Part 5 (1/2)
We have already noted the great significance of American history stories in fourth and fifth grades. It is from the early pioneer epoch and the colonial history that we derive much of our best educative history. The heroism of these old days has been commemorated in story and poem by our best writers.
As we approach the Revolutionary crisis a new body of choice literary products, aglow with the fire of patriotism and independence, is found stored up for the joy and stimulus of our growing young Americans: ”Paul Revere's Ride,” ”Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill,” Was.h.i.+ngton's letters, ”A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party,” ”Ode for Was.h.i.+ngton's Birthday,” ”Lexington” (Holmes), ”The Song of Marion's Men,” ”The Green Mountain Boys,” Webster's speeches at Bunker Hill and on Adams and Jefferson, ”Old Ticonderoga” (Hawthorne), Burke's speech on the American War, Was.h.i.+ngton's ”Farewell to the Army,” The Declaration of Independence, ”Under the Old Elm,” and descriptions of some of the great scenes of the war by our best historians.
It is to be desired that children in the seventh grade may have opportunity in regular history lessons to study in detail a few of the central topics of the Revolutionary epoch. This will put them in touch with the spirit and surroundings of the Americans.
In the reading lessons of the same grade we may well afford to discover and feel what our best patriots and men of letters have said and felt in view of the struggle for freedom. The n.o.blest expressions of sentiment upon great men and their achievements are contagious with the young.
Patriotism can find no better soil in which to strike its deepest roots than the n.o.ble outbursts of our orators and poets and patriotic statesmen. The c.u.mulative effect of these varied but kindred materials is greater than when scattered and disconnected. They mutually support each other, and when they are brought into close dependence upon parallel historical studies, we may well say that the children are drinking from the deep and pure sources of true Americanism.
Parallel to whatever history we attempt to teach in the eighth grade should run a selection of the best literary products that our American authors can furnish, and here again we are rich in resources. The thought and life of our people find their high-water mark in the poet's clarion note and the statesman's impa.s.sioned appeal. No others have perceived the destiny of our young republic as our cherished poets, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and Emerson. They have stood upon the mountain tops, looking far and wide through the clear atmosphere, while the great army of the people has been tenting in the valleys below. These wakeful priests and prophets have caught the bright tints of the morning while the people were still asleep, and have witnessed the suffused glory of the sunset clouds when the weary ma.s.ses below had already forgotten the day's toil. One thing at least, and that the greatest, can be done for our children before they finish the common school course. They may rise into this pure atmosphere of poet, patriot, sage, and prophet. They may hear these deathless strains and feel the thrill of these clarion notes. Let their ears be once attuned to the strength and harmony of this music, and it will not cease to echo in their deeper life. The future patriots will be at hand, and the coming years will see them rising to the great duties that inevitably await them. We have a body of n.o.ble, patriotic material which is capable of producing this effect if handled by skilful teachers: the Ordinance of 1787, _The Federalist_, Numbers 1 and 2, Was.h.i.+ngton's ”Inaugurals” and the ”Farewell Address,” Everett's ”Oration on Was.h.i.+ngton,” ”O Mother of Mighty Race” (Bryant); ”Our Country's Call” (Bryant); ”Abraham Lincoln”
(Bryant); Lincoln's ”Inaugurals” and ”Gettysburg Speech,” ”Army Hymn”
and ”The Flower of Liberty” (Holmes), Webster's ”Second Speech on Foot's Resolution,” The Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, ”The Fortune of the Republic” (Emerson), etc., ”Antiquity of Freedom” (Bryant); ”Centennial Hymn” (Whittier); ”The Building of the s.h.i.+p” (Longfellow); ”The Poor Voter on Election Day” (Whittier).
Why not gather together these sources of power, of unselfish patriotism, of self-sacrifice, of n.o.ble and inspiring impulse? Let this fruit-bringing seed be sown deep in the minds and hearts of the receptive young. What has inspired the best of men to high thinking and living can touch them.
It is not by reading and declaiming a few miscellaneous fragments of patriotic gush, not by waving flags and banners and following processions, that the deeper sentiments of patriotism and humanity are to be touched, but by gathering and concentrating these fuller, richer sources of spiritual power and conscious national destiny. The schoolroom is by far the best place to consolidate these purifying and conserving sentiments. By gathering into a rising series and focussing in the higher grades the various forms, in prose and verse, in which the genius of our country has found its strongest expression; by a.s.sociating these ringing sentiments with the epochs and crises of our history, with the valorous deeds of patriots upon the field and of statesmen in the senate, with the life and longings of home-nurtured poets and sages,--we shall plant seed whose fruitage will not disappoint the lovers of the fatherland.
Mr. Horace E. Scudder, in his two essays on ”Literature” and ”American Cla.s.sics in the Common School,” has portrayed with convincing clearness the spiritual power and high-toned Americanism which breathe from those literary monuments which have been quarried from our own hillsides and chiselled by American hands. We recommend to every teacher the reading in full of these essays, from which we quote at much length:--
”Fifty years ago there were living in America six men of mark, of whom the youngest was then nineteen years of age, the oldest forty-four.
Three of the six are in their graves and three still breathe the kindly air. [Since this was written, in 1888, the last of the six has pa.s.sed away.] One only of the six has held high place in the national councils, and it is not by that distinction that he is known and loved. They have not been in battle; they have had no armies at their command; they have not ama.s.sed great fortunes, nor have great industries waited on their movements. Those pageants of circ.u.mstances which kindle the imagination have been remote from their names. They were born on American soil; they have breathed American air; they were nurtured on American ideas. They are Americans of Americans. They are as truly the issue of our national life as are the common schools in which we glory. During the fifty years in which our common school system has been growing up to maturity these six have lived and sung; and I dare say that the lives and songs of Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell have an imperishable value, regarded as exponents of national life, not for a moment to be outweighed in the balance by the most elaborate system of common schools which the wit of man may devise. The nation may command armies and schools to rise from the soil, but it cannot call into life a poet. Yet when the poet comes and we hear his voice in the upper air, then we know the nation he owns is worthy of the name. Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? Even so, pure poetry springs from no rank soil of national life.
”I am not arguing for the critical study of our great authors, in the higher grades of our schools. They are not the best subjects for critical scholars.h.i.+p; criticism demands greater remoteness, greater foreignness of nature. Moreover, critical study is not the surest method of securing the full measure of spiritual light, though it yields abundant gain in the refinement of the intellectual nature and in the quickening of the perceptive faculties. I am arguing for the free, generous use of these authors in the princ.i.p.al years of school life. It is then that their power is most profoundly needed, and will be most strongly felt. We need to put our children in their impressionable years into instant and close connection with the highest manifestation of our national life. Away with the bottle and the tube! Give them a l.u.s.ty draft at the mother's full breast!
”Nor do I fear that such a course will breed a narrow and parochial Americanism. On the contrary, it would destroy a vulgar pride in country, help the young to see humanity from the heights on which the masters of song have dwelt, and open the mind to the more hospitable entertainment of the best literature of every clime and age. I am convinced that there is no surer way to introduce the best English literature into our schools than to give the place of honor to American literature. In the order of nature a youth must be a citizen of his own country before he can become naturalized in the world. We recognize this in our geography and history; we may wisely recognize it also in our reading.
”The place, then, of literature in our common school education is in spiritualizing life, letting light into the mind, inspiring and feeding the higher forces of human nature.
”It is the business of the old to transmit to the young the great traditions of the past of the country, to feed anew the undying flame of patriotism. There is the element of destiny. No nation lives upon its past; it is already dead when it says, 'Let us eat and drink to-day; for to-morrow we die.' But what that destiny is to be may be read in the ideals which the young are forming; and those ideals, again, it is the business of the old to guide. They cannot form them; the young must form them for themselves; but whether these ideals shall be large or petty, honorable or mean, will depend upon the sustenance on which they are fed.
”Now in a democracy, more signally than under any other form of national organization, it is vitally necessary that there should be an unceasing, unimpeded circulation of the spiritual life of the people. The sacrifice of the men and women who have made and preserved America, from the days of Virginia and New England to this hour, has been ascending from the earth in a never-ending cloud; they have fallen again in strains of music, in sculpture, in painting, in memorial hall, in tale, in oration, in poem, in consecration of life; and the spirit which ascended is the same as that which descended. In literature above all is this spirit enshrined. You have but to throw open the shrine, and the spirit comes with its outspread blessings upon millions of waiting souls. Entering them, it reissues in countless shapes, and thus is the life of the nation in its highest form kept ever in motion, and without motion is no life.
”The deposit of nationality is in laws, inst.i.tutions, art, character, and religion; but laws, inst.i.tutions, character, and religion are expressed through art and mainly through the art of letters. It is literature, therefore, that holds in precipitation the genius of the country; and the higher the form of literature, the more consummate the expression of that spirit which does not so much seek a materialization as it shapes itself inevitably in fitting form. Long may we read and ponder the life of Was.h.i.+ngton, yet at last fall back content upon those graphic lines of Lowell in 'Under the Old Elm,' which cause the figure of the great American to outline itself upon the imagination with large and strong portraiture. The spirit of the orations of Webster and Benton, the whole history of the young giant poised in conscious strength before his triumphant struggle, one may catch in a breath in those glowing lines which end 'The Building of the s.h.i.+p.' The deep pa.s.sion of the war for the Union may be overlooked in some formal study of battles and campaigns, but rises pure, strong, and flaming in the immortal 'Gettysburg Speech.'
”Precisely thus the sentiment of patriotism must be kept fresh and living in the hearts of the young through quick and immediate contact with the sources of that sentiment; and the most helpful means are those spiritual deposits of patriotism which we find in n.o.ble poetry and lofty prose, as communicated by men who have lived patriotic lives and been fed with coals from the altar.
”It is from the men and women bred on American soil that the fittest words come for the spiritual enrichment of American youth. I believe heartily in the advantage of enlarging one's horizon by taking in other climes and other ages, but first let us make sure of that great expansive power which lies close at hand. I am sure there never was a time or country where national education, under the guidance of national art and thought, was so possible as in America to-day.
”The body of wholesome, strong American literature is large enough to make it possible to keep boys and girls upon it from the time when they begin to recognize the element of authors.h.i.+p until they leave the school, and it is varied and flexible enough to give employment to the mind in all its stages of development. Moreover, this literature is interesting, and is allied with interesting concerns; half the hard places are overcome by the willing mind, and the boy who stumbles over some jejune lesson in his reading-book will run over a bit of genuine prose from Irving which the schoolbook maker, with his calipers, p.r.o.nounces too hard.
”We have gone quite far enough in the mechanical development of the common school system. What we most need is the breath of life, and reading offers the n.o.blest means for receiving and imparting this breath of life. The spiritual element in education in our common schools will be found to lie in reserve in literature, and, as I believe, most effectively in American literature.
”Think for a moment of that great, silent, resistless power for good which might at this moment be lifting the youth of the country, were the hours for reading in school expended upon the undying, life-giving books! Think of the substantial growth of a generous Americanism, were the boys and girls to be fed from the fresh springs of American literature! It would be no narrow provincialism into which they would emerge. The windows in Longfellow's mind looked to the east, and the children who have entered into possession of his wealth travel far.
Bryant's flight carries one through upper air, over broad champaigns.
The lover of Emerson has learned to get a remote vision. The companion of Th.o.r.eau finds Concord become suddenly the centre of a very wide horizon. Irving has annexed Spain to America. Hawthorne has nationalized the G.o.ds of Greece and given an atmosphere to New England. Whittier has translated the Hebrew Scriptures into the American dialect. Lowell gives the American boy an academy without cutting down a stick of timber in the grove, or disturbing the birds. Holmes supplies that hickory which makes one careless of the crackling of thorns. Franklin makes the America of a past generation a part of the great world before treaties had bound the floating states into formal connection with venerable nations. What is all this but saying that the rich inheritance we have is no local ten-acre lot, but a part of the undivided estate of humanity. Universality, Cosmopolitanism,--these are fine words, but no man ever secured the freedom of the Universe who did not first pay taxes and vote in his own village.”--”Literature in School” (Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.).
9. The series of American cla.s.sics is nowise confined to the ideas of local or national patriotism, but above and beyond that deep and powerful sentiment which magnifies the opportunity and manifest destiny of our nation, it grasps at the ideal form and content of those Christian virtues which now and evermore carry healing and comfort to the toiling millions. Our poets, as they have pondered on the past and looked into the future, were not able to be content with less than the best. As the vision of the coming years unrolled itself before them they looked upon it with joy mingled with solicitude. In the mighty conflicts now upon us only those of generous and saintly purpose and of pure hearts can prevail.
”Brief is the time, I know, The warfare scarce begun; Yet all may win the triumphs thou hast won.
Still flows the fount whose waters strengthened thee, The victors' names are yet too few to fill Heaven's mighty roll; the glorious armory That ministered to thee is open still.”--BRYANT.