The Primer and Literature

IN the Gradus ad Parnassum it is the first step that costs. There is a fair agreement amongst teachers that classic literature may be substituted for the reading-books heretofore in use in the upper grades of our public schools; there is a growing belief in the possibility of discarding these readers in the middle grades; a few boldly take the position that what is known in schoolbook parlance as the third reader may be supplemented by the use at the same time of simple, direct forms of literature, such as the fable and the folk story. The time has come when the more radical statement may be made that there should be no break in the continuity of literature in the schools ; that from the day when the child begins to hold a book in his hand until the day when he leaves the public, school he shall steadily, uninterruptedly, be presented with genuine literature; that the primer itself shall serve as an introduction to literature.

The whole system of graded readingbooks which has dominated our schools the past two generations rests upon the assumption that reading is one of the meehauic arts, and that the process of acquiring this art is from the easy to the more difficult. Thus, in the old-fashioned spelling-book words were arranged in columns, which marched first one syllable deep, then two syllables, then three, until the hero who confronted them was called upon to meet, single-handed, such monsters as " ratiocination,” when, if victorious, he was regarded as master of words. In the readers the same principle of grading has been maintained as the fundamental principle, and the child is led along step by step in his apprehension of words and sentences. The device of repetition, by which the words introduced are rearranged in new combinations, until skill has exhausted itself, is supposed to fix the images of these words indelibly in the child’s brain. The assumption is that, words are blocks out of which the forms of language are constructed ; that sentences are frames of words deftly fitted together. The greatest care has been taken to make the increasing difficulty imperceptible at any one stage of progress. To accomplish this, reading exercises have been manufactured whose sole excuse for being lies in the skill with which they provide an easy grade. From the simpler to the more complex forms of sentences this, grading proceeds, and it is difficult to see how the process can be carried further than it has been carried in the latest, most nicely studied series of readers.

The principle of grading cannot he disregarded, but its tendency toward a mechanical exercise sets one to thinking if there he not another principle, more fundamental in nature, more comprehensive and more free, to which we may have recourse when we are teaching children to read; and our doubt, is increased by a study of the contents of School readers. If, we may ask, this principle of gradation requires such an extraordinary amount of commonplace reading-matter and such mediocre literature, are we not sacrificing the end to the means, and thinking more of the machine we are constructing than of the work the machine is to accomplish ? Moreover, does not the weariness which overtakes the child in his reading exercises suggest that his intellectual life has a more rapid growth than the material on which it is fed supposes, and that, he exhausts this reading-book literature long before he is called on to abandon it?

There is another principle, well recognized in educational thought, which may prove more fundamental and offer a better working scheme. It is found, in the process of development from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the less familiar, compelling at certain stages marked transitions. This principle at once reduces gradation to a method under its operation, and limits it in scope. Let us follow it in its practical application to the training of a child in the art of reading.

The child enters school with the endowment of speech. In his limited way, he can express himself in words which are symbols of objects, and words which are symbols of action and notions. He has learned to talk before he has learned to read. Under the more philosophical methods of our modern school, the first effort of the teacher is to cultivate the child’s power of speech, and this effort properly continues throughout the entire course of a child’s education. There is no period when a wise teacher relaxes this endeavor to make the pupil s power of expression keep pace with his intelligence. A book is not placed in the child’s hand at once. Use is made of the blackboard, of pencil, paper, and slate. In other words, there is a transition to be made from talking to connecting the words used in talk with signs for those words, and in the first steps taken writing may he said to take precedence of reading. The picture of a familiar object is placed before the eye, and the name of the object is written in immediate association with it. The object and the word standing for it are made interchangeable. In the same way, a sentence or a word standing for action or notion is made interchangeable with the idea in the child’s mind. All the while, by ringing the changes on these words and forcing them into new combinations, an analysis is going on by which sounds arc resolved into characters-, and characters are recombined to express new forms which still are familiar to the child. In this exercise, which extends over many weeks, the pupil has been taking that which is known to him and associating it with what hitherto was unknown, namely, the symbol in writing. He has mastered the principle of the association of words with written forms. He has learned to write and to read writing.

In all this preliminary work the aim has been to make the child think intelligently and read intelligibly. One of the most common difficulties to he overcome by the teacher is that which arises from a parrot-like repetition by the child of what he has been told ; and by far the most important result to he attained by him is the habit of thinking accurately and clearly, and then answering a question with precision, or reading a sentence with the clearness of tone and proper emphasis which spring from an intelligent apprehension of what the sentence means. This habit of thinking accurately and clearly is well cultivated by the methods which prevail in the preliminary work upon the blackboard and slate.

So far the oral and written exercise, in which the child has constantly taken an active part with his hands and his tongue. The next transition is from writing to print. Here the child takes an important step. A book is placed in his hands, — the primer, — and now he is to be taught to connect words with objects and ideas without using his hands, and even without using his tongue. His mind has used these instruments hitherto ; he is to he shown how he is to use the eye alone.

In its first process, a well-considered primer will help the child to make the passage from the written to the printed form by the application of the same principle as before. It will at first give together the picture or the written word with the printed word : then, as the association becomes familiar, the picture and the written word will gradually he withdrawn, until the point is reached where there is no picture and no writing, only the printed sentence. That has become among the known things of the child’s possession.

Up to this point the child’s notion of reading has been confined by his exercises to sentences which reproduce what is already familiar to his mind. He has acquired the art of deciphering print, but what he finds in that print is what be knows already; it is his talk and the talk of those about him set down in symbols. For what further purpose has he acquired this art of deciphering print? This is not yet his to know, but it is his teacher’s, and the child’s progress from this point onward will be determined largely by the grasp which his teacher has of this controlling principle, namely, that the end of learning to read is to read great books.

There follows, therefore, this final and immense transition, — the transition from colloquial to literary form. The vocabulary of a child as drawn from common vernacular use is very limited, though its extent is of course largely affected by the speech which he is wont to hear at home. Yet, even under the most favoring conditions, the form of language to which the child is most accustomed is colloquial, not literary. It is true, he may have had books read to him, and this is a very important part of a child’s training; but for the most part, until be goes to school, these books are purposely couched in almost colloquial terms. Yet if the child is really to be educated, he is to pass over, in his reading, from a colloquial to a sustained literary form, and it is the business of the primer to aid him from the outset in making this transition.

The prime function of literature, at any stage in the development of man, is to stimulate his imagination and reasoning powers by presenting to him conceptions which lie beyond the immediate reach of his experience. The great consideration to he observed, therefore, in putting literature before the child, is to present in succession forms which will appeal to his expanding powers, and in turn enlarge those powers for the apprehension of still larger, nobler forms. One is not to consider so much the gradation from easy to hard words, from simple to more complex sentences, as the application of the law of procedure from the known to the less known, from the familiar objects and notions to the same in unfamiliar relations.

Practically, the task is to find literature for the child, not to make it. The permanent in literature springs from the necessity of the writer to create, not from the attempt to fit the creation to the needs of the reader. A common illustration is found in Robinson Crusoe, which lives generation after generation with the young, though Defoe had no thought of that audience when he wrote the book; while every generation witnesses the death of books written after the pattern of Robinson Crusoe, for the benefit of the young. In like manner, the great bulk of literature prepared for the young is ephemeral, and has no place in the formal education of the schoolroom. That, literature only is to he used there which is permanent, has stood already the test of time, or, if recent, has the unmistakable note of the permanent. Indeed, one of the greatest achievements of the teacher is to fix in the child’s mind the distinction between the permanent and the impermanent. To this end every true device should he used, and chief among them I should place these three ; —

First, given the piece of literature which is to confront the child, I would have every word, and, if necessary, every phrase in it, familiar to the child before he reads the piece, so that when be comes to read it all mechanical difficulties shall have been overcome: then his mind is free to receive the full impression of what he reads; then reading is a pleasure, not a task.

Second, the drill precedent to this enjoyment should be in exercises, not in literature. The words and phrases which are to occur in literature are beforehand to be combined and recombined in simple exercises of a colloquial nature. By this means, the child conies early to distinguish between reading - matter and literature. These passages of literature occurring at intervals in his book are so many illumined stages toward which he is traveling. I should like to see a primer in which the literature was printed in gold, and the intervening exercises in black.

Third, I would make it a cardinal principle with the teacher not to talk about literature, nor to pick it to pieces. The time for enjoyment through the immediate perception comes early ; the time for enjoyment through analysis comes late. I would not even, in the early stages, attempt to connect the literature read with the writers who produced it. I would do nothing to distract the child’s mind from pure enjoyment. The greatest help a teacher can render is to read the passage in hand simply and sympathetically, without comment, and above all without criticism. If she can sing it, so much the better.

It would seem superfluous to urge that literature should be held as the reason for learning to read, if this proposition were not practically denied in our ordinary methods of training; for there is a tacit assumption that literature is one of a number of studies reserved for the high school and academy or college ; that the grammar school is busy about other matters, and that the primary school simply gets the child ready for the grammar school. Moreover, when one examines into the methods of study in the high school, lie is very likely to find that the highest function of literature is overlooked, and that great art, great thoughts, are used chiefly as the means for extending one’s knowledge of biography and history, or as offering grammatical conundrums and problems in criticism. In fact, it is only by associating the notion of great literature with the very earliest stages of a child’s training in reading that we can hope to effect a needed revolution in the ideas of a high-school student regarding literature.

A more specious objection to my proposition lies in the contention that very early in a child’s study of reading he should turn his new art to account in acquiring knowledge in natural history, in geography, biography, and history. There are series of readers designed to serve this end, — historical readers, geographical readers, natural-history readers, — all patiently graded, and offered as substitutes for the current reading-books. I am not surprised that the demand for such hooks should have been made ; they are in many instances clear improvements upon the fragmentary collections of prose and verse which do duty as readers. They emphasize the fact that there is a deplorable waste in our system which keeps children at work year after year reading books which only now and then quicken their powers; and if the choice lay only between these new-comers and the old stand-bys, I for one should welcome the substitution of honest fact for feeble imagination.

There can be no objection to this useful, class of readers in their place, namely, as subsidiary to school work in the subjects to which they are devoted ; but it is a mistake to suppose that they constitute an end in themselves. They are clearly means towards the information of the child’s mind. Now, the great end of literature is not to inform, but to inspire; and unless literature, first, last, and always, is made to stand before the child, in his whole course of school training, a grievous wrong is committed, —nothing less than quenching the spirit. Not that fact has no power to kindle the spirit, but the spirit requires expansion under the illuminating power of things of the spirit, in order that it may respond to the more hidden, obscurer light concealed within fact.

No, it will not do to reverse the true order. Let literature be kept in view as the great end of learning to read, and all subordinate uses of the art of reading will find their place. The greater includes the less. In education, as in religion, the principle holds good, Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all these things shall he added unto you.

To return to our primer, which is to offer, after the child has learned to decipher print, beside exercises in reading, genuine bits of literature. If it be well planned, the exercises will diminish as the book proceeds ; the literature will increase. Its volume, in the early passages of the child’s mind, cannot he great; it broadens and deepens very perceptibly after the period of what is known as the fourth reader. But it should be remembered that the amount of literature required by the pupil before he reaches that period is relatively very small. Whilst he is slowly acquiring command of the art of reading he does not need much literature, and necessarily cons such as he does have somewhat laboriously. It is just as well that these simple productions should he read over and over again by him. They furnish his mind, and do not wear out by use. Narrow, too, in its springs as the stream of literature is for the child, and narrow as it remains for two or three years, it does not lose in fullness and sufficiency. Never is it necessary to have recourse to the literature which is forgotten when it has been read, and that is the fate of all thin literature. At present, the notion of reading for pleasure is dissociated in the child’s mind from his school readers. Let this notion once become identified with the books given him to read in school, and not only is the idea of great literature formed in the mind, but school itself is raised to a higher plane.

Of the literary forms at the service of the teacher who wishes to lead the child by natural ways into the richest pasturage, verse must be given the precedence, in time at least. If for no other reason, the ease of reading it, its short lines, its completed phrases, the melody, the rhymes which help, — all these characteristics render it a fit aid to the child in passing into the apprehension of literature. But there are other, more radical reasons. The form of verse sets it apart from colloquialism, and this makes it more distinct to the child. It has the mark of literature ; it is apart from ordinary use ; it is a thing by itself. Beyond this, the higher spiritual thought has found expression in poetry to a degree of simplicity which makes it apprehensible both by children and by the mature. It offers, as the best literature always does, a common meeting-ground for all ages. In poetry the child finds his half-formed thoughts and imaginations fully expressed, and thus he is interpreted to himself. Once let. genuine poetry possess a child, and the hardness of later life will not wholly efface its power ; but let the cultivation of the love of poetry come late, and it comes hard.

After this encomium, it may seem to some a travesty of the subject to say that the first book of verse to put into the child’s hand is Mother Goose; but one may say it, nevertheless, in all seriousness. We are undertaking to begin the child’s training in literature when he is very young, very timid, incapable of long or high flights. If we put before him literature which bewilders him or presents great obstacles, we are driving, not leading him. In Mother Goose — meaning by this term nursery ditties in general, and ignoring the merely senseless jingle — we have a capital point of departure. To recall our favorite law. it helps the child to make a passage from the known to the unknown. The cat he knows, the boy he knows ; but the cat in the well, little Johnny Green, big Johnny Stout, the bell with its swinging, resounding note, — all these are in the region of the just not known; and when he reads, half sings the ditty, his mind has been given wings with which to soar a little way. Again, Mother Goose is cheerful, and the task of reading literature is lightened. Further, Mother Goose is full of human associations, and, entering literature by this passage, the child is treading in steps worn by generations of use. There is no waste. He is becoming familiar with the permanent in literature; he is not conning that which will be left behind with childhood. Rather, he is acquiring a currency which will, in later days, be drawn forth for use in the exchange when “ we that are children have children.” Indeed, when one considers how, in our anxious, crowded American life, the home has delegated more and more its powers to the school, one may well fear that, unless Mother Goose be preserved for childhood in the schoolroom, that classic of infancy may be lost out of the life of great multitudes and die in the minds of the people.

After Mother Goose, no one book can be relied upon ; but it would not be impossible to make an anthology from the great literature, small but precious, which should meet the needs of the child in the schoolroom. I would banish from his book all the trivial, prosaic, or supersentimental verses which are found in abundance in the primer, first and second readers. A child should never be taught to read these. If he picks them up in book or magazine at home, they will do him less harm; but they form no genuine part of his higher education, and a wrong is done him when they are set before him even as exercises in drill. Let poetry be presented to him always as something fine and uncommon ; then the power of poetry will grow in his nature. Blake, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Stevenson, Whittier, Longfellow,— these have all something not beyond the scope of the child that has had his introduction to poetry in reading Mother Goose ; and solitary poems from other masters of English verse might be named.

In prose, the selection is at first more limited, because in literature prose presupposes an older audience. Yet the diligent gleaner need not be disheartened. He will find in proverbs and in pithy sayings much well-beaten gold. For more sustained forms the English Bible may be searched profitably. A very little practice in the more difficult words will make it possible, for example, for a child who has been reading a few weeks to read the parable of the Sower. In the early stages, moreover, there should he offered what may be called the protoplasm of literature. Any one who has sought the origins of much modern literature has found them in folk lore and legends, and the comparative study of this popular literature discloses the variation in form. So then there is no absolute form which must be preserved, but each poet, or dramatist, or story-teller may use his art for a new setting of the images and fancies. There remains a task, for those who know the worth of simple, transparent English, in the casting of these legends and bits of folk lore into form which shall be intelligible to the child reading, and not merely to the child hearing. The matter itself appeals to the first wondering expression of the child’s mind ; and if the form be the simplest, most unadorned presentation, that accords with the spirit of the original conception. In after years, when the reader comes upon the same invention elaborated and adorned, flowering out in poem or drama, the early possession has not dulled, but rather quickened his interest; for now it is not the novelty, but the rich use of what is familiar, that impresses his mind.

It is sometimes objected that school use hardens the heart against fine literature, but I suspect the charge will be found to rest upon the artificial employment of literature for less important ends than its highest. It must not be forgotten that the love of great literature is not a revelation vouchsafed to this or that favored one ; our system of education, unhappily, proceeds largely upon this assumption. True it is that some minds are more finely attuned to its harmonies than others ; but it also remains true that, given a natural, unaffected, orderly presentation from the period of earliest childhood up to the elose of school life, the mind will be at ease in such company. The power to appreciate great literature is a power which can be trained, and the best training comes through the well-considered introduction to such literature by an appreciative, sympathetic teacher. Now and then a child is so endowed that a haphazard acquaintance will be the most joyous and the most fruitful; but all our studies in the growth of the mind go for nothing if they do not impress upon us the law of order as a supreme law.

In pleading for an unbroken, continuous presentation of great literature in the common schools, I am asking only that the power which inheres in this literature, the power to delight, to inspire, to ennoble, should from the first he allowed full exercise in our ordinary life. The forces of worldliness press hard from every quarter. The child is exposed to them from the Outset. Necessary is it that the guardian of childhood should from the very first reinforce his best life by marshaling in ever-increasing ranks these bright legions of heaven that wait upon man. The consummation of human aspiration is to he found in the arts, and of all the arts that which embodies speech is at once the finest and the most familiar, the most friendly. " Heaven,” sang “Wordsworth, “ lies about us in our infancy; ” and whatever response our philosophy may make to his poetic appeal for confidence in the foregleam of immortality as intimated in childish instincts, this we may heartily believe: that the opening soul of childhood should be incited by the purest, truest expression of human imagination, not closed by barring the entrance with the shell-heaps of mere linguistic phrases.

Horace E. Scudder.