Stevenson. Goethe said: "How fortunate the young who know what art is!" And we add: "How fortunate the young whose teachers know what art is!"

Is there not opened here a field for helpful, inspiring, and enjoyable meetings of teachers with superintendents and supervisors? Might they not do much to remove present limitations?

Another great remedy for existing conditions must be found in our higher schools and schools of professional training. Some of them are making the true study of literature a part of the education of each student; many are not. It should be demanded of all training schools for teachers that they recognize as an important part of their work the teaching to know, to appreciate, and to tell, to read, and to recite the gems of song and story that should become a part of the life of children. And this should be one of the required tests of a person's preparation for teaching in the grades.

The revival will come when professional schools, teachers, and superintendents unite in searching for the best literature to be used for, with, and by children; when, loving and appreciating its thought and its beauty, they unite in studying the inner life of the child, and the best ways of making literature serve its great purpose in the development of the manifold powers of that inner life.

That so many are thus searching and studying heralds the dawn of the new day.

DISCUSSION

MRS. JOSEPHINE HEERMANS, principal of Whittier School, Kansas City, Mo.-What question lies at the very root of the organization of our system of education for our youth? Without doubt it is the question of idealism. I mean by “idealism" the response of selfconsciousness to the ideal; or the effort of self-consciousness toward self-realization; or the spiritual process of the growth of mind; or the development of the self from within; or, more simply, possibilities of reaction.

Without idealism we shall have feeble mental reaction. The ultimate aim of education is many and perfect reactions. Idealism, liberating mental reactions, abstracts the truth from each study in the curriculum, assists discrimination, and makes that study a living force. These reactions cannot be taught by talking about them, nor by memorizing; rules of any or all the studies, but may be developed and strengthened and permanently organized in various ways. We reach out to literature -"the fifth window of the soul," as Dr. Harris expresses it-dealing as it does with the spiritual, as the most potent agent we have for developing idealism.

The reactions of literature are conducive always to high thought and purpose; they organize impulses into feeling, they nurture and augment feeling; and feeling working thru will achieves character. Literature gives a certain power of adaptability and readjustment. Responsible individuality is best taught by contact with the institutions of society; yet literature pictures such contact and its results in terms of conduct, which patterns are supports to the child's need of experience. The child will and must build up a world of some kind in which his native reactions—fear, love, curiosity, etc.— modified or unmodified, play a large part. During the plastic period the influence of

literature-active, corrective, and constructive-harmonizes these reactions with those of the group in which he lives, making possible for all the ethical life.

Children are not getting conceptions of literature, to know them as such; or at least they are very vague. They are getting something far more valuable-conceptions of life. They do not analyze niceties of construction, but they do analyze sentiment, thought, conduct. They do picture ends more and more remote, and are influenced, on the side of feeling, to greater sympathy for others.

Our graded system of education without literature is as the body without the spirit. The three highest activities of soul- the good, the true, and the beautiful-find an embodiment in literature. Who would defer their recognition? Let the child know that these activities are in eternal correlation with himself.

While no one today is without convictions as to the necessity of literature in the grades, here and there is one who thinks the difficulties of a course quite insurmountable; others who would limit the American child, or the child taught in American schools, to American literature; others who are indefinite as to whether literature in the grades includes supplementary reading of all kinds-geographical readers, historical readers, and the like; and still others who, with minds open to the subject, are as yet unsettled as to its scope.

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I am familiar with the arguments concerning the difficulties involved in a course" in literature, the principal one being that, because a course is of necessity selected, the teaching would lack spontaneity in case a teacher was not assigned the particular poet or writer of her choice; or, worse, the teacher might not care for literature at all, and would kill rather than awaken an interest.

While there is something in that argument, there is not much. A course in literature, whether in college, high school, or elementary school, must be selected and must be taught by someone selected to teach it. Such teacher cannot hope to limit her teaching to her especial choice of writers. The truth is that we have in the grades many teachers of a catholicity of taste which enables them not only to enjoy for themselves, but to lead others to enjoy, the essential excellencies of a great number of writers, writers as dissimilar as Shakespeare and Shelley, Ruskin and Dickens, Tennyson and Browning.

Taking schools as they are, the selective power could not be left to the teachers, for the simple reason that such a course would lack organization and unity. It is left to them in a measure in this way: How does Homer stand in your regard? Which do you prefer, Ruskin, Hawthorne, or Dickens? Could you make a class of pupils understand The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? The answers determine what authors could be safely committed to them. Good common-sense and careful, conscientious teaching vitalize literature the same as other studies; and we must not forget that literature is one thing that does its own work largely, for the results are only measured by the power of the literature itself. Its ardor and flow negative any teacher. True literature, poetry, or prose always transports.

It is not desirable to make a set course in literature for every school in a system, as is done in arithmetic, grammar, and geography; but each school should have a course fitted to the conditions of that school, just as manual-training courses, to be effective, recognize and meet the conditions of special environment. The supply of literature is limitless, and substitutions and modifications are easily made.

Who should make this course? It must be one who knows and loves literature. It is not a question of official position, but one of ideas and ideals. It must be one who sees in literature the spirit of art, of culture, of morality, of love of nature, of patriotism, of sympathy, and knows where and when in the period of elementary education to build these into the spiritual nature of the child. It might be a joint work. However made, we should reach out our hands to the teaching body to assist with suggestions; and after the course is made, it should be elastic enough to admit of substitutions and reinforcement, as conditions suggest.

nation.

Its literary product is the best thing any nation has to show, from the days of Ilomer and of Moses until now. But this same product is rarely great during the fancy of a Those who put all their stress on our national literature limit us unreasonably. In developing our history we revert often to the reign of Elizabeth, but what event in her reign compares with the fact that it was the age of Spenser and of Shakespeare? Shall we bar Shakespeare because not an American? Our history takes us to England, Germany, France, Spain, when dealing with religious intolerance; yet the history of centuries of religious intolerance is epitomized in Lessing's Nathan the Wise. Shall we bar the classic because it is not American? Surely we must have as much freedom in literature as we have in history. History is great, but literature is greater. History may

be likened to Saul, literature to David. We love our national life, but we have no more right to limit our children to its literature than we have to ignore the influence of other nations on its history; no more right to limit to American literature than to American art. We gladly adorn our schools with Greek, French, German, Italian, and English art in casts of world-famed sculpture, prints of painting and architecture, doing this for the influence of the world-spirit; yet shall we bar the world-spirit in literature?

In a practical course of literature for the grades, myth, legend, poetry, the drama, and strong prose must each have its place. The Hebrew, the Greek, Shakespeare, the English, and the American poets and prose writers must each render tribute (and I should like to add a little bit of Victor Hugo and Heine and Lessing). These writers shouid come to the grades with texts perfect and unmutilated.

We want literature that is pure, serious, stern, joyful, truly educative; our purpose in its selection being culture, and not information. One of the many temptations in planning · a course of reading is to go outside real literature and to overload the course with informational reading, scientific or historical. This is a great mistake.

While realizing the limitations of my sphere of observation, I wish to speak of my own experience with a course that has been in successful operation nine years. In organizing the course the aim has been simplicity and thoroness. The object is not to cover the largest possible field, but the reverse of that. For the time being the child is consecrated to one book until he understands it as well as he is capable of understanding it. The course is presented on the opposite page.

There is some organization of the subject-matter of the literature to harmonize with the absorbing interest of each particular stage of advancement. Hiawatha, Robinson Crusoe, Ethics of the Dust, and many of the legends and short poems appeal to the constructive instinct of the young child; later, in the highest grades, literature teeming with causal sequences is chosen. Some effort is made to place emphasis upon the social and economic conditions portrayed in each classic, but the main object in the grades is not to study in a minute and detailed way, but to read and enjoy and converse freely about each, making of it an influence penetrative and strong.

In the first grade are the Greek myths, based upon nature, and the Hebrew stories as found in the Old Testament. Hebrew does not stop there. It reappears in each grade in the form of passages from the Old Testament written on the blackboard; not with the indefinite word "Bible" underneath, but the particular book from whence it came, as Isaiah, Psalms, Joel, etc. These are changed frequently. Each blackboard has an extract also from some world-poet, "jewels, five words long "-poets not read in the grades; and on some little corner of the blackboard in all the upper grades is the permanent tabulation:

The work in the first grade is memory work, the myths and stories being told to the children until they give them back. We have a simple dramatization of the myths. The children assume the characters necessary to the development of each story, using

mounted pictures correct as to costume and accessories, each holding the picture of the character he represents.

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In the lowest grades the literature is further impressed by using as copy in the writing exercise a line from whatever story they are studying, as: 'Ruth gleaned in the fields,' 'Apollo drives the sun chariot," etc. The object in these grades is expression. This work is done in the language period, because the reading periods in the first and half of the second grade are fully occupied with the formal side of reading. Beginning with the last term of the second grade, the reading periods are devoted to literature.

Myths are chosen because childhood loves the symbolic. Myths bring nature nearer. Myths are an attractive and convenient medium to teach the glory and power and constancy of nature, and man's relation, whether of subjection or of dominion, to it. In

different garb it is the same thing that we find in Job, chaps. 38 and 39: "Where is the way where light dwelleth and as for darkness where is the place thereof ?" I think it is Emerson who says: "The universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called Cause, Operation, and Effect, or more poetically Jove, Pluto, Neptune." How fitting that each generation should first apprehend poetically what later it must struggle with poetically!

The Greek thought reappears several times in the course. In the third grade the Wonder Book is read; in the fifth grade the Odyssey (Books V, VI, VII, VIII, XIII) and in the sixth grade the Iliad (Books I, VI, XXII, XXIV) occupy three months of school life. These are placed before the drama because of their simplicity, their steadiness, and their repose. In one sense they prepare for the strenuousness and conventionality of Shakespeare. The great lesson of Homer, that everybody needs everybody, finds a ready acceptance with the children of the fifth and sixth grades. Wherever we use the Greek thought, we link it with some expression of our own time; with the myth of the seasons in Jean Ingelow's "Persephone; " John G. Saxe's poem supplements the story of Icarus; Tennyson's "Ulysses" accompanies Odysseus.

Literature is like other arts in one respect. It includes subject and treatment. There is a wide scope in treatment which must be intelligently recognized. Literature in the grade means the pure joy of sympathy. All the method required is to stimulate sympathy and to make the impression profound and dominating. It is not the place for detailed study, for etymology or structural analysis; not the place "to chase a panting syllable thru time and space; start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, to Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark."

In the second grade Longfellow's Hiawatha is read entire. The whole poem is idealized nature study. But its great value for second-grade work is in its rhythm. Children delight in rhythm. It satisfies some unrecognized idea of self-activity. It was while searching for this principle that I found this splendid encouragement from Plato (Republic). In effect he says: "Rhythm sinks most deeply into the recesses of the soul, bringing a just disdain for the unlovely and a commendation for the beautiful. The child receives it, feeds upon it, and grows to be noble and good before he is able to be reasoned with, and when reason comes welcomes her and recognizes her by the instinct of relationship, because he has been thus nurtured."

Somewhere in the intermediate part of the course it is necessary to introduce some strong prose to give word, phrase, and sentence practice, intelligently connected with the thought back of the words. This is hard work, but not too hard for the fourth grade. Soft pedagogy should be left behind by this time. For this purpose we have used in the last half of the fourth grade Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust. It gives fine opportunity for verbal reaction, not to mention its value on the character side. Most refreshing are the children's interpretations of the author's message, which is, in the words of N. D. Hillis, "that goodness is more than gold, and character outweighs intellect." Of all that Ruskin has written, this is the book in which he speaks directly to the child.

The prose in the course includes a complete book or essay of Holmes, Hawthorne, Irving, Emerson, Bunyan, Defoe, Dr. John Brown, Ruskin, Dickens; certain American state papers and certain fine passages from the Old Testament. This range secures familiarity with many different styles of literary composition.

Beginning with the fifth grade and continuing thruout the course, we read a book a term, usually in this order: fall term, prose; winter term, a drama; spring term, poetry. Sometimes it is necessary to change this order.

One word about the drama. Pupils of ward-school age do respond to the strong demands made by the drama. In these plays pupils are confronted with the institutional life of man. The impressions are strong. The reactions of condemnation or approval are also strong, suggesting the strength of their own springs of action. Imagination is kept active, and enthusiasm follows naturally.