Literature in the Elementary SchoolMacClintock, Porter Lander
General
Literature in the Elementary School
MacClintock, Porter Lander
Literature -- Study and teaching
What is the nature of the supplement such a teacher must make to his
gift? What is the training with which the teacher without the gift must
fortify himself? It is little more than one would like to have for his
personal culture, and little other than he is obliged to have for his
contact with the children in other directions. By dint of much reading
of literature and some reading in good criticism he must bring himself
to a sane view of the whole subject, realizing what literature is and
what it is not; what it can be expected to accomplish in human culture,
and what we cannot reasonably ask of it. He must know something of its
laws, that he may know how to judge it and when he has judged it aright.
This process will inevitably have refined and deepened his taste and
broadened his artistic experience in every direction. Of course, he will
not talk to his children about literature as an art, about critical
problems, structural principles, and all that; no more will he, when he
is guiding his class in evolving for themselves food and shelter by way
of beginning the study of history, talk to them about primitive culture
and social evolution. But he is an ill-equipped and untrustworthy guide
if he does not have in his own consciousness these large explaining
points of view. It is precisely so with the large fundamental principles
of literature. One gathers certainty and power for the choice and
teaching of the merest folk-tale, if he is able to see in it the working
of the great and simple laws of all art. And more specifically he must
imbue himself with the spirit of the childlike literature. He must know
and love the wonderful old folk and fairy tales, not regarding them as
matter for the nursery and the kindergarten, merely, but learning to
love them as great but simple art. He must read the hero tales and
romances till he knows them as a treasure house out of which he may draw
at his need. Many, many children's stories and poems he must read to be
able to judge them and he must read all those artists, Carroll,
Stevenson, Pater, Hauptman, who in _Alice_, _The Child's Garden_, _The
Child in the House_, _Hannele_, have done so much to interpret for us in
the artist's way the consciousness of the child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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