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MYTH AND HISTORY IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS:

THE USE AND LIMITS OF EACH.

MAY H. PRENTICE, CLEVELAND CITY NORMAL SCHOOL.*

T

HE myth, so far as it has found its way into the elementary schools, has come usually as the handmaiden of nature study. The myths oftenest used are those which are accepted as poetical interpretations of certain natural phenomena. For this use, quite frequently an illuminative one merely, and also to point a moral, sometimes a forced one, the myth has been quite generally accepted. When the myth story is judiciously chosen, and its relation to the principal subject of thought is clear, these are real uses.

History has been firmly established in the schools of civilization since civilization reached the stage of self-consciousness, and particularly since the doctrine of evolution, with all its vast implications, has caused men to try to solve the problems of the future by a study of the past-not that they may imitate that past, but that they may read its prophecy of the future.

In recent years we have believed that history may be so presented as to have a great value and an ever-increasing interest in every year of the child's school life.

Is it possible that the province of myth is a larger one than it is usually considered; that it has a value all its own; a field lying alongside that of history, but not trenching upon it, and correlated but not subordinated to nature study and moral instruction?

The use, or uses, of history are so delightfully definite that we find it a pleasure to recount them and to remind ourselves on what solid ground we stand.

One of the most valuable services which the study of history renders to the child is to bring the child into a rational and ordered world. The sequence of events is not a mere time sequence, he finds. He comes, so, to recognize the law of development; nothing comes from nothing. Thus he comes to question whither? whence? and to be satisfied only when he sees clearly the relation of cause and effect.

No better medium than history can be found thru which to teach the essentials of truthful statement. The value of this *Read before the N. E. A. at Minneapolis, 1902.

knowledge is difficult to overrate. Some thoughtful people have feared to destroy the trust of the child in the parent, teacher, or text-book by too early knowledge of the fallibility of these; but the child who is brought up to stoutly support his own text-book against another in matters of detail, is being trained to set up authority as truth, instead of truth as authority. Moreover, a knowledge of the human tendency to error is likely to make the individual strive humbly to be accurate, and in so doing learn charity, whereas the belief that all error is willful and wicked breeds sensitiveness and false pride as well as intolerance. Further, finding brave, devoted, sincere and thoughtful people on both sides of any great question, the pupil should learn a large and generous tolerance-respect, courtesy toward those people whose views differ from his own.

The study of history exercises the imagination of the pupil within given and definite limits. The imagination wears bit and bridle, and serves its master to a given end. The ability to put one's self in another's place is needful to establish right relations. between man and man.

In the biographical form in which the child largely studies history he finds what we may call practical ideals-ideals which individual men have realized and therefore made to seem possible to the struggling soul which sees its own ideal self realized in them.

The child's knowledge of history does not consist alone in the accuracy of his information. To really know he must feel. Mrs. Heman's "Landing of the Pilgrims" is somewhat inaccurate, yet I doubt if it does not contain more history than a page of the "Classified Cyclopædia of Dates," valuable as that work is.

The larger patriotism which scorns the sentiment "My Country, right or wrong," the patriotism to which life or reputation is counted nothing worth, so that country or party may be stayed in evil and turned to the right, is best taught thru history, and thru it actual volitional unity with the ideal home, school, city, state is established.

The judgment is trained in this study. Even in the elementary grades the beginning should be made of a careful, critical weighing of values in human testimony; of balancing probabilities as to results; of making sure of one's data before arriving at a conclusion; of finding, merely as a cold, intellectual fact, that char

acter and burning enthusiasm and grim determination are factors which cannot be left out of the problem without causing the "answer" to come out wrong.

The study of history does and should cultivate the memory, and this is no slight thing. There is something tonic in the effort required to accomplish a reasonable amount of memorizing, and something very pleasant in the feeling of sure possession which follows. But the memory which the study of history trains is largely of the higher type, and tho the pupil may well commit to memory the preamble to the constitution, or the Gettysburg speech, yet the important thing is that the organization of his knowledge should be such that in his mind a fact can no more be separated from its relations than could the footprint on his island in the mind of Robinson Crusoe. History, I think, quite easily proves its right to a place in the school curriculum. It can as easily prove its right to a place in every grade, from the home school in which the child begs the parent, "Tell me about when you were little," to the highest grammar grade in which the child. gets one breathless glimpse of the significance of the slow and stately procession of the centuries.

The myth is not on so assured a footing as history. In our discussion of the myth we are liable to fall into platitudes, vagueness, or imaginary parallelisms. The realm of myth, which history trenches upon not at all, is that of free poetic fancy and imagination.

It is but a brief, brief time that the happiest little child tarries in that Garden of Eden in which man has dominion over all things. From the time when he first cries for the unattainable he is without its gate, and the sense of his own impotence is the angel with the flaming sword which bars the way against him. But forever on the skies of his banishment float a splendid mirage of the native home of his soul, which could not exist but for the reality of which it is the distorted image. In other words, the young soul very early discovers and chafes at its limitations, but it possesses also a sure sense of its oneness with that power and intelligence which is displayed in the universe. Looking out upon the world about him the myth-maker saw in the ordered workings of nature the manifestations of spirit akin to his own. Recognizing the kinship he felt-the child feels-that within himself dwells power, somehow fettered, that shall some day break its

bonds and be free. The myth-hero is the personification of the human soul so freed, joyous, power-wielding. It doth not yet appear what man shall be, but in the myth child-man dreams at child's dream of the future.

In myth and fairy story the child's spirit is at home, but this distinction between the mental attitude of the child and that of the man of the child race must constantly be kept in mind. To myth-accepting man the myth was fact, was his history, his science, his religion. To the modern child it is none of these things. In his self-made explanations of the world and its phenomena the child tends to the animism of the savage, but as to the stories and explanations presented by his elders he questions relentlessly, "Is it true?" by which he means "Is it a fact?"

Mrs. Jameson, quoted by Tylor in his "Primitive Culture," says: "I remember that when I once tried to explain to a good old woman the meaning of the word parable, and that the story of the Prodigal Son was not a fact, she was scandalized; she was quite sure that Jesus would never have told his disciples anything that was not true."

The study of the myth furnishes the basis for the intellectual perception or apperception-of later years, that truth is greater than fact. It can hardly be necessary to say here that any teaching of myths which emphasizes the idea of superstition or heathenism in their origin must fail to find the value here suggested.

Greater than any intellectual value is the power-giving and spirit-freeing effect of dwelling in that realm of feeling and being to which the myth is one of the great gateways. It was Froebel's great discovery that in play the child most freely expresses himself; that in free play every power stretches itself to the utmost, as it can never do in the most conscientious work. In the free play of the imagination, bounded by no unyielding barrier of facts, in images and situations unreal, fanciful, often grotesque, the child finds a keen joy akin to that physical delight found in the abandon of play. In the free play of the imagination the mind stretches itself to the utmost. It was at ten years of age that the inventor of one of the successful submarine boats, inspired by reading "Twenty Leagues Under the Sea" of Jules Verne, determined upon the undertaking which many years later he brought to a successful termination.

This is the kind of illustration of the value of the creative im

agination which the practical world loves and will listen to. But when shall we learn that the body is more than raiment, that the thought is more than the material form in which it embodies itself? You remember him, the singer, who

"Dwelt where level lands lay low and drear,

Long stretches of waste meadow pale and sere,
With dull seas languid tiding up and down.
The pale horizon walled them in and still,
No lifted peak, no slope, nor even mound.
Daily he gazed seaward:

'There must be hills,' he said,

'I know they stand at evening rosy-red
And purple in the dewy-shadowed morn.'
"So gazing, at last,

Sudden he saw,

Far out to seaward, mountain peaks appear
Slow-rising from the water, pale and clear,
Purple and azure; there they were as he
Had faithful yearning vision they must be."

"In vain he called his fellows to see. They saw not; not even when he brought his argosies thence. Yet of them who for the gladness in the Singer's face set sail to the unseen hills, some returned madmen like himself, rich in a wealth which the world could not see or measure:

"No man's scorn could hurt nor hinder them. No pity born

Of it could make them blush or make less

Their joy's estate; and as for loneliness,

They knew it not."

Forever better and more blessed is that child who has caught even one fleeting glimpse of the Singer's hills.

The breezy out-of-door non-morality of many of the classic myths makes them specially valuable literature for little children. It is not necessary that these little ones should all the time have their teeth set on edge by that fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil of which their forbears ate. There is serious danger in a child's too early consciousness of good and evil in himself. Conscience, as is well illustrated in the case of poor little Betty Sewall and other God-fearing, or was it devil-fearing, colonial children, may sometimes be transformed from the cheerful guide and friend of childhood to a tormenting demon, breeding morbidness, unrest, and irresolution in his little victim's breast. Nevertheless, some of the beautiful myths which do teach ethical

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