In later childhood and youth young people begin to organize themselves into clubs and societies, which represent the people and customs of another age or the social organizations of adults. This instinct is seen even among grown people in the secret lodges, where men, who have apparently outgrown the play spirit, find a genuine satisfaction in being known as “knights,” engaging in secret rites reproductive of magic and mystery, and banding themselves into fraternities which bring down the names, traditions and ideals of mediæval guilds and chivalric orders.
While this third era is later than the second, it does not supersede it, but lives alongside of it. The desire to appear before an audience persists usually only as there are easy opportunities for doing so, but the youth of unspoiled fancy continues all his life long to create imaginary people and to live in a world of ideals. It is thus that he is able to keep the spirit of youth by which he can sympathize with those of the younger generation, and continue to hope and have faith even when the world appears to be too much for him.
The matter of actual dramatic impersonation is but a small and temporary part of the range of the dramatic instinct. This paper touches upon it, but does not emphasize it. The dramatic instinct is too large, too useful, too inspiring to be confined to occasional forensic or theatrical performances.
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.”