But the fact that after having been repeated for two thousand years, a story still possesses a perfectly fresh attraction for a child of to-day, does indeed prove that there is in it something of imperishable worth.—Felix Adler.
Whatever has, at any time, appealed to the best emotions and moved the heart of a people, must have for their children's children, political, historical, and cultural value. This is especially true of folk-tales and folk-songs.—P.P. Claxton, United States Commissioner of Education.
I. AVAILABLE TYPES OF TALES
From all this wealth of accumulated folk-material which has come down to us through the ages, we must select, for we cannot crowd the child with all the folk-stuff that folk-lore scientists are striving to preserve for scientific purposes. Moreover, naturally much of it contains the crudities, the coarseness, and the cruelties of primitive civilization; and it is not necessary that the child be burdened with this natural history of a past society. We must select from the past. In this selection of what shall be presented to the child we must be guided by two standards: First, we owe it to the child to hand on to him his literary heritage; and secondly, we must help him to make of himself the ideal man of the future. Therefore the tales we offer must contribute to these two standards. The tales selected will be those which the ages have found interesting; for the fact that they have lived proves their fitness, they have lived because there was something in them that appealed to the universal heart. And because of this fact they will be those which in the frequent re-tellings of ages have acquired a classic form and therefore have within themselves the possibility of taking upon them a perfect literary form. The tales selected will be those tales which, as we have pointed out, contain the interests of children; for only through his interests does the child rise to higher interests and finally develop to the ideal man. They will be those tales which stand also the test of a classic, the test of literature, the test of the short-story, and the test of narration and of description. The child would be handicapped in life to be ignorant of these tales.
Tales suitable for the little child may be viewed under these seven classes of available types: (1) the accumulative, or clock story; (2) the animal tale; (3) the humorous tale; (4) the realistic tale; (5) the romantic tale; (6) the old tale; and (7) the modern tale.
I. The Accumulative Tale.
The accumulative tale is the simplest form of the tale. It may be:—
(1) A tale of simple repetition.
(2) A tale of repetition with an addition, incremental iteration.
(3) A tale of repetition, with variation.