Story Telling and Education

BY GEORGE EVERETT PARTRIDGE, Ph.D.

The recent revival of story telling raises many interesting questions, both practical and theoretical. Considered as a part of a larger movement,—an effort to control and utilize the powers concealed within the instincts and unconscious forces of the mind—story telling takes a place in a problem which we can hardly be mistaken in calling one of the most important of our day. We have tended to value, in education, only that which we can see and fully understand; but now, as we begin seriously to employ arts in the school, and in the arts to subordinate knowledge to feeling, to use methods that yield no immediate or practical return, we demand an increasing faith in the powers of receptivity and inner response of the child, and we must learn more and more to detect, and to be satisfied with, unseen and remote effects.

In the art-invasion of the school, which is one aspect of this movement toward a wider education, it is difficult to see how, in the near future, we can be carried too far. We have been in the habit of emphasizing so much the learning process, that we are in danger of preventing the free and experimental attitude toward these new interests that seems needed at the present time. We are likely to have too little, rather than too much, faith in the play motives, the æsthetic moods, and the subconscious powers. We shall still want the child to express, to dramatize, to be examined upon, everything he receives: to externalize every response, even in the most intimate regions of feeling.

In calling the influx of artistic elements and methods into the school one phase of the education of the unconscious and deeper powers, we have a significant practical view-point, and are at the same time in touch with new results in science. As a practical ideal, we must aim to educate all the individual, not merely thought and voluntary movement. We wish to reach the inherited mechanisms of the organism; we wish to play upon all the potentialities of feeling and volition, and to utilize powers latent in the deposits of experience that the child has brought with him to the world.

These new results in science give to the well-worn principle that we must educate all the powers of the child a new meaning, and at least three important advances in psychology, in recent years, combine to put solid ground under our feet for a practical æsthetics, and give us principles by which we can coördinate the artistic elements and methods of the school.

The first of these advances is the genetic psychology that has arisen and flourished on the basis of Darwinian principles in biology, and which has shown the fundamental place of the feelings in education. The second is the new psycho-analysis, which, by showing the laws of the symbolic expression of hidden desires and feelings, has given us a new conception of the relation of art to life. The third new result is in the psychology of valuation, which has traced out, at least roughly, the course of development of the æsthetic and ethical states of consciousness.

New and incomplete and lacking in coördination as these principles are, they already yield us practical insights such as we have never been able to obtain from the older philosophies. We may confidently expect to see in time a solid science of the feelings, which will give us a “union of art and life” in a sound æstheticism in education: an æstheticism that will help to organize and control the fundamental feelings, and will overcome the superficial aloofness of our prevailing too formal and too detached art. This will be based upon the discovery that art, and the need of art, extend throughout all phases of human life; and that all true art must work in intimate union with practical affairs.

Considerations, such as these, seem essential for any study of the place of story telling, or any other art, in education.

II

The story telling “situation” is an artistic situation. It falls under the category of the beautiful, and is subject to all the general principles of æsthetics. Thus it stands in striking contrast with all formal methods of instruction, and all routine and unemotional learning. In such artistic situations the child is more fully present than in the formal school work, for he brings with him his deeper, unconscious nature.

The nature of the story as an educational art is best shown by its place in primitive life. Here the function of the story is clearly practical. By it religion, and all beliefs, morals, customs, and traditions are conveyed to the child. The folk-tales, the legends, the fairy-tales, the epics, and the myths of the world are not merely fanciful inventions of man; in a far more profound way than we yet fully understand, they express man’s most urgent needs and desires. Primitive man began early to express, in his stories, by means of a varied symbolism, his own hopes and wishes,—sometimes, thereby, keeping them alive through hard conditions, and passing them on to new generations; sometimes obtaining for them a vicarious satisfaction. These racial stories affect our feelings deeply, simply because there is continuity in evolution: because the past still lives in the present: because these stories are the products of universal needs, and symbolize or represent them. The story is thus a language of the feelings; it is a means of communication between the past and the unconscious and undeveloped potentialities of the present. The story is a symbolic language: its scenes and words are often trivial, but underneath them runs a deeper meaning. Everyone who has told stories must have felt this. We all know that when we tell a good story to a child, the child is receiving from us indescribable meanings, which the story itself conveys, but does not really contain or express,—and this sense of free-masonry of emotional meaning is the greatest charm of the story. One who feels this does not need to point a moral to a tale; and one who feels the need of the moral does not really tell his story.

Without knowing something about the nature of the æsthetic feelings and moods it is impossible to understand the scope of such an art as story telling. We are likely to think of æsthetic feeling as passive, or as merely “refining” in its effects: or, if inspiring, as mainly affecting the creative, artistic imagination. But this is not the case. All æsthetic feelings are intensely active. Because the responses are internal,—a play of forces within the organism—we are likely to overlook them altogether. In every æsthetic state, we have good reason to believe, there is a play of volitions, an active choosing, a drama of aroused and satisfied desire—definite, specific desire, which, though it may often be unconscious, if none the less real. And it is because of this drama of desire that æsthetic situations have meaning and value—educational value.

We cannot at present know,—and as practical educators we do not need to know—precisely the mechanism or content of every emotional state; yet we can often see clearly some of the deeper meaning and effect of æsthetic valuations. We can see sometimes, in the child’s interest in fairy-tales, for example, that the child is playing a part; that he is accepting for himself misfortunes for the sake of the good that issues from them; that he is appreciating, in some half-conscious way, the nature of a world in which events are not separate and haphazard, but are connected through far-seeing purposes. The child is not merely pleased at the story; he reacts to it by taking attitudes: by accepting, rejecting, deciding; by desiring, and by receiving satisfaction. In such experiences the child is even acquiring religion, and the standards and moods of later life are made up of just such feelings as are conveyed so effectively through the medium of the artistic story.

The story, then, is an important method in education. It is a very effective and natural devise for conveying the ideals and volitions of one generation to the mind of another, and of coördinating many individuals by means of the common possession of these ideals and purposes. We have yet to learn fully how far we can go by this and other kinds of artistry in teaching; but that the story should have a serious place in education, seems wholly certain. Just how large a place it should occupy is to be determined, in part, by experiment. Good story telling may be utilized in so many subjects of the curriculum, for so many purposes, and in so many departments of education, within and without the school; its artistic possibilities are so great; the present momentum of interest is so strong, and so well justified by science, that we may expect to see a widespread use of the story as a method of education. We shall expect to see story telling become a part of the equipment of all teachers, and the story literature of the world become more and more accessible, and better adapted to the child. And it is likely that the professional story teller will again flourish among us, as in the days before books and schools robbed him of his art.

The Story Tellers’ League, of Nashville, Tenn., issues an attractive Year Book for the current year. Among the topics announced for the year is a Greek pageant, “The Fire Regained,” to be given out of doors at the Parthenon, in Centennial Park. This pageant was written by Mr. Sidney Hirsch, a member of the Story Tellers’ League, and dedicated to the League. A popular subscription of $10,000 has been made by the city for its production. Seats will be arranged for 20,000 people. The Schools will furnish 800 young men and young women for the performance; a herd of sheep and a flock of doves enter into the pageant. It will be given five afternoons early in May.