Educating by Story-Telling. Mrs. Katherine Dunlap Cather
that the story amuses has caused a neglect of its larger functions in education. This is due to the traditional attitude toward the pleasurable in education. Education is life, and synonymous with the joys and griefs of life; but the traditions of the school when it was a place simply to master the three R’s, and the traditions of intellectualism, monkish asceticism, and Puritanism, have conspired to perpetuate the idea of education as a “hard” process. That it is “hard” is demonstrated by the vast number of children who dislike school and drop out of it before finishing the grades, and by the small number of those who go through its process and think of education and its discipline with delight. Yet this is what all normal, vigorous children should feel. There is probably no more profound or serious issue in education or democracy—and democracy depends on education—than this conflict between the advocates of a school process that is “hard” and the advocates of a process that is “pleasurable.” The arguments exhibit the two extremes in all such controversies: the advocates of “discipline,” “iron,” “the bitter pill” on the one hand, and the advocates of “freedom” and “enjoyment,”—really soft pedagogy and license—on the other. The truth, as is usually the case, lies between the two schools. Both are right in part, and both are wrong in part. Both see an essential, and both fail to see the reverse side of what each advocates. There is no conflict between real discipline and real pleasure; they cannot be separated in child life. This being so, the story is bound to take a large place in the teaching of the future.
The story amuses, but its function is not merely to amuse. Pleasure is not the aim of life, nor even its sole guide; it is an index of life, especially in the young.
The point needs to be emphasized that the story is the carrier, always has been the carrier, and will remain the natural carrier of racial tradition or information and ideals. The story in education has two functions: (1) it is the molder of ideals, and (2) it is the illuminator of facts.
(1) The highest and most difficult achievement in educational effort is the establishment of standards or ideals that function in judgment and behavior. The place of the story in moral education has been emphasized by many writers. Its place in developing an appreciation of artistic forms in language, in music, and in the graphic arts is splendidly illustrated in this book.
Appreciation is an emotional response, primarily instinctive, but developed through experience and according to high or low artistic standards by social approval or disapproval. In the emotional response lies interest and in the character of the emotional response lies the character of the interest. The interest may be crude, vulgar, or vicious, or it may be ideal, but in either case it is a product of developed emotional habits. In the life of the child this emotional response precedes the intellectual judgment of artistic values which comes later and only through contrast and comparison, and the former is vastly more important in social significance for the pleasure of the mass than the latter. This development of the artistic emotional response may be cleverly guided through the story, as Mrs. Cather shows, and she gives a wealth of suggestions for the use of the teacher.
But the story itself is a form of artistic expression and thus subject to the application of standardizing judgments. A good story must be judged by a double standard. It may be good in the sense that it is well told—and well told means simply that the incident or plot is related in sequence, with such emphasis and form of language that it grips the human instinctive response to the dramatic; or it may be good in the sense that it carries a good content in meaning or ideal. These two standards may not, frequently do not, coincide. A story may be so told that it is most fascinating, and yet the content be mere rubbish or even vicious; or the content may be correct and the telling so poorly done that it kills interest.
Many stories are told because of their “beauty” of form, where the content is not true. Some such stories are valuable because of the standardizing sentiments they carry, but truth is as important at least as the æsthetic. The human intellect evolved to interpret meanings and progressively perfect behavior adjustments. Each age of racial experience brings on its new interpretations, and broadly, each age makes advances upon that which preceded. Old theories fall, new truths arise; but old theories hold sway over the imagination of the masses long after the leaders have accepted higher truths because the old is well told while the new lacks the poetic expression of the artist. Literature is well-told information, yet under the guise of literature goblins and superstitions and worn-out theories parade in the imagination and thus mold ideals and behavior.
The problem of the professional story-teller of the future is to tell the best information of the age in as fascinating a form as the old myths and fables are now told after years of repetition. Only in this way can contemporary popular opinion be kept abreast of the scientific truth of the time, instead of dragging along in the superstitions of the past.
Some stories are told though untrue, because they “develop the imagination,” but this by itself is a dangerous criterion. The function of the imagination is to reconstruct the world in mental terms which will guide behavior. The functioning of the imagination in any kind of images will develop “power,” but the power may be detrimental individually and socially if the images cause crooked thinking. Straight thinking depends on the imagination—on the kind of emotionalized images which habitually arise in any thought situation or problem. Just so far as stories are untrue and without great moral value, yet are fascinatingly told, so far do they encourage untrue imagining and emotional attitudes, and therefore untrue thinking. And inasmuch as the emotional response to the single interpretative concept, the single vision of life, is vastly stronger through tradition than the interest in the discovery of complex relationships—and truth comes finally only through the latter—the emotionalized habits of imagination in interpretation are profoundly important for democracy.
Democracy cannot exist with a population of fuzzy thinkers. Story-telling, like all educational effort, must develop the imagination in mental terms that will function in life today.
(2) The story is an illuminator of facts. The child gets his information by activities in relation to the environment, by exploration, observation, experimentation, with the everlasting play of the interpretative processes, and by responding to and accepting or rejecting the communicated interpretations put upon phenomena by his social group. In this process of interpretation there is the immediate environment which can be sensed, but is understood only through its reconstruction in the imagination, largely in linguistic terms; and the remote environment which cannot be sensed and which can be understood only as it is built in the imagination as an extension of the reconstructed sensed environment. In these reconstructive processes the story is the most powerful correlating and illuminating educational force we have, as may be indicated by a brief analysis.
The activities of the school curriculum dealing with the environment have two natural foci of interest for the child. (a) The civic-geographical-historical complex (when rightly organized just one subject) and (b) the physical-biological complex, which is now coming to be called “general science.” For the child these two groups of the environmental activities cover the whole of adult science, philosophy, and religion, and both require a tremendous reconstructive functioning of the imagination.
(a) The first group is a new coming correlation which naturally must carry with it organized communication or the larger share of language and literature. The investigation of the local social environment is the basis of all “civics,” “geography,” and “history.” It expands as civics. When the child projects his interpretations of any human activity into another environment so that he is reconstructing in his imagination the life habits and customs of the people in relation to the physical and biological characteristics of the country, he is studying geography. When he goes backward in time in this process, he is studying history.
In this concentric widening of the intellectual horizon concerning human life and its relationships to the environment, the imagination must reconstruct a world which it cannot sense. The facts may be gained from pictures, maps, descriptions, but to become functional in thought in any other than in a mere commercial sense, the reconstruction must touch the emotions so that the life and conditions of living of the people will be felt. When felt the life will be dwelt upon in imagination, and when dwelt upon in imagination it will function in the life activities of the child. Giving this vivid, felt insight into the