Katinka found herself in a great forest. The wind was wailing through the treetops, the snow was falling and it was bitter cold. Katinka did not come back to the house. Her mother waited for her and by and by she started out in search of her, but she, too, was lost in the storm that raged, and never came back.
Dobrunka waited in the house. The night passed, and the next day and many days. By and by the snow melted. The birds and flowers of Spring came, but still the lost ones did not come back. Dobrunka had the house all alone. One day, the handsomest youth in all the world came by and met Dobrunka. They became friends, and afterwards they were married and lived happily forever thereafter.
The Storytellers’ League, of the State Normal School, of Dillon, Montana, have decided for the present year to devote their attention to a line of work, which so far as we know, has not yet been attempted by any other League. They will investigate the part that the supernatural, especially witchcraft, plays in literature, and will follow it not only through folk literature, but the following units: Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Konigs-kinder and Hansel and Gretel. The general theme will be broken from time to time by the introduction of stories suitable for a special session. At the last meeting in December the program will be given over to Christmas stories, tales and legends. Miss Florence Mayer is President of the League.
Story Telling and Education
BY GEORGE EVERETT PARTRIDGE, Ph.D.
The recent revival of story telling raises many interesting questions, both practical and theoretical. Considered as a part of a larger movement,—an effort to control and utilize the powers concealed within the instincts and unconscious forces of the mind—story telling takes a place in a problem which we can hardly be mistaken in calling one of the most important of our day. We have tended to value, in education, only that which we can see and fully understand; but now, as we begin seriously to employ arts in the school, and in the arts to subordinate knowledge to feeling, to use methods that yield no immediate or practical return, we demand an increasing faith in the powers of receptivity and inner response of the child, and we must learn more and more to detect, and to be satisfied with, unseen and remote effects.
In the art-invasion of the school, which is one aspect of this movement toward a wider education, it is difficult to see how, in the near future, we can be carried too far. We have been in the habit of emphasizing so much the learning process, that we are in danger of preventing the free and experimental attitude toward these new interests that seems needed at the present time. We are likely to have too little, rather than too much, faith in the play motives, the æsthetic moods, and the subconscious powers. We shall still want the child to express, to dramatize, to be examined upon, everything he receives: to externalize every response, even in the most intimate regions of feeling.