that is not literature, and so much literature
that is not English.
One of the pleasantest and most profitable co-operations of literature
is with the training in languages other than the vernacular. In those
elementary classes where the children have instruction in either German
or French--or, for the matter of that, in Spanish or Italian--every
effort should be made in their use of story and verse to secure the
characteristic and universal literary effect. The German lyric has all
the beauty of music and of image that the English has; the French
fairy-play has most of elements of dramatic art that the children could
use in English translation.
A few of the fallacies of correlation, or mere co-relation, of
literature with other aspects of the children's school experience are
these:
The fallacy of setting out to teach children the love of home, or
country, or nature, or animals, by teaching them literature that
expresses or reflects those emotions.
The love of one's own country must be in our day a thing of slow and
gradual growth. Our feelings about our country should arise out of our
knowledge of the heroic things in her history, out of the noble plans
for her growth, out of the generous things she provides for her children
and the children of other lands. Out of this or some such basis arises
the emotion of patriotism, a poem or a story which reflects this emotion
has some such back-ground by implication. To hunt about for a poem or
story which teaches patriotism is a putting of the cart before the
horse. First arouse in your children the emotion--an original personal
emotion of their own, growing out of the legitimate background; then, if
perchance you are so fortunate as to find a poem or a story which also
reflects this emotion, and which is at the same time good as art, you
are so much the richer. The children will find their own feeling
reinforced and nobly expressed, and consequently deepened and dignified.
The same thing is true as to the love of animals. If the children have
the literature first, or only the literature, they may have only a
second-hand and perfunctory love of the beasts. But first give your
grade a dog, or a cat, or a canary; or give your child in the country a
pony, or a lamb, or a pig; that they may feel at first hand the throb of
dramatic brotherhood, of humorous kinship, that constitutes love of
animals. Then, when, judging by the proper canons that test good
literature, you find a piece that reflects and deepens this, it is so
much pure gain.
The same thing is true of nature. The children should have many things
that reflect feelings about nature and natural phenomena, and that give
the interpretations which great and gifted artists have made of these
things. But one should no more go to literature for creating first-hand
love of nature than he would go to the same source for facts about any
specific phenomenon in nature. Of course, this is not saying that we
demand that a child shall have had a previous experience of every image
and phenomenon of nature that is presented to him in literature. Indeed,
we expect literature to complement and supplement life in the matter of
imagery; to deepen and to arouse experience in the matter of emotion.
But the fallacy lies in choosing literature on this ground, and in
depending upon literature to create at first hand what is, and should
be, an extra-literary feeling. Now, from time to time there comes the
teacher's way one of those rare chances when he finds the time, the
place, and the poem all together, as when on some March day of thaw he
can teach "The cock is crowing," of Wordsworth; on the first morning of
hoar-frost he can read "The Frost;" on another day, "The Wind"--the
things that harmonize with the spirit of an experience.
Another of the fallacies of correlation is the determined, if not
violent, association of the work in literature with the festivals. As a
matter of fact, there is not much more than time in certain schools to
teach the younger children the things they are expected to know about
Thanksgiving, Christmas, Washington's birthday, Easter, June. The work
for the next celebration begins just as soon as the foregoing one is
past. The partitioning of the year into these very emphatic sections,
and the carrying of the children through the same round year after year,
are questions too general to be treated here. But we are interested in
the fact that in most cases the specimens of literature that can be
considered applicable to the festivals would never be chosen from out
the world of things for their absolute value as literature, nor for
their peculiar suitability for the children. So it comes about that the
children--the younger classes, at least--spend as much as two-thirds of
their time at second- or third-rate specimens of literature.
There is not much reason for protesting in our day against that species
of correlating literature with something else which consists in teaching
in connection with this literature things that the children ought to
know later, regardless of their immediate fitness or acceptability; as
for example the facts of Greek mythology, the characters and plots of
Shakespeare's plays; we can never be too grateful for that
interpretation of childhood and of education which has made this
hereafter impossible. At the same time, if we choose wisely now, choose
in the light of our best knowledge, the children will be glad all their
lives to know the things we choose for them.
The connection of literature with history is a many-sided question, and
is not easily disposed of. As a matter of fact, the partnership between
history and literature, so vaguely asserted and so complaisantly
accepted in many quarters, is a combination in which the literature has
usually gone to the wall. Indeed, the practical adjustment of history
and literature wavers about between two equally fallacious schemes. One
of these is to give the children the literature produced by the nation
whose history they are studying; as for example, the Homeric poems when
they study the history of Greece, that they may imbibe the true Greek
spirit from the poems. Now, children of elementary age cannot
distinguish, or even unconsciously feel, a national spirit in a poem. It
is the broadly human, the universally true, elements and spirit that
they feel. Besides, the Greek national spirit, the spirit of the
characteristic Greek period, was not Homeric, and the literature of the
characteristic Greek period would never do for the elementary children.
In the case of Greek literature one cannot unreservedly demur because
the Homeric poems are never bad for the children. But the same
principle applied to other nations and their literature may bring
disaster.
The other scheme for relating history and literature is to choose the
literature on the basis of the fact that it deals with some person or
event or period with which the history is concerned; as, when we have a
class in the history of the Plymouth colony, we give them Longfellow's
"The Courtship of Miles Standish" for literature, which, except for one
or two picturesque scenes, one would never choose as literature for
young children; and as, when we study the American Revolution, we give
them as literature some mature and sentimental modern novel, or some
sensational and untrustworthy juvenile, choosing these merely because
they profess to incorporate events connected with the historical period.
The whole matter of the historical romance is important and
complicated--too complicated and involving too many critical principles
to be handled here. It must be sufficient to say in this connection what
is sufficiently obvious to any thoughtful critic--that he who takes up
and handles legitimately and justly an epoch, an event, or a group of
historical persons, and at the same time produces good literature, is a
master and produces a masterpiece--much too mature and developed for
elementary children. Only Scott possessed the faculty of keeping
generally in sight of his history, or of segregating it in an occasional
_longeur_, and adding to it a rattling good story. But Scott is too
mature and complex for elementary children up to the very oldest, and
they are not likely to be studying the periods in history that
interested him.
No, the kinship between history and literature, and the co-operations
between them in the children's experience, are not of this external and
artificial kind. It is for the mature and philosophical student to study
literature as a culture product--its relation to the country and the
times that produced it. It is for much older students to read the great
romances, like Tolstoy's _War and Peace_, that adequately mirror an
epoch or an epoch-making event.
For the children there is a deeper spiritual kinship between history and
literature. It has to do with the personal and dramatic side, the
biography and adventure of history. It lies in the spirit and atmosphere
of human achievement, in the identity of the motives that express
themselves in literature and in actual accomplishment. When we study the
pioneer and the colonist--the born and doomed colonist--we find his
kinsman and prototype in Robinson Crusoe. When we study the Revolution,
the revolt against unjust laws, the protest of democracy against
class-oppression, we find the spirit of Robin Hood.
I hasten to disclaim any intention of advising these particular
combinations. The examples should merely serve to make clear certain
aspects of the kinship of spirit between literature and history. Of
course one does now and again, and as it were, by special grace, find a
story or a poem--like the "Concord Hymn," or "Marion's Men," or "The
Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers"--precisely _apropos_ of his event and
beautifully adapted to his literary needs. And one often comes upon a
historical document--like _The Oregon Trail_ or _The Autobiography of
Benjamin Franklin_--so picturesque and concrete, so observant of effects
of unity and harmony, so full of appeals to the imagination, and so
effective in verbal expression, as to yield many of the effects of
literature.
In spite of all protests against forced and mistaken associations of
literature with other subjects in school, we must constantly insist that
it is no isolated thing, detached from life. On the contrary, literature
arises out of life, and is always arising out of it and reacting upon
it. It is effective and practically operative in a child's life
precisely because it, too, is life. It is closer, therefore, to his
business and bosom than any item or system of knowledge could be. It is
not to disturb its trustworthiness and value to say that it does not
primarily convey information and cannot be called upon to deliver facts.
It does render truth and wisdom, the summary and essence of fact and
knowledge. It does not destroy its educational value to say that we
shall search it in vain for a body or a system of organized discipline;
for, since it is art, it disciplines while it charms and teaches us
while it sets us free.
The natural correlations of literature are with the other arts, but,
above all, with the spirit of childhood, and with the consciousness of
children; with the tone and spirit of their other work, rather than with
its actual subject-matter.