Here and Now Story Book / Two- to seven-year-olds

by Lucy Sprague Mitchell

This she sang day after day, enumerating such groups as her clothes, the objects on the mantel and her toys. Walt Whitman has given us glorified enumerations of the most astounding vitality. If some one would only pile up equally vigorous ones for children! But it is not easy for an adult to gather mere sense or motor associations without a plot thread to string them on. The children’s response to the two I have attempted in this collection, “Old Dan” and “My Kitty,” make me eager to see it tried more commonly.

All this means that the small child’s attention and energy are absorbed in developing a technique of observation and control of his immediate surroundings. The functioning of his senses and his muscles engrosses him. Ideally his stories should happen currently along with the experience they relate or the object they reproduce, merely deepening the experience by giving it some pleasurable expression. At first the stories will have to be of this running and partly spontaneous type. But soon a child will like to have the story to recall an experience recently enjoyed. The living over of a walk, a ride, the sight of a horse or a cow, will give him a renewed sense of participation in a pleasurable activity. This is his first venture in vicarious experiences. And he must be helped to it through strong sense and muscular recalls. I have felt that these fairly literal recalls of every day details did deepen his sense of relationships since by himself he cannot recapture these familiar details even in a simple chronological sequence.

But if stories for a two or a three-year-old need to be of himself they must be written especially for him. Those written for another two-year-old may not fit. Consequently the first three stories in this collection are given as types rather than as independent narratives. “Marni Takes a Ride” is so elementary in its substance and its form as to be hardly recognizable as a “story” at all. And yet the appeal is the same as in the more developed narratives. It falls between the embryonic story stage of “Peek-a-boo!” and Marni’s second story. It was first told during the actual ride. Repeated later it seemed to give the child a sense of adventure,—an inclusion of and still an extension of herself beyond the “here” and “now” which is the essence of a story. Both of Marni’s stories are given as types for a mother to write for her two-year-old; the “Room with the Window in It” (written for the Play School group) is given as a type for a teacher to write for her three-year-old group.

I cannot leave the subject of the “familiar” for children without looking forward a few years. This process of investigating and trying to control his immediate surroundings, this appreciation of the world through his senses and his muscles, does not end when the child has gained some sense of his own self as distinguished from the world,—of the “me” and the “not me,”—or achieved some ability to expand temporarily the “here” and the “now” into the “there” and the “then.” The process is a precious one and should not be interrupted and confused by the interjection of remote or impersonal material. He still thinks and feels primarily through his own immediate experiences. If this is interfered with he is left without his natural material for experimentation for he cannot yet experiment easily in the world of the intangible. Moreover to the child the familiar is the interesting. And it remains so I believe through that transition period,—somewhere about seven years,—when the child becomes poignantly aware of the world outside his own immediate experience,—of an order, physical or social, which he does not determine, and so gradually develops a sense of standards of what is to be expected in the world of nature or of his fellows along with a sense of workmanship. It is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting. The attempt to amuse children by presenting them with the strange, the bizarre, the unreal, is the unhappy result of this adult blindness. Children do not find the unusual piquant until they are firmly acquainted with the usual; they do not find the preposterous humorous until they have intimate knowledge of ordinary behavior; they do not get the point of alien environments until they are securely oriented in their own. Too often we mistake excitement for genuine interest and give the children stimulus instead of food. The fairy story, the circus, novelty hunting, delight the sophisticated adult; they excite and confuse the child. Red Riding-Hood and circus Indians excite the little child; Cinderella confuses him. Not one clarifies any relationship which will further his efforts to order the world. Nonsense when recognized and enjoyed as such is more than legitimate; it is a part of every one’s heritage. But nonsense which is confused with reality is vicious,—the more so because its insinuations are subtle. So far as their content is concerned, it is chiefly as a protest against this confusing presentation of unreality, this substitution of excitement for legitimate interest, that these stories have been written. It is not that a child outgrows the familiar. It is rather that as he matures, he sees new relationships in the old. If our stories would follow his lead, they should not seek for unfamiliar and strange stuff in intrigue him; they should seek to deepen and enrich the relationships by which he is dimly groping to comprehend and to order his familiar world.

But to return to the younger children. Children of four are not nearly so completely ego-centric as those of three. There has seemed to me to be a distinct transition at this age to a more objective way of thinking. A four-year-old does not to the same extent have to be a part of every situation he conceives of. Ordinarily, too, he moves out from his own narrowly personal environment into a slightly wider range of experiences. Now, what in this wider environment gets his spontaneous attention? What does he take from the street life, for instance, to make his own? Surely it is moving things. He is still primarily motor in his interest and expression and remains so certainly up to six years. Engines, boats, wagons with horses, all animals, his own moving self,—these are the things he notices and these are the things he interprets in his play activities. Transportation and animals and himself. Do not these pretty well cover the field of his interests? If conceived of as motor and personal do they not hold all the material a four-or five-year-old needs for stories? If we bring in inanimate unmoving things, we must do with them what he does. We must endow them with life and motion. We need not be afraid of personification. This is the age when anthropomorphism flourishes. The five-year-old is still motor; his conception of cause is still personal. He thinks through his muscles; he personifies in his thought and his play.

Nevertheless there is very real danger in anthropomorphism,—in thus leaving the world of reality. There is danger of confusing the child. We must be sure our personifications are built on relationships which our child can understand and which have an objective validity. We must be sure that a wolf remains a wolf and an engine an engine, though endowed with human speech.

Now, what are the typical relationships which a four-or five-year-old uses to bind together his world into intelligible experiences? We have already noted the personal relationship which persists in modified form. But does not the grouping of things because of physical juxtaposition now give way to a conception of “Use”? Does he not think of the world largely in terms of active functioning? Has not the typical question of this age become “What’s it for?” Even his early definitions are in terms of use which has a strong motor implication. “A table is to eat off”; “a spoon is to eat in”; “a river means where you get drinks out of water, and catch fish, and throw stones.” (Waddle: Introduction to Child Psychology, p. 170.) It was only consistent with his general conception of relationships in the world to have a little boy of my acquaintance examine a very small man sitting beside him in the subway and then turn to his father with the question, “What is that little man for?”

Stories which are offered to small children must be assessed from this two-fold point of view. What relationships are they based on? And in what terms are they told? Fairy stories should not be exempted. We are inclined to accept them uncritically, feeling that they do not cramp a child as does reality. We cling to the idea that children need a fairy world to “cultivate their imaginations.” In the folk tales we are intrigued by the past,—by the sense that these embodiments of human experience, having survived the ages, should be exempt from modern analysis. If, however, we do commit the sacrilege of looking at them alongside of our educational principles, I think we find a few precious ones that stand the test. For children under six, however, even these precious few contribute little in content, but much through their matchless form. On the other hand, we find that many of the human experiences which these old tales embody are quite unsuitable for four-and five-year-olds. Cruelty, trickery, economic inequality,—these are experiences which have shaped and shaken adults and alas! still continue to do so. But do we wish to build them into a four-year-old’s thinking? Some of these experiences run counter to the trends of thinking we are trying to establish in other ways; some merely confuse them. We seem to identify imagination with gullibility or vague thinking. But surely true imagination is not based on confusion. Imagination is the basis of art. But confused art is a contradiction of terms.

Now, the ordinary fairy tale which is the chief story diet of the four-and five-year-olds, I believe does confuse them; not because it does not stick to reality (for neither do the children) but because it does not deal with the things with which they have had first-hand experience and does not attempt to present or interpret the world according to the relationships which the child himself employs. Rather it gives the child material which he is incapable of handling. Much in these tales is symbolic and means to the adult something quite different from what it bears on its face. And much, I believe, is confused even to the grown-up. Now a confused adult does not make a child! Nor does it ever help a child to give him confusion. When my four-year-old personified a horse for one whole summer, he lived the actual life of a horse as far as he knew it. His bed was always “a stall,” his food was always “hay,” he always brushed his “mane” and “put on his harness” for breakfast. It was only when real horse information gave out that he supplied experiences from his own life. He was not limited by reality. He was exercising his imagination. This is quite different from the adult mixtures of the animal, the social, and the moral worlds. Does not Cinderella interject a social and economic situation which is both confusing and vicious? Does not Red Riding-Hood in its real ending plunge the child into an inappropriate relationship of death and brutality or in its “happy ending” violate all the laws that can be violated in regard to animal life? Does not “Jack and the Beanstalk” delay a child’s rationalizing of the world and leave him longer than is desirable without the beginnings of scientific standards? The growth of the sense of reality is a growth of the sense of relations. From the time when the child begins to relate isolated experiences, when he groups together associations, when he begins to note the sequence, the order of things, from this time he is beginning to think scientifically. It is preëminently the function of education to further the growth of the sense of reality, to give the child the sense of relationship between facts, material or social: that is, to further scientific conceptions. Stories, if they are to be a part of an educational process, must also further the growth of the sense of reality, must help the child to interpret the relationships in the world around him and help him to develop a scientific process of thinking. It is not important that he know this or that particular fact; it is important that he be able to fit any particular fact into a rational scheme of thought. Accordingly, the relationships which a story clarifies are of much greater import than the facts it gives. All this, of course, concerns the content of stories—the intentional material it presents to the child and has nothing to do with the pleasure of the presentation,—the relish which comes from the form of the story. I do not wish this to be interpreted to mean that I think all fairy stories forever harmful. From the beginning innocuous tales like the “Gingerbread Man” should be given for the pattern as should the “Old Woman and Her Pig.” Moreover, after a child is somewhat oriented in the physical and social world, say at six or seven,—I think he can stand a good deal of straight fairy lore. It will sweep him with it. He will relish the flight the more for having had his feet on the ground. But for brutal tales like Red Riding-Hood or for sentimental ones like Cinderella I find no place in any child’s world. Obviously, fairy stories cannot be lumped and rejected en masse. I am merely pleading not to have them accepted en masse on the ground that they “have survived the ages” and “cultivate the imagination.” For a child’s imagination, since it is his native endowment, will surely flourish if he is given freedom for expression, without calling upon the stimulus of adult fancies. It is only the jaded adult mind, afraid to trust to the children’s own fresh springs of imagination, that feels for children the need of the stimulus of magic.

The whole question of myths and sagas together with the function of personification must be taken up with the older children. For the present we are still concerned with four-and five-year-olds. Two sets of stories told by four-and five-year-old children in the school seem to me to show what emphasizing unrealities may do at this age. The first child in each set is thinking disjunctively; the second has his facts organized into definite relationships. Can one think that the second child enjoyed his ordered world less than the first enjoyed his confusion?