Educating by Story-Telling. Mrs. Katherine Dunlap Cather
of other people is the function of the story. Through the hunger to feel life the story reveals life.
(b) The story also functions for children in the interpretation of the physical-biological environment or “general science.”
Between six and fourteen years of age is the neglected period for science, and it is the age when the story may function in the biggest way as a natural educational tool. Yet so absorbed are school men in the problem of drilling children in the dissected elements of the written language that they do not even understand one of the two chief characteristics of child nature at this age—the rapidly expanding curiosity concerning nature. It is the age of the first crude control of the “scientific instinct,” the tendency to experiment and explore. It is the age for fixing the questioning habit and building a common-sense confidence in and familiarity with nature. These results follow from the logical processes involved in the activities, not from being presented with the formalized and logical results of adult science. The child will have none of this latter if he can help it; he wants to do his own experimenting. In this process again the story gives the larger insight. The child acquires facts by experimentation, observation, exploration, but the larger meanings and relationships require imaginative reconstruction. The child can observe the fish or the fly at different stages of their development, but the story of the life history of the fish or fly gives what observation cannot supply. It is as fascinating as any fairy tale when told with the same consideration for dramatic form, and the story is true besides. The child cannot understand evolution as presented by Darwin, or by the teacher of biology in the high schools; but the child even of eight revels in the stories that carry the facts of evolution, and thus he gains a right feeling towards the wonderful meaning of the progress of natural things, which makes later thinking true and easy. So strong is the response to the story that even the history of physical things when set in a natural story form, stimulates.
The fairy tales of the future will be well-told stories from our sciences or human life and nature, the two natural centers of interest in the environment, and we may expect as results in public opinion a broader common sense and a lessened gullibility. In this organization of science and modern thought in story form for its larger use in education the professional story-teller has still a great unfinished task to perform. Its beginnings are in this book, and Mrs. Cather is already at work on a broader compilation of materials for a later volume. In this larger functioning of the story the old fairy tales and myths will take their place as historical data to give comparative insight into the beliefs of people in the past, a sympathetic understanding of their limitations in knowledge, and an appreciation of our privileges in civilization, due largely to the struggles of the past.
Clark W. Hetherington
EDUCATING BY STORY-TELLING
PART ONE
STORY-TELLING AND THE ARTS OF EXPRESSION—ESTABLISHING STANDARDS
CHAPTER ONE
The Purpose and Aim of Story-Telling
Ever since the beginning of things the story-teller has been a personage of power, an individual welcomed by young and old alike. Hailed as a joy bringer and heeded as an oracle, his tales have been the open sesame to admit him to any throng and his departure has always been attended with regret. During the Middle Ages he was a privileged character, free to wander at will into camp or court. The Piso manuscript in the museum at Budapest tells of the solicitous effort made by Ladislaus of Hungary to secure safe-conduct through Bohemia and Austria for a favorite narrator, and many other old chronicles attest to the fact that in France, Germany, Italy, and the British Isles passports were given to minstrels and raconteurs when no one else could obtain them. Long before this period, during the nomadic existence of the race, the mightiest men of the tribe were the chieftain and the story-teller, the one receiving homage because of his ability to vanquish his adversaries in battle, the other because of his skill in entertaining his fellows as they huddled around the fire at night. Each ability was believed to be evidence of divine gifts, and the possessor of each was revered as being a little higher than a mortal, a little lower than a god.
Primitive man, like civilized man, was fond of power, and realizing that his talents made him mighty, the narrator exercised them in such a manner as to promote their development. Every emotional response on the part of his hearers served as a key to unlock doors into the land of his desire, and as he listened to exclamations of approval, condemnation, or delight, he saw ways of arousing these emotions to even greater degrees of intensity and, possessing an elemental love of the spectacular, made the most of his opportunity. Thus he evolved from a crude declaimer into something of an artist. As the race emerged from a barbaric into a pastoral state, he grew to be more than an entertainer; he imparted knowledge to the young by keeping alive the tribal traditions.
On the Asiatic highlands, before the Aryan migration, it was the story-teller who preserved the tales of the fathers, the nature myths that were primitive man’s explanation of the things he did not understand. The journey of the sun across the heavens, the shifting of clouds from one fantastic form to another, the chromatic skies of sunrise and sunset, and the starry firmament of night aroused his curiosity and awakened his awe. He wondered about them just as children today wonder about them, and just as the twentieth-century child questions his mother, so he questioned one whom he deemed wiser than himself. This consulted oracle gave as an explanation something that out of his own wondering and puzzling had grown into a vague belief, and consequently the clouds that presaged showers came to be regarded as heavenly cows from whose exuberant udders came the rains that refreshed the earth; stormy oceans and rugged mountains with ravines beset with perils held giants that avenged and destroyed; while the sun, a beneficent creature that drove away the monster of darkness, and all the saving forces of nature, were metamorphosed in the fancy of these early men into protecting heroes and divinities.
As generation succeeded generation and the young received their allotment of lore from the old, these stories became fixed so firmly in the minds of the people that they were carried with them at the scattering of the tribes, told and retold in the new-found homes, and modified to suit conditions of life in strange lands the wanderers came to inhabit; and they still survive as present-day fairy tales. There are various theories of how these old beliefs came to be disseminated, how it happened that tales supposed to be indigenous to Finland or Madagascar are found in slightly different dress among the tribes of Central Africa and in other sections of the world remote from each other; but no matter how much folklorists disagree as to the process through which the tales evolved to their present form, they do not differ as to their significance, and whether they accept the Aryan theory promulgated by Max Müller or the totemistic theory of Andrew Lang, they unite in a belief that these ancient tales represent the religion of primitive man, a religion growing out of fear of the unknown.
Always it was by the lips of the story-teller that the legends were kept alive. It was his mission to teach children the tales their fathers knew, and as the race evolved toward civilization he gave them something besides nature myths. He recounted and reiterated the achievements of the heroes of his people until youths who heard were fired with desire to emulate. Because he was deemed a man of supernal powers, his words were believed; consequently he created the ideals of the age in which he lived, and just as his own standards were fine or base, so the ideals for which he was responsible came to be high or low. Fortunately for the world, however, these old-time narrators were wiser than their fellows. They were poets and dreamers who saw life through eyes vision clear. They glorified virtue and deprecated vice, taught that right triumphs over wrong and that sinning brings inevitable punishment, and explained in a crude way the workings of the law of compensation.