Literature in the Elementary SchoolMacClintock, Porter Lander
General
Literature in the Elementary School
MacClintock, Porter Lander
Literature -- Study and teaching
First as to the childlikeness of myth. There are, of course, undeveloped
races that have a naïve and childish myth, but it is also so crude and
unbeautiful that it would never commend itself to one seeking artistic
material for children. The developed myths, those that have achieved the
elaboration of beautiful episodes, are most unchildlike. They are far,
far away from the crude guesses of the primitive mind. They have all
been worked over, codified, filled with theological and symbolistic
content by priests and poets. One can be very sure that no sensible
teacher who has mastered the material, would attempt to teach the whole
of any Hebrew or Greek or Scandinavian myth as myth within the
elementary period. If he takes one of the especially romantic or
beautiful episodes out of the myth, he is obliged to thin it out to the
comprehension of the children, and to mutilate it so as to make of it a
mere tale. When one reads Hawthorne's version of Pandora and Prometheus
and realizes the mere babble, the flippant detail, under which he has
covered up the grim Titanic story of the yearnings and strivings of the
human soul for salvation here and hereafter, the very deepest problems
of temptation and sin, of rebellion and expiation, he must see clearly
what is most likely to happen when a complex and mature myth is
converted into a child's tale. To make a real test, leave the alien
Greek myth and try the same process with one that we have built into our
own religious consciousness--the temptation and fall in the Garden of
Eden; a story, which is, by the way, much more naïve in conception and
detail than that of Prometheus. We must conclude that such myths are not
childlike, and that to make such a version of them as will appeal to
the little child's attention and feeling gives but a shallow and
distorted view of them.
There should undoubtedly be a place in education for the study of myth
as religion and as an influence in human culture; should it not be
somewhere well within the adolescent period, when the symbols of the
great myths attract and do not baffle the child, when their religious
content finds a congenial lodging-place and a sympathetic interpretation
in his own experiences? It would seem only fair to reserve the beautiful
and reverential myths of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians for this
period, rather than to use them in the age when there is little more to
appeal to than the tendency, so short-lived and shallow-rooted in the
modern child, to see personal agencies behind appearances. For this,
confused with a degree of grammatical uncertainty of speech, is
practically all that we can find under close analysis, of the mythopoeic
faculty in little children brought up under modern conditions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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