Talks on Teaching Literature — Themes and Context

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Authors: Bates, Arlo, 1850-1918 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2015 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Literature -- Study and teaching Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 65,845

Reading time 287 min

Text sections 25

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #50082

Arlo Bates's 1905 lectures examine the paradox of teaching literature as an art, emphasizing structure, student originality, and the use of unfamiliar extracts to test genuine comprehension.

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h farmer boys, you understand; but the moment they were outside, they gave a cheer, just to express things they couldn't have put into words. When they came in they were alive to the ends of their fingers, and we went over that old Alligation with a perfect rush." This sort of thing would not be possible anywhere outside of the old-fashioned country school, but it is a capital illustration of the way in which poetry may stir the enthusiasm.

More valuable still, because at once deeper and most lasting, is the effect of literature in nourishing imagination. The real progress which children make in education—the assimilation of the knowledge which they receive—depends largely upon this power. In many branches of study this is easily evident. What a child actually knows of geography or of history obviously depends upon the extent to which his mind is able to make real places or events remote in space or in time. The same is true of those studies where the fact is not so evident; and it is hardly too much to say that the advance of any student in higher education is measured by the development of his imagination.

The teacher of literature in the secondary schools, then, is to consider that although his work is primarily done as a part of the school requirement, he need not be without some clear and deliberate intention in regard to the permanent effect upon the education and so upon the character of the pupil. He may treat the getting of his charges through the examinations as a purely secondary matter; a matter, moreover, which is practically sure to be accomplished if the greater and better purposes of the study have been secured. Besides a general knowledge of literary history, the student should gain from his training in the secondary school a vivid sense of the importance and value of words; an appreciation of word-values as shown in actual use by the masters; should increase in knowledge of life, and as it were gain experience vicariously, so as to advance in perception of intellectual and moral values; should be advanced in the control of the feelings; in enthusiasm; and in the development of that noblest of faculties, the imagination.

To deal clearly with the work of teaching, it is first of all essential to deal frankly. In order that suggestions in regard to instruction in literature may be of practical value, we must be entirely honest in admitting and in facing whatever difficulties lie in the way and whatever limitations are imposed by the conditions under which the work is done.

As things are at present arranged, an instructor, it seems not unjust to say, must decide how far he is able to mingle genuine education with the routine work which the system imposes upon him. If he has not the power to settle this question, or if he is lacking in the disposition to propose the question to himself, his labor is inevitably confined chiefly to routine. His students are turned out examination-perfect, it may be, but with minds as fatally cramped and checked as the feet of a Chinese lady. If literature has a high and important function in education, the teacher must consider deeply both what that function is and how he is best to develop it.

The failure on the part of instructors to do this makes much of the work done in the secondary grades so mechanical as to be of the smallest possible use so far as the expansion of the mind and of the character of children is concerned. For a pupil in the lower grades the first purpose of any and of all school-work should be to teach him to use his mind,—to think. The actual acquirement of facts is of importance really slight as compared to the value of this. If at twelve he knows how to read and to write, is sound on the multiplication-table, is familiar with the outlines of grammar and the broadest divisions of geography, yet is accustomed to think for himself in regard to the facts which he perceives from life or receives from books, he may be regarded as admirably well on in the education which he is to gain from the schools. Indeed, if he have learned to think, he is excellently started even if he have accomplished nothing further than simply to read and to write.

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Arlo Bates opens his first talk by confronting a disquieting possibility: that literature cannot be taught. He grounds this doubt in the nature of art itself, arguing that a poem or novel conveys what no other form of words can express, leaving the teacher to talk about qualities rather than delivering the thing itself. This central tension—between the ineffable experience of art and the practical demands of a classroom—shapes the entire series. Bates does not offer a method so much as a persistent inquiry into what is possible when instruction meets the irreducible particularity of literary works.

The Problem of Teaching an Art

Bates begins by naming the teacher’s blackest moments: the suspicion that literature cannot be taught at all. He insists that if a pupil learns anything in literature—as opposed to learning about it—the pupil does it alone. This is not a counsel of despair but a recognition that art exists because it says what cannot be said otherwise. A painting, a melody, a poem gives delight through qualities that belong to nothing else. Words cannot replicate those qualities, or the work itself would be superfluous. The teacher is therefore “apparently confronted” with an impossible task. Yet Bates does not stop there; he uses this paradox to frame the talks that follow, turning a theoretical dead end into a practical starting point.

Examinations That Test Understanding, Not Memory

In the chapter on examinational work, Bates describes a device he used at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Students were given a brief extract from a standard author they had never seen before—in one case, the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Book II—and asked to state its excellent points of workmanship, thought, and imagination. The purpose was to see how intelligently they could apply principles they had learned, not to test recall of assigned readings. Bates emphasizes that only merits were requested, to strengthen the habit of looking for excellencies. One student’s comment on the word “barbaric” in Milton’s line shows the kind of independent thinking the exercise aimed to elicit: the student connected the word to “early inhabitants of the uncivilized rich countries of the east” throwing wealth around like pebbles.

The Danger of Stultifying Themes

Bates warns against setting students to write “formal and lifeless themes on pedantic topics” that replace intelligent comprehension with mechanical imitation. Such exercises, he argues, are not the study of literature but a “stultifying process” that lessens the power of appreciation. He insists that the supreme test of any subject given for written work is whether it is reasonable to suppose students can and will have individual, original thought about it. The writing of themes belongs to the examinational side of the work and should not be dwelt on more than necessary. It must stay within the range of the student’s personal experience. This pragmatic caution runs through the talks, always returning to the goal of genuine engagement rather than rote performance.

Structure and Movement Between Lectures

The book’s structure mirrors its origin as a series of lectures delivered at the University of Illinois Summer School in June 1905. Each talk builds on the previous one, moving from the problem and conditions of teaching literature through specific difficulties, foundations, and methods. Bates devotes separate chapters to the study of prose, the novel, and Macbeth, using each as a concrete illustration of his principles. The movement is from general to particular, from doubt to practical suggestion. The final chapters on criticism, literary workmanship, biography, and voluntary reading broaden the scope again, ending with a chapter titled “In General.” This alternating rhythm of problem and example gives the talks a cumulative force, as if the reader is attending the summer school alongside the original audience.

Bates’s talks are best read as a series of provocations rather than a manual. He does not promise a system that will make literature teachable; instead, he offers a way of thinking about the classroom that keeps the art itself at the center. Readers who expect step-by-step instructions will be disappointed, but those who welcome a thoughtful, sometimes skeptical companion in their own teaching will find much to return to. The book rewards attention to its recurring images—the black moment, the stultifying theme, the unfamiliar extract—and to the quiet insistence that students must be allowed to think for themselves.

That old Bates book kept circling back to me—the way he insists a teacher must feel literature before explaining it. It reminded me of something quieter, a Spanish reader I stumbled upon later, where the stories simply breathe. A First Spanish Reader — Inside the Classic has that same unhurried warmth, letting the language unfold like a familiar tune. I think of them together sometimes, two gentle voices across the years.