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

by Lucy Sprague Mitchell

I am far from meaning that five-year-olds should be confined to their literal experiences. They have made considerable progress in separating themselves from their environment though at times they seem still to think of the things around them more or less as extensions of themselves. Their inquiries still emanate from their own personal experiences; but they do not end there. A child of this age has a genuine curiosity about where things come from and where they go to. “What’s it for?” indeed, implies a dim conception beyond the “here” and the “now,” a conception which his stories should help him to clarify. If we try to escape the pitfall of “fairy stories,”—abandoning a child in unrealities,—we must not fall into the opposite pitfall and continue the easy habit of merely recounting a series of events, neither significant in themselves nor, as in the earlier years, significant because they are personal experiences. “Arabella and Araminta” and their like give a five-year-old no real food. They are saved, if saved they are, not by their content, but by a daring and skilful use of repetition and of sound quality. No, our stories must add something to the children’s knowledge and must take them beyond the “here” and the “now.” But this “something,” as I have already said, is not so much new information as it is a new relationship among already familiar facts.

In each of the stories for four-and five-year-olds I have attempted to clarify known facts by showing them in a relationship a little beyond the children’s own experience. All the stories came from definite inquiries raised by some child. They attempt to answer these inquiries and to raise others. “How the Engine Learned the Knowing Song,” “The Fog Boat Story,” “Hammer and Saw and Plane,” “How the Singing Water Gets to the Tub,” “Things That Loved the Lake,” “The Children’s New Dresses,” “How Animals Move,”—all are based on definite relationships, largely physical, between simple physical facts.

Interest in these relationships,—inquiries which hold the germ of physical science, continue and increase with each year. In addition, a little later, children seem to begin questioning things social and to be ready for the simpler social relationships which underlie and determine the physical world of their acquaintance. “What’s it for?” still dominates, but a six-year-old is on the way to becoming a conscious member of society. He now likes his answers to be in human terms. He takes readily to such conceptions as congestion as the cause for subways and elevated trains; the desire for speed as the cause of change in transportation; the dependence of man on other living things,—all of which I have made the bases of stories. To the children the material in “The Subway Car,” “Speed,” “Silly Will,” is familiar; the relationships in which it appears are new.

Somewhere about seven years, there seems to be another transition period. Psychologists, whether in or out of schools, generally agree in this. Children of this age are acquiring a sense of social values,—a consciousness of others as sharply distinguished from themselves. They are also acquiring a sense of workmanship, of technique,—of things as sharply distinguished from themselves. They seek information in and for itself,—not merely in its immediate application to themselves. Their inquiries take on the character of “how?” This means, does it not, that the children have oriented themselves in their narrow personal world and that they are reaching out for experience in larger fields? It means that the “not-me” which was so shadowy in the earlier years has gained in social and in physical significance. And this again means that opportunity for exploration in ever-widening circles should be given. Stories should follow this general trend and open up the relationships in larger and larger environments until at last a child is capable of seeing relationships for himself and of regarding the whole world in its infinite physical and social complexity, as his own environment.

Probably the first extra-personal excursions should be into alien scenes or experiences which lead back or contribute directly to their old familiar world. Stories of unknown raw material which turn into well-known products are of this type,—cattle raising in Texas, dairy farms in New England, lumbering in Minnesota, sheep raising in California. It is a happy coincidence that raw materials are often produced under semi-primitive conditions, so that a vicarious participation in their production gives to children something of that thrilling contact with the elemental that does the life of primitive men, and this without sending them into the remote and, for modern children, “unnatural” world of unmodified nature. The danger here is that the story will be sacrificed to the information. Indeed it can hardly be otherwise, if the aim is to give an adequate picture of some process of production. This, of course, is a legitimate aim,—but for the encyclopedia, not for the story. What I have in mind is a dramatic situation which has this process as a background, so that the child becomes interested in the process because of the part it plays in the drama just as he would if the process were a background in his own life. I am thinking of the opportunities which these comparatively primitive situations give for adventure rather than for the detailed elucidation of a process of production.

It is the peculiar function of a story to raise inquiries, not to give instruction. A story must stimulate not merely inform. This is the trouble with our “informational literature” for children, of which very little is worthy of the name. Indeed, I am not sure it is not a contradiction of terms. It is frankly didactic. It aims to make clear certain facts, not to stimulate thought. It assumes that if a child swallows a fact it must nourish him. To give the child material with which to experiment,—this lies outside its present range. Reaction from the unloveliness of this didactic writing has produced a distressing result. The misunderstood and misapplied educational principle that children’s work should interest them has developed a new species of story,—a sort of pseudo-literary thing in which the medicinal facts are concealed by various sugar-coating devices. Children will take this sort of story,—what will their eager little minds not take? And like encyclopedias and other books of reference this type has its place in a child’s world. But it should never be confused with literature.

Literature must give a sense of adventure. This sense of adventure, of excursion into the unknown, must be furnished to children of every age. As I have said before, I think “Peek-a-boo, there’s the baby!” is the elementary expression of this love of adventure. The baby disappears into the unknown vastness behind the handkerchief and to her, her reappearance is a thrilling experience. Children’s stories,—as indeed all stories,—have been largely founded on this. The “Prudy” and “Dotty Dimple” books though keyed so low in the scale seem adventurous because of the meagre background of their young readers. But children of the age we are considering,—who have left the narrowly personal and predominantly play period demand something higher in the scale of adventure. To them are offered the great variety of tales of adventure and danger of which the boy scout is the latest example. Every child in reading these becomes a hero. And every child (and grown-up) enjoys being a hero. Higher still comes “Kidnapped” and so up to Stanley Weyman and “The Three Musketeers” which differ in their art, not in their appeal.

Now is it not possible to give children these adventurous excursions which they crave and should have, without so much killing of animals or men, and so many blood-thirsty excitements, and so much fake heroism? What relationships do such tales interpret? What truths do they give a child upon which to base his thinking? The relation of life to life is a delicate and difficult thing to interpret. But surely we can do better at an interpretation than tales of hunting, of impossible heroisms, and of war. Or at least, we can protest against having these almost the sole interpretations of adventure which are offered to children. The world of industry holds possibilities for adventure as thrilling as the world of high-colored romance. We must look with fresh eyes to see it. When once we see it, we shall be able to give the children a new type of the “story of adventure.” Of all the experiments which the stories in this collection represent, this attempt to find and picture the romance and adventure in our world here and now, I consider the most important and difficult. In such stories as “Boris” and “Eben’s Cows” and “The Sky Scraper,” I have made experimental attempts to give children a sense of adventure by presenting social relations in this new way.

The cultured world has yet another answer to the question, “How shall we give our children adventure?” It points to the wealth of classical myths, of Iliads, sagas, of fairy-stories which are practically folk-lore, semi-magic, semi-allegorical, semi-moral tales which express the ideals and experiences of a different and younger world than ours of today. And it replies, “Give them these.” It feels in the sternness of saga stuff and in the humanity of folk-lore, a validity and a dignity and a simplicity which seem to make them suitable for children. These tales tell of beliefs of folk less experienced than we: we have outgrown them. They must be suited to the less experienced: give them to children. Thus runs the common argument. And so we find Hawthorne’s “Tanglewood Tales,” Æsop’s “Fables,” various Indian myths and Celtic legends, and even the “Niebelungen Lied” often given to quite young children. But do we find this reasoning valid when we examine these tales free from the glamour which adult sophistication casts around them? Remember we are thinking now of children in that delicate seven-to eight-year-old transition period. I have already told how I believe these children are but just beginning to have conceptions of laws,—social and physical. They are groping their way, regimenting their experiences, seeing dim generalizations and abstractions. But they are not firmly oriented. They are beginners in the world of physical or social science and can be easily side-tracked or confused. A child of twelve or even ten is quite a different creature, often with clear if not articulate conceptions of the make-up of the physical and human world. He has something to measure against, some standards to cling to. But we are talking about children still in the early plastic stages of standards who will take the relationships we offer them through stories and build them into the very fabric of their thinking.

Now, how much of the classical literature follows the lead of the children’s own inquiries? How much of it stimulates fruitful inquiries? What are the relationships which sagas, myths and folk-lore interpret? And what are the interpretations? This is a vast question and can be answered only briefly with the full consciousness that there is much lumping of dissimilar material with resulting injustices and superficiality. Also there is no attempt to use the words “myth,” “saga” and “folk-lore” in technical senses.[A] I have merely taken the dominant characteristic of any piece of literature as determining its class.