Parents and children

by Charlotte M. Mason

We are glad to find that Mr. Adler reinstates fairy tales. He says, justly, that much of the selfishness of the world is due, not to actual hard-heartedness, but to a lack of imaginative power; and adds, “I hold that something, nay, much, has been gained if a child has learned to take the wishes out of its heart, as it were, and to project them on the screen of fancy.” The German Märchen hold the first place in his regards. He says: “They represent the childhood of mankind, and it is for this reason that they never cease to appeal to children.”

“But how shall we handle these Märchen? and what method shall we employ in putting them to account for our special purpose? My first counsel is, Tell the story. Do not give it to the child to read. The child, as it listens to the Märchen, looks up with wide-opened eyes to the face of the person who tells the story, and thrills responsive to the touch of the earlier life of the race, which thus falls upon its own.” That is, our author feels, and rightly so, that traditions should be orally delivered. This is well worth noting. His second counsel is equally important. “Do not,” he says, “take the moral plum out of the fairy tale pudding, but let the child enjoy it as a whole.... Treat the moral element as an incident, emphasise it indeed, but incidentally. Pluck it as a wayside flower.”

Mr. Felix Adler’s third counsel is, to eliminate from the stories whatever is merely superstitious, merely a relic of ancient animism, and, again, whatever is objectionable on moral grounds. In this connection he discusses the vexed question of how far we should acquaint children with the existence of evil in the world. His conclusion is one with which we shall probably be inclined to agree.

“My own view,” he says, “is that we should speak in the child’s hearing only of those lesser forms of evil, physical or moral, with which it is already acquainted.” On this ground he would rule out all the cruel step-mother stories, the unnatural father stories, and so on; though, probably, most of us would make an exception in favour of Cinderella, and its charming German rendering Aschenbrödel.

Fables, according to our author, should form the basis of moral instruction at the second stage; probably when children emerge from the nursery. We have all grown up on “Æsop’s Fables,” and “The Dog in the Manger,” “King Log,” “The Frog and the Stork,” have passed into the current coinage of our thought. But it is interesting to be reminded that the so-called Æsop’s fables are infinitely older than the famous Greek story-teller, and are, for the most part, of Asiatic origin. We are reminded that it is important to keep the origin of this fable before us, and exercise discrimination in our choice of those which we use to convey moral ideas to our children. Such fables as “The Oak and the Reed,” “The Brazen and the Earthen Pot,” “The Kite and the Wolf,” Mr. Adler would reject, as breathing of Eastern subserviency and fear. But possibly for the very reason that the British backbone is little disposed to bow before man or circumstances, the lessons of life culled by peoples of other habits and other thoughts may be quite specially useful to the English child. Anyway, we should lose some of the most charming fables if we cut out all that savours of the wisdom of the East. The fables Mr. Felix Adler specially commends are those which hold up virtue for our praise or evil for our censure; such as Cowardice, the fable of the “Stag and the Fawn;” Vanity, “The Peacock and the Crane;” Greediness, “The Dog and the Shadow.”

“In the third part of our primary course, we shall use selected stories from the classical literature of the Hebrews, and later on from that of Greece, particularly the ‘Odyssey’ and the ‘Iliad.’”

Here we begin to be at issue with our author. We should not present Bible stories as carrying only the same moral sanction as the myths of ancient Greece; neither should we defer their introduction until the child has gone through a moral course of fairy tales and a moral course of fables. He should not be able to recall a time before the sweet stories of old filled his imagination; he should have heard the voice of the Lord God in the garden in the cool of the evening; should have been an awed spectator where the angels ascended and descended upon Jacob’s stony pillow; should have followed Christ through the cornfield on the Sabbath-day, and sat in the rows of the hungry multitudes—so long ago that the sacred scenes form the unconscious background of his thoughts. All things are possible to the little child, and the touch of the spiritual upon our material world, the difficult problems, the hard sayings, which are an offence—in the Bible sense of the word—to his elders, present no difficulties to the child’s all-embracing faith. We would not say—far otherwise—that every Bible story is fit for children, because it is a Bible story; neither would we analyse too carefully, nor draw hard and fast lines to distinguish what we would call history from that of which it may be said, “Without a parable spake He not unto them.”

The child is not an exegetical student. The moral teaching, the spiritual revelations, the lovely imagery of the Bible, are the things with which he is concerned, and of these he cannot have too much. As Mr. Adler says, “The narrative of the Bible is saturated with the moral spirit, the moral issues are everywhere to the forefront. Duty, guilt and its punishment, the conflict of conscience with inclination, are the leading themes. The Hebrew people seem to have been endowed with what may be called a moral genius, and especially did they emphasise the filial and fraternal duties. Now, it is precisely these duties that must be impressed on young children.”

Let us see how Mr. Adler would use the Bible narratives. We have only space for a fragmentary sentence here and there: “Once upon a time there were two children, Adam and Eve. Adam was a fine and noble-looking lad.”... “It was so warm that the children never needed to go indoors.”... “And the snake kept on whispering, ‘Just take one bite of it; nobody sees you.’”... “You, Adam, must learn to labour, and you, Eve, to be patient and self-denying for others,” &c.

We leave it to our readers to decide whether “treatment” improves the Bible narrative, or whether this is the sort of thing to lay hold of a child’s imagination.