_BY GEORGE EVERETT PARTRIDGE, Ph.D._
The recent revival of story telling raises many interesting questions,
both practical and theoretical. Considered as a part of a larger
movement,—an effort to control and utilize the powers concealed
within the instincts and unconscious forces of the mind—story telling
takes a place in a problem which we can hardly be mistaken in calling
one of the most important of our day. We have tended to value, in
education, only that which we can see and fully understand; but now,
as we begin seriously to employ _arts_ in the school, and in the arts
to subordinate knowledge to feeling, to use methods that yield no
immediate or practical return, we demand an increasing faith in the
powers of receptivity and inner response of the child, and we must
learn more and more to detect, and to be satisfied with, unseen and
remote effects.
In the art-invasion of the school, which is one aspect of this
movement toward a wider education, it is difficult to see how, in the
near future, we can be carried too far. We have been in the habit
of emphasizing so much the learning process, that we are in danger
of preventing the free and experimental attitude toward these new
interests that seems needed at the present time. We are likely to
have too little, rather than too much, faith in the play motives, the
æsthetic moods, and the subconscious powers. We shall still want the
child to _express_, to dramatize, to be examined upon, everything he
receives: to externalize every response, even in the most intimate
regions of feeling.
In calling the influx of artistic elements and methods into the school
one phase of the education of the _unconscious and deeper powers_, we
have a significant practical view-point, and are at the same time
in touch with new results in science. As a practical ideal, we must
aim to educate _all_ the individual, not merely thought and voluntary
movement. We wish to reach the inherited mechanisms of the organism; we
wish to play upon all the potentialities of feeling and volition, and
to utilize powers latent in the deposits of experience that the child
has brought with him to the world.
These new results in science give to the well-worn principle that we
must educate _all_ the powers of the child a new meaning, and at least
three important advances in psychology, in recent years, combine to
put solid ground under our feet for a practical æsthetics, and give us
principles by which we can coördinate the artistic elements and methods
of the school.
The first of these advances is the genetic psychology that has arisen
and flourished on the basis of Darwinian principles in biology, and
which has shown the fundamental place of the feelings in education.
The second is the new psycho-analysis, which, by showing the laws of
the symbolic expression of hidden desires and feelings, has given us
a new conception of the relation of art to life. The third new result
is in the psychology of _valuation_, which has traced out, at least
roughly, the course of development of the æsthetic and ethical states
of consciousness.
New and incomplete and lacking in coördination as these principles
are, they already yield us practical insights such as we have never
been able to obtain from the older philosophies. We may confidently
expect to see in time a solid science of the feelings, which will give
us a “union of art and life” in a sound æstheticism in education: an
æstheticism that will help to organize and control the fundamental
feelings, and will overcome the superficial aloofness of our prevailing
too formal and too detached art. This will be based upon the discovery
that art, and the need of art, extend throughout all phases of human
life; and that all true art must _work_ in intimate union with
practical affairs.
Considerations, such as these, seem essential for any study of the
place of story telling, or any other _art_, in education.