Original editor’s note: This article is one of three funded by a grant from the Missouri Endowment for the Humanities, Inc., a state based arm of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Children in elementary schools spend their days in a shower of other people’s words. Many are teachers’ words, but among them might also be these:
There was once a poor widow who lived with her two daughters in a cottage in the forest. In the garden by the cottage two rose trees grew. In summer one rose tree had snowwhite roses on it. The other rose tree had rose-red roses on it.
Or these:
You walk
down this canyon
this place of high red cliffs
and turning winds
and hawks that float
in a far white sky
and you wonder:
“Am I the first one
ever
to come this way?”
Or these:
Many, many years ago before the animals were finished, they had no marks. All were a plain gray-brown color.
One day Chui, the leopard, and Fisi, the hyena, were out hunting together. They saw two beautifully painted warriors coming towards them on the plain.
“Oh, how wonderful they look!” said Chui.
“Yes, indeed,” agreed Fisi, “How I wish I could wear bright colors!”
Or the words of many other poems and stories that school children read or have read to them in their elementary years. What role should literature such as this play in our elementary schools? What can parents and the community ask of the teachers and books that bring literature and children together?
My own view, and the point of this brief article, is that the words of poems and stories possess a special clarifying power which, when effectively used, can help students better understand themselves. More than any of the other humanities, literature gives us the chance to make self knowledge as important a part of classroom life as the three R’s.
The fact is, however, the words of poetry and stories often serve a different purpose in the schools: to teach reading skills alone. One widely-used series of readers, for example, is Reading Systems, published by Scott Foresman; I quoted my opening pieces of poetry and fiction from it. According to the editors, the main goal of the series is “to teach pupils to read so well that they respond to written language as readily as they do to spoken language.” As the editors of the Roberts English Series for elementary schools put it, exposure to poetry and stories is supposed to “teach the child to read more accurately and sensitively [and] … to discover consistently and accurately what is on the printed page.”
No one would argue with a goal like that. Still, as Bruno Bettelheim has recently said, “the acquisition of skills, including the ability to read, becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one’s life.” If we want to use literature to teach our children how to read, we should do so through a program that leads to something as important as reading skills to a student’s life: a growing awareness of and regard for his or her values and attitudes, thoughts and feelings, life-patterns and goals. It is themselves, not the words of poetry and stories alone, that students should learn to read and appreciate in school.
For this to happen in an elementary classroom, the teacher must be both willing and able. Whenever possible, he or she should stop being the traditional kind of teacher who asks most of the questions in the classroom and knows most of the right answers. The teacher must be willing to listen, not just talk, and to make the classroom a place that encourages students to respond freely and honestly to literature. Then, the teacher needs to know how to use specific activities that will enable students to move from reading literature to reading themselves through the literature. In general, the format for this process is circular: from the literature, to ourselves, and then back to the literature, which then should glow with a sense and meaning that come from seeing ourselves in it. Like the surface of a lake in shifting angles of wave and light, the poem’s or story’s word surface is alternately transparent and reflective, allowing us to see into it and then into ourselves and then again into it, but more deeply.
The three works I quoted from at the start are full of possibilities for this kind of learning: “Snow White and Rose Red” in its concern with, say, magical change or the nature of evil, Byrd Baylor’s poem “Before You Came This Way” with its emphasis on the unique past that each person and place contains, and “Colored Coats” by showing beauty of different kinds.
Because they deal powerfully with being human, poems and stories always offer openings into ourselves that students and teachers can learn to explore. Reading literature can thus be more than simply technical, more than a matter of word skills and mastery. It becomes a richly human experience that students may learn to return to again and again for pleasure and understanding.
Originally published in The Paper, March 1979.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1979_03.pdf, printed page(s) 3; PDF page(s) 3.
