II. The Educational Value of This Instinct
Two thirds of all play is dramatic play. Those who believe in the educational value of play must, therefore, not neglect this phase of it.
The child who engages in dramatic play reproduces and enacts, and so realizes the ideas around him. He so focuses imagination that what would otherwise be vague pictures are made real by his own activity.
“Dramatic work,” says Gesell, “organizes the child’s thinking. The simple and imperfect images of childhood are vivified and crystallized by being transformed into the movements which express them, and a child emerges from dramatic representation fortified in his mental imagery.” A child who tries to “act a horse,” as Mrs. Gruenberg tells us, will be much more apt to notice all the different activities and habits of the horse than a child who observes passively.
“The child,” says Dr. Gesell, “does not smile when he is glad, but fairly dances with joy. He does not shed a few tears when he is unhappy, but kicks and shakes with his grief. The opportunity to make use of his whole body in the expression of his feeling, which he is compelled to do in dramatic interpretation, will serve to equalize and conserve his moral strength. Emotional expression, although dependent upon instinct, must not be left to chance. Instinct and emotion are as capable of organization as motor and mental processes.”
One writer (Anne Throop Craig) suggests the use of the dramatic impulse instead of the usual school gymnastics as a means of relaxation, since it involves the use of the child’s whole body. “Let them act a little play,” she says. “Let them make it up on the spur of the moment.”
What we remember best is that which we learned dramatically. “The fact acted out is the fact remembered,” says Mrs. Herts. What we remember out of books is that which we have in some fashion ourselves reproduced. Our memories of the Bible even are chiefly those related to some dramatic event, such as the ritual of the church, a revival or some dramatic method which was used incidentally or purposefully in our Bible study. Letting the children act out such stories as those of Moses, Joseph and Samuel, as is being done in many of our church schools to-day, not only arouses interest but helps to fix the knowledge of the Bible’s wonderful hero stories firmly in their minds.
“That which the child understands,” says Gesell, “must bear an intimate and personal relation. Just as he must take into his hands the concrete thing he studies, and by physical contact understand it, so, to understand thought, emotion, character, he must assimilate them, lose himself in them, and become for the time being that thing which he interprets. Through such interpretation the child touches heights and depths which otherwise might never enter into his experience. Life becomes larger as he learns to lay aside his own limitations and put himself in the other man’s place. He need not wait to enlist in the army to become a soldier, nor carry a real gun to acquire a martial step. He need not do wrong himself in order to know the remorse of wrongdoing.”
A child who merely reads about a foreign people gathers only a dull catalog of external facts, which he soon forgets; but the child who puts on a foreign costume and endeavors to imitate the actions of its owner begins to get from his experiences the feeling which the other has. “Recently I went into a practice school connected with the University of Chicago,” writes President Faunce, “where I saw the children gathered round a teacher who was reading to them the poem of ‘Hiawatha,’ and their eyes were wide with wonder. Then they went over into the Field Columbian Museum and saw the materials of Indian life, the tents and the wampum, the feathers and the moccasins, and all the utensils of the Indian household. Then they returned and modeled in clay an Indian village, with Hiawatha at one end of it, and all over it the marks of the creative imagination.”
In contrast, Dr. Faunce says: “I too learned ‘Hiawatha,’ side by side with Mr. Colburn’s ingenuities. I could spell the name of every tree in Hiawatha’s forest, but would not have known one of them if I had seen it. I could pronounce the name of every beast on the American continent or in Noah’s ark, but knew nothing about any one of them.”
Says O’Shea: “Every personality he assumes stretches his own in one direction or another, enriches it perhaps, or at least broadens it. Through personation one gets the point of view of others; he discovers how it feels in a broad sense to do as they do, and is put in a way to sympathize with them. Again, when the child creates an environment, and then reacts upon it, he is really pre-adjusting himself to that environment.”
The child who engages in dramatic expression not only visualizes more clearly, but more practically. “A child with imagination,” as Mrs. Gruenberg says, “can picture to himself what he is expected to do, and easily translates his instructions into action. To the unimaginative child the directions given will be so many words, and he cannot carry out his instructions so effectively.” This resourcefulness is important. It is the unimaginative child who is always wailing, “What shall I do now?” The child who plays dramatically can be whatever he likes, and have whatever he likes, and always has something to do. And in later life it stands to reason that it will be the men and women who have habitually seen with their imaginations, who have visualized unexpected situations, who will display “faculty” and effectiveness.
This is real education.
The dramatic instinct brings out a number of traits of very great value. It develops initiative and ingenuity and resourcefulness. It helps make clear the difference between the imaginary and the real. It helps one to acquire unconsciousness of self, grace of demeanor and the correct use of the voice. It develops the power of action in groups and of ready and unselfish cooperation. It relates itself to English, elocution, drawing, and shop work, and is as important in its inspiring effect upon craftsmanship, in the making of costumes, scenery, and stage effects, as upon the acting itself. The portrayal of scenes from polite life helps politeness, and to imitate a courteous character tends toward the habit of courtesy. “A book on manners and customs will be little used until the child needs the information which it contains to portray some character.”
An interest in literature may first be aroused through the stimulation of the dramatic instinct. Robert Browning, in his poem “Development,” tells how his father, by acting out with him the story of the Iliad, and then suggesting that he might himself find out more about it through reading such and such a book in the library, aroused in him the intense love of the classics which was his through life.
It has also an important part in helping to forecast a child’s future. “I fancy an individual standing hesitant at the center of a great circle, the circle of his possibilities,” says Mrs Howard Braucher. “One small amount of that circle, a part of his potential life, he actually lives—the dramatic instinct is the key which admits him to at least a glimpse of what the rest might have been.” Of what the rest may be, she might have said, because the full expression of the dramatic instinct has often inspired a child with courage to enter the entire circle of his possibilities.
Like all human instincts, the dramatic instinct may be misused. It must not be confused with dramatic talent, which is a special gift bestowed upon only a few. The dramatic impulse in children, as Joseph Lee says, is “not the impulse toward dramatics in the grown-up sense—toward representing to other people what is passing in the actor’s mind. It is, rather, the converse of this, being the method whereby children make clear to themselves what they suppose to be in the minds of other people and of other things, or of what is dimly passing in their own.”
The educational value, therefore, of the instinct, lies not in producing finished dramatic products, but in cultivating the child’s imagination through expression.