NARRATIVES SELECTED AND THE BASIS OF SELECTION.
In the following narratives, for the most part consisting of German Märchen, the principles of selection given below have been kept in mind:
1. The story must be simple, direct, and imaginative.
2. It must have strong ethical significance and must avoid cruel situations. Stories dealing with happy home life—emphasizing industry, thrift, and usefulness—are to be given preference.
3. It must offer a content rich in social allusion, in outdoor life, and in references to natural objects, animate and inanimate.
4. It should be of such abiding worth that it will bear repetition and hold interest.
5. It must be dramatic; that is, there should be movement, activity, dialogue, interesting and even humorous incidents, but all subordinate to a central unity. Only such a dramatic unity can work a deep and lasting impression.
These principles of selection are in the main those enunciated by William Rein in his excellent manual, Das Erste Schuljahr, a book with which every primary teacher should be familiar. The stories here presented have the sanction of such eminent students of pedagogy as William Rein, Ziller, Just, and Hiemish—all leaders of educational thought in Germany.
The text of the first fourteen tales has been translated with a few adaptations from the German of Hiemish, as found in his Das Gesinnungsunterricht. To these have been added Andersen’s Fir Tree and Miss Harrison’s Hans and the Four Big Giants.
The order here given is not essential, but on the whole it will be found a rational one. The succession could be determined by many points of view. The one here chosen is that of relation to home life. The series begins with the simplest home relations of parents and brother and sister. It gradually broadens into the wider circle of companionship, and contact with the world external to the home. It culminates in Miss Harrison’s fine story, Hans and the Four Big Giants, where the separation from home is complete and the child is brought into contact with the highest industrial and scientific phases of modern civilization. Transition from the more simple situations to the more complex and longer narratives have also been kept in mind.