Literature and Integration

E DUCATIONALLY speaking, each generation seems to find it necessary to create its own shibboleth, and the shibboleth of today is integration. One can hardly read a current discussion of educational problems without sooner or later stumbling over the word. The reason is not hard to find. Presentday segmented education will lose any race with destiny unless knowledge is again viewed as a whole, and not as an almost infinite series of specializations which divide instead of join us. It is high time that synthesis should draw the vigorous attention of educators. Having decided, however, the need for integration, the more difficult problem still remains. How shall integration be achieved? How shall we put back together again what the modern curriculum has so completely fractured into seemingly discrete bits? The thesis of this brief paper is that one of the oldest and most effective methods of synthesis is the intelligent study of literature. Surely this is not the only method of achieving integration, nor is it the only reason for literary study. It is, however, a valuable method and an available one. For literature at its best mirrors life, interprets life, illuminates life; literature gives pleasure as it gives profit. It is the regal though always available pastime. But it is also a natural integrator. Methods of teaching literature vary as widely as teachers vary, and no man can say with assurance that his method is the most effective. But one can say with more assurance that certain methods are not effective and not useful. Literature is often taught as if it were a museum, a place for housing the written relics of the ages, where people who have nothing better to do may tarry for a moment in quiet reverence before they pass on to the important work of the world. Often it is taught as an encyclopedic mountain which must be scaled before one may achieve education. Names, dates, movements, and controversies-these appear to some to be the meaning in reading. To still others the study of literature is purely an aesthetic matter. One must master the forms and grow conscious of the tricks of the craftsman. A poem, says one of these, must not mean, but be. The rest will take care of itself. These are a few of the methods that render literature sterile to many students. But there are still others who believe that though form and method are important, inseparable indeed from a work as a whole, still what matters most of all is what a literary work has to say about life. President Chalmers of Kenyon College tells of a