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  • Educational Survival Kit:Learning, Basic Human Interests, and the Teaching of Children's Literature
  • Francelia Butler (bio), J. Bruce W. McWilliams (bio), and Robert G. Miner Jr. (bio)

The teaching of children's literature in the Humanities is of necessity innovative at this time because it is still not generally accepted or taught as part of the traditional curriculum. As a result of this state of affairs, and after consistent experimentation, we have happened upon a way of teaching children's literature which we think might eventually lead to a whole new way of structuring learning. What we suggest is to rearrange material in accordance with basic human interests instead of the traditional subjects.

Some recent theories of learning seem to reinforce our own findings. The Biological Boundaries of Learning, by Martin Seligman and Joanne Hager (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1972), suggests that it is not so much conditioning and environment but evolutionary (survival) value that determines the efficiency of learning. (Indeed, all human beings share certain basic needs and interests that derive from them, and are preoccupied by these survival needs and interests in one form or another all of their lives.) In Motivation and Personality, Abraham Maslow defines the basic needs as safety, love, esteem, self-actualization, and of course, the physiological ones. When these are satisfied,

At once other and higher needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still higher) needs emerge, and so on. This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency.

-Motivation and Personality, Harper & Row: New York, 1970

Beside Maslow's, many systems exist for determining basic human needs: mythology, psychology, sociology, anthrophology, philosophy, to name a few. For the purposes of our course, we decided that the simplest way to arrive at a working list was to go into the most fundamental substratum: the basic physiological activities necessary for survival, from which needs and interests derive—respiration, ingestion, digestion, excretion, and reproduction. We are not suggesting that a dignified university should have catalog offerings such as Excretion 101. What we are suggesting is that a curriculum structured around these functions might produce a more interesting and productive learning experience than the usual one.

Without attempting here to prove why learning is more efficient when structured this way (most probably because it is the ultimate kind of "relevance"), we [End Page 244] can only assert that we have tried the approach on classes of varying sizes and found it effective, at least if a consistently increasing enrollment is any indication.

Most literature for children assumes a quality of perception in its audience that literature for adults must strive to create: what T. S. Eliot, in speaking of the metaphysical poets, called "the direct sensuous apprehension of thought." Most non-children have lost this capacity, in part at least as a result of the enforced segregation of responses that modern education has deemed essential to its process. (See Children's Literature, I (1972), Appendix, for details.) Our experience has been that approaching children's literature through the basic functions helps adults escape that segregation and more fully respond to the literature.

Furthermore, as a way of structuring a course, the five functions offer interesting metaphorical perspectives, Thus respiration suggests a literature which enables smothered human beings to breathe freer. All learning is ingestion. Observations derived from this process parallel digestion. Reproduction, most tampered with by society, takes spiritual and other subliminal forms in literature. Excretion or the separation through digestion of unneeded products has its parallel in the many doubles in literature—the Doctor Jekylls and Mr. Hydes, where evil is separated and examined for any negative or positive values it may contain. The problem, then, is to determine which of the various symbols, metaphors, or literary works as a whole is most closely connected with which function. Most of them, of course, are involved in varying degrees in all literature.

Respiration and Children's Literature

One entire genre of literature—the pastoral—has to do with going back to a simpler form of existence, where one can...

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