XIIEDUCATING THE EMOTIONS
Life is full to the brim with emotions. Not war only nor political rallies nor the excited throngs at sports are vibrant with emotion, but there is not a single act of life which has not some emotion, quiet or intense, as its source, its companion and its effect. Man ought to be ruled by cold reason, but he responds to feelings and succumbs to feelings.
Today more than ever in the history of the world is emotionalism rampant. Civilization has made mankind a crowd. We touch elbows with the world. The Egyptian hermit has now “the privacy of a goldfish in a glass bowl.” An individual by himself may indeed deliberate and philosophize, but a crowd feels and acts. As soon as it stops cheering, it begins to disintegrate into thinking individuals, who creep silently back to the hermitage of home. The war, with its drives of all kinds, the elections, the athletic contests, have made us familiar with the nature of a crowd. The mob is a high-pressure crowd, and the feelings which burn in the crowd explode violently in a mob. Civilizationhas brought mankind into the closeness of a crowd, but not yet to the explosive confusion of a mob.
War taught us too the great value of morale. What is morale? What is that light in the sky, that solid ground under foot, that winged buoyancy of the heart? Morale might be described as organized emotion. A crowd is fickle because it feels instead of reasons. Morale is the counter-force to fickleness. Emotions are awakened, are focused on a given point, are stabilized, and the result is morale. Courage hardens to pluck, duty flames into devotion and bravery is transfigured into heroism.
Life therefore is flooded with emotion, all the way from every action of the individual up to the responsive crowd, yielding to panic, exploding into violence or steadied by morale. What then is education doing for the emotions? Whether education be considered a development of the individual capacities, or an adjustment of man to the community, education should not neglect the emotions. The controlling tendencies, however, of the modern school would seem to ignore or belittle emotions. Modern schools pride themselves on being practical and scientific. They have become more immersed in matter than in man. They are materialistic in the wide sense, or naturalistic, but they are less and less humanistic. Three great fields lie before the spirit of man, the field of truth, the field of beauty and the field of good. No traveler canreach beauty and good except through truth, but education seems to think its work is done if it travels the regions of truth and ignores the regions of beauty and good.
All education formerly could be divided into two stages, the earlier of preparation, the later of application. The individual was taught to speak and write and was equipped with the general information necessary to all. He who was able to speak and write was able to express himself, and self-expression, which argued that man’s powers were working normally, was the satisfactory goal in the first stage of education. After the development of the individual came his application to the study of his life-work in professional schools and universities.
In the former of these two stages, as self-expression was the end, language was the chief and almost exclusive means. Sciences were relegated to the university and informational subjects were left strictly subordinated, and the whole course was predominately humanistic. Modern education has profoundly changed this simple arrangement. The university method of education and electivism and specialization have been advanced to college, to high school and to grade school. Many natural sciences have been systematized and brought into early classes. The university chemistry and physics of fifty years ago are now in the grades. Besides professional courses, pre-medical, pre-law, pre-divinity, pre-engineering, pre-journalism, andin general pre-professional studies are in our schools or at the doors. The trades are not behind the professions. The million trades which concern themselves with the production of raw material or with the manufacture of raw material into finished products or with the distribution of finished products, all these are knocking at the door or looking in the window of our school. Nor is that all. As the professions want pre-professional and the trades pre-trade courses, so the state demands pre-citizen courses in civic and hygienics and military tactics, and the home exacts pre-family courses in eugenics and many domestic sciences. Do not close your curriculum list yet. The profession, the trade, the home, the state are not all, and to leave out religion, which calls for pre-religious courses in private schools, we have the whole field of sport and play in pre-dancing, pre-ball-playing, and at last pre-movies. To make the conquest of the practical complete, it is seriously advocated by a special committee of the N. E. A. that this bewildering multiplicity of sciences, professions, trades, civic, domestic and amusement courses should be begun at the junior high school or seventh grade.
There is the contrast. Life is emotional. The early schools that used to be devoted chiefly to writing and speaking, are now crowded with a multiplicity of fact subjects, and even language and literature, the most humanistic and emotional subjects of our courses, are taught theoretically by universityand scientific methods. In the JesuitRatio Studiorum, which did not differ essentially from other systems, four years of the lower schools were given to correct expression of the truth, one year to the element of interest, or beauty, in expression, and one whole year to the element of force, or good, in expression. These two latter classes were called humanities and rhetoric and correspond to the present freshman and sophomore classes in Jesuit colleges.
The reason why a whole year was given to the elements of interest and force in self-expression is found in the twofold nature of emotions. One set of emotions arises from the apprehension of good or avoidance of evil. Another set arises from the perception of the novel, humorous and beautiful. These latter comprehend the emotions of surprise, wonder, delight, awe, in general, the esthetic emotions. The other emotions, called appetitive, include love and hate, with desire and fear, joy and sadness, pity and anger and many others.
Fortunately for the teacher the teaching of emotions is somewhat simplified by the fact that both kinds of emotions respond, not to abstract truth but to truth in the concrete and concrete truth takes on beauty or good and awakens emotions through the imaginations of teacher and student. Teachers who themselves imagine will awaken emotions and educate emotions by exercising them. Teachers who imagine will make pupils imagine by making themtranslate all truth from the abstract to the concrete. The perpetual question on the lips of the teacher, “For instance?” will embody truth in the concrete, exercise students in imagination and make truth emotional and abiding.
Interesting and enthusiastic teachers are always training emotions. Emotion is not imparted by instruction; it is kindled by contact. Teachers who have their subjects transferred from dead books to their warm, living imaginations, will be interesting, will be moving. They will excite surprise and wonder by novelty and beauty of presentation. They will make their classes expand with love or shrink in horror at the pictures of good or evil.
After imagination and actual feeling on the part of both student and teacher, the next best means of educating emotions is the stimulating of action, especially in the way of original self-expression through the written and spoken word. One of the happy tendencies of our modern education is the restoring of oral expression to its former high place.
These means just mentioned will be helpful in any subject of the curriculum, but the principal instrument in the schools for training the emotions will be literature. Literature is the embodiment of human emotions, in story, in essay, poem, and speech. The schools must hold on to the teaching of literature. They must make a stand against the imperialism of facts and so-called practical subjects. The schools must never forget that it is atleast just as practical to have a heart in life as to have a head. A modern French scholar has said: “Humanities and letters are man himself, to remove them from education, it would be necessary to commence by taking man from man.”
Instruction in trades is a knack, not an education of man. A savage can learn to run an automobile, and there are many today running automobiles, but a savage does not enjoy literature or produce literature. Science has its center outside of man, it is impersonal and unemotional. Literature is human, is personal, it appeals to the heart which must not be starved while the head is stuffed.
But even when the teachers of literature have the works of man in their hands, they must not rob them of all emotions by making their teaching of them historical only, or analytical only or theoretical only, lowering Macbeth to a footnote in Scottish history or to an argument for the theory of the romantic movement or to a dissertation on the psychology of temptation. Literature must be taught as literature, not as history, not as ethics. Literature should be taught as an art, not as a science. The teacher should keep self-expression in view. The teacher will consider the work of literature as the expression of a man. Before the class the masterpiece of literature will grow and crystallize into unity. The students will watch its creation; they will reflect the light from the eyes of an enthusiastic teacher; they will grasp the truth vividlyand emotionally; they will be thrilled with the truth that has taken shape in their teacher’s imagination, that has been dramatized before them in suggestive detail, that will teach the students themselves how to think, how to imagine, how to find for the embodied truth a local habitation and a name, how to express themselves in words which fascinate and inflame.
So will the emotions by their exercise be developed and by their expression be controlled. The world of the classroom is a little world and its tiny emotions are as dew-drops to a deluge, but for the young hearts in school the world of the classroom is a gigantic world and its slight emotions are adequate to teach beginners. For a dew drop may be a deluge for a violet and its very food and life.