Walter Lowrie Hervey

“ And a student pursuing a university course in education, after seeking to know what stories to choose, where to find them, how and to whom and wherefore to tell them, touched the same truth when he said, "It gradually dawned upon me that if I knew how to tell a story, I had mastered the main part of the art of teaching." For to know a good story is to have literary and pedagogic taste; to adapt or make a good story for children is both to know the secret of the mind of a child and to have creative power; to tell a good story is to be a master of a noble art. ”

“ To us as well as to our Lord himself it makes a vital difference whether his youth was spent amid arid wastes—as many of us picture Palestine—or in the peaceful beauty of such a retreat as that described for us in Archdeacon Farrar's picture.
We must indeed have knowledge, as full, as exact, as personal as it can be made for us or as we can make it for ourselves. And from this will come love. The more full, exact, and personal our vision, the more deep-seated will be our love. We should therefore seek our knowledge at first hand. ”

“ But the plants of love to God and moral taste are tenderer than these. They must be shined upon, warmed, and watered many days before they are ready to give an account of themselves. Love is a silent thing before it is outspoken. True feeling has few words, is not self-conscious, likes not to be asked questions. In its own good time it wells up and finds vent in deeds, and even in words. ”

“ So it is in story-telling. Never tell a story for its own sake, merely, but for the sake of the truth that lies embedded in it. A story or an illustration must grow as naturally out of the subject as a flower grows out of a plant. ”

“ Here, then, we have some of the types of picture-work: the picture and the story, the parable in its various forms, and the word-picture—whether of things or actions; illustrations or side-lights, the "likes" with which a skilful teacher illumines his teaching, and the objects, models, maps, and sketches on pad or blackboard, with which he re-enforces the lagging imaginations of his hearers.
What, then, is a picture? A picture is anything that helps us to see more clearly, feel more heartily, and act upon more faithfully the truth which is not or cannot be immediately present to our senses. ”

“ The teacher should be a capitalist. He should not run dry every Sunday, and fill in during the week only enough for the next lesson; as a schoolboy who fills his mind with facts and empties it on examination day. The true teacher is independent of the "Quarterly." He uses it but does not lean on it. For the facts there given are, as a rule, isolated, and so half dead; the illustrations are at best warmed over. Neither can give a strong head of steam. There is not enough, and what there is is cold. ”

“ One is never more than two bases away from the home plate. It is not a cross-country run, but a game of score and tally.
At the opposite pole from this intensive method is the typical Sunday-school lesson. The typical Sunday-school lesson is—is it not?—hodge-podge. Does the last lesson always bear upon the lesson of to-day? Is to-day's aim single? Do you hold before your mind the one point, the one picture, that your pupils shall carry away with them as an everlasting possession, or do you have in mind to display so many pictures, so many points, that some must needs take effect? ”

“ Who cannot at this moment see with his mind's eye a picture of such a class—on the one side a vision of inattention, insubordination, irreverence, on the other, incompetence, blindly, consecratedly, painfully doing his—or her—best?
In all things relating to the common schools there is a quickening of popular interest and of professional spirit. The time is at hand when none but trained experts will be allowed to teach. ”

“ Like all picture-work, it fulfills its mission when it serves as a scaffolding, when it is kept subordinate. It fails when it obscures the truth, not helps to build it. False picture-work is anything that stands in the way of our seeing truth; as when we cannot see the woods for the trees—cannot see the Sunday-school lesson for the bizarre exhibitions on the blackboard. ”

“ He is to be put in bed in a strange room, and is to go to sleep alone. Spring the idea upon him and he will reject it. Prepare him for it, by telling him a story of a little boy who went to bed in a new room, a new bed, and all alone, and he is eager for the hour of bed-time. When the time comes, the picture already in his mind, of a little boy, a new room, a peaceful going to bed, welcomes the actual experience, point for point. The wise mother has made a nest for the experience.
So might a teacher prepare the minds of his pupils to receive the idea of ninety millions of miles. ”

“ Should one be in danger of being misunderstood in saying that we do not have enough of reading the Bible for fun, for the pure enjoyment of its stories and of its matchless pictures? The rest will come in due course. It will come just so surely as the story is realized.
But important as reading is, telling is incomparably better. The eye of the teacher is then fixed on the class, not on the book; the tone is conversational, the hand is free to gesture and to draw. One can grasp the whole of the story and the whole of the situation. One can bring out dramatic power. ”

“ The only way to work up the raw materials of a boy into real boy is to bring him into touch with them, to have him taste, see, handle. But in order to be tasted these materials must be real. And to make them real is the first duty of the teacher. It is also his hardest task. For consider what it costs to make a thing so real to yourself that it can't help being real to some one else! ”

“ Picturesque language means that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a picture arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writings and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous, provided one have lived sufficiently to fill his mind with the raw materials of such pictures. One bred in the woods shall not lose his lesson in the roar of cities.... ”

“ While many of the stories both of the Old and of the New Testament need expansion rather than contraction—think of trying to bring the masterly story of Jonah or the wonderfully simple tale of the Shunemite's son into any smaller compass!—yet the need of condensing the long stories, of Abraham, Joseph, David, Daniel, for instance, is obvious, for we must give the children a picture of the whole life and character of these great and simple figures. ”

“ You must have seen, acted, felt, if you would make your hearers see and feel and act. Talk is cheap, especially borrowed talk. It is not the story in the lesson quarterly that you can build into the lives of your class; it is the story in you. It is the picture that has become a part of your life, that will be most likely to be built into the fabric of theirs. ”

“ Story-telling, both by teachers and pupils, is here suggested as a means of further enrichment.
The "wholes" of Scripture narrative, whole books, whole lives, whole stories told as wholes by the teacher or by a single pupil, and not picked out piecemeal by the teacher from halting individuals—these are the things that in the class give interest and that in the mind live and grow and bear fruit. "Moral power is the effect of large unbroken masses of thought; in these alone can a strong interest be developed," and from these alone can a steady will spring. ”

“ The story must have one more characteristic, if its effect is to be lasting and emphatic; it must carry on its face the strongest and clearest stamp of human greatness. For a boy distinguishes the common and ordinary from the praiseworthy as well as we; he even has this distinction more at heart than we have, for he does not like to feel himself small, he wishes to be a man. The whole look of a well-trained boy is directed above himself, and when eight years old his entire line of vision extends beyond all histories of children. ”

“ In picture-work, as in everything else, love is the principal thing. A teacher of little children, whose privilege it is to help them to enter into loving appreciation of buds and leaves, soil and roots, winter and how everything prepares for it, spring and how it wakes everything to new life, must herself love nature. No "science" falsely so called will suffice. "Do you really love nature?" as President G. Stanley Hall has said with an indescribable emphasis on every word, is the question of questions to ask such a teacher. "Do you really love the pictures of the Bible?" ”

“ Now pictures help toward unity of aim in a lesson in two ways: they help to elaborate the one main point—twenty illustrations of one point, not twenty points from one illustration; they help to teach us the law of unity, for a true picture has but one theme, is always simple.
Reality.
"The great trouble with the stuff taught in our schools is that so much of it always remains stuff, and never gets worked up into boy." So said Dr. Parkhurst, in a sermon from the text, "Taste and see that the Lord is good." ”

“ Show the bad to children plainly, but not as an object of desire, and they will recognize that it is bad. Interrupt a narrative with moral precepts, and they will find you a wearisome narrator. Relate only what is good, and they will feel it monotonous, and the mere charm of variety will make the bad welcome. Remember your own feelings on seeing a purely moral play. But give to them an interesting story, rich in incidents, relationships, characters, strictly in accordance with psychological truth, and not beyond the feelings and ideas of children ”

“ In fact the younger they are the better sometimes seems to be their taste. Are we doing all that we may to gratify, and at the same time to form, this taste?
But our term, "picture-work," includes more than pictures painted with the brush. Literature is full of pictures no less beautiful in theme and in execution, and even more important in meaning, than Raphael's masterpiece. The story of the good bishop, Monseigneur Bienvenu, as it is told for us in "Les Miserables," is a picture, and so are all such stories. Literature is full of them. The Bible is a treasure-house of masterpieces. ”

“ He who has never read or heard as a whole, at one, or at most, two sittings, the story of an entire book of the Bible, as Jonah, Daniel, Job, or one of the Gospels, has missed one of the chief sources of interest and power. ”

“ In short, they seem not to understand that common sense applies even to blackboard work.
What are the points in good blackboard work? To be quite dogmatic, for the sake of brevity, good blackboard work is:
1. Simple. "Blackboard ingenuities, dissolving from acrostic into enigma, and from enigma into rhyme are not necessary" and they are harmful besides. They distract, distort, make dizzy. The best blackboard work has the fewest lines, the most unity in its variety, the least approach to anything like a maze. ”

“ Who has not felt the same when listening to one who speaks of that which he does know? And who has not felt the difference when trying to listen to one who talks, but whose words are not loaded with life? ”

“ The art of "getting a good ready" is an art worth mastering. In sermon or Sunday-school lesson alike the beginning is the main concern. It is a good plan to seem to waste time at the start. Nine tenths plowing, harrowing, marking out, one tenth sowing, and (as we shall see) no looking for a crop at all, is a just proportion for the most of our lessons. We shall be always safe in counting upon a sufficient number of stony-ground hearers to justify us in clearing the ground, and making it mellow with interest and expectation. ”

“ Modern writers and modern ways of thinking are, in general, too reflective, self-conscious, subjective, and, where children are concerned, too direct, bare, "preachy."
5. But the secret of story-telling lies not in following rules, not in analyzing processes, not even in imitating good models, though these are all necessary, but first of all in being full—full of the story, the picture, the children; and then, in being morally and spiritually up to concert pitch, which is the true source of power in anything. From these comes spontaneity; what is within must come out; the story tells itself ”

“ Taste.
If deliberation is a virtue at the start, brevity and patience are a necessity at the finish. When the teacher has planted an interest-awakening picture in the minds of the children, his main work is done. He may safely leave them to make the application. He has supplied the cause; the effect will take care of itself. It is often convenient and suggestive to remember that children are not fools. "A child knows a thing or two," 'tis said, "before he knows much of anything." And one of the very first things he knows is how to put his finger on the moral in a story ”

“ It is a favorite simile among writers on education that the mind is not unlike a field, and that the steps of instruction answer to the successive stages of the farmer's work. First there is the preparation of the soil, then come the planting, the cultivating, and in due time the harvest, the mill, and the market. Two of these steps, the preparing and the applying, concern us here; the work of presenting and elaborating is a theme by itself, and has been treated in a separate chapter. ”

“ Better a child never went to Sunday-school than that he should go to have interest deadened. He may wait many a year before the freshness returns.
"Two grand qualifications are equally necessary in the education of children," said Horace Mann, "love and knowledge." The teacher of the Bible must indeed know—not know about, merely, but be personally acquainted with—the old patriarchs, their dress, occupation, country, way of life, and character ”

“ Miss Lucy Wheelock says that "the most satisfactory map is one which the teacher makes herself, drawing the outlines with a blue marking crayon on a sheet of white silesia, or finished cotton cloth, and putting in thin strips of wood or rollers at top and bottom, so that it will hang easily."
The sand table, especially with work for younger children, is indispensable. This every one can learn to make and manage and can fit out with the needed materials. Let no one shrink from the simple task of getting together the equipment and learning to model a map of Palestine. ”

“ The best blackboard work is that which is original, personal. That which is given in the "lesson helps" is just what you should not use. It is not yours. If it does not help you to find your own way, it is useless—and worse than useless, because it tempts you to borrow without inspiring you to create.
6. In fine, the mission of the blackboard, as of all picture-work, is to help us to see the truth in the world or the truth in our own selves by showing us a truth that is easier to see or that is nearer at hand than that which we would learn. ”

“ No one who has tried to tell Bible stories to children, whether young or old, can fail to appreciate the need of adaptation: of enrichment and expansion on the one hand, of condensation on the other. Suppose the story to be told is the parable of the Good Samaritan. There must first be preliminary work. The minds of the children must be made ready, not merely for the lesson, as, for example, by a talk on the meaning of "neighbor," but also for the story. ”

“ The effects of practice have already been cited in the case of Beecher. It is one of the mournful facts of human life that so many powers that might have been brought out by practice always remain in the latent state. Practice story-telling, practice finding "likes," and you will find before long that there is growing up in you a new power, just as if you were to discover in your organism a stop, by pulling which you could jump ten feet in the air. "Practice is nine tenths. A course of mobs is good practice for orators. ”

“ In a recent sermon Dr. Parkhurst illustrated his single point from botany, physics, physiology, a ship, and from the actual experience of two men engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the same appetite.
But the power of these great preachers is only the reflex of the method of Christ himself. No man had greater power in picture-work. In range, fertility, aptness, and result, the word-pictures of Jesus stand alone in the history of teaching, just as in respect of beauty and power they stand alone in literature. ”

“ The truth to be pictured may be the truth of people, places, and actions—external things; it may be the truth of character and of inner life—the things that are unseen, which we could never see at all except by the aid of real things or pictures of real things ”