Children -- Books and reading; Children's literature -- Bibliography; Children's stories -- Bibliography; Storytelling
This element is necessary in response to the demand of the child who
expressed the needs of his fellow-playmates when he said: "I want to
go to the place where the shadows are real." This is the true
definition of "faerie" lands and is the first sign of real mental
development in the child when he is no longer content with the stories
of his own little deeds and experiences, when his ear begins to
appreciate sounds different from the words in his own everyday
language, and when he begins to separate his own personality from the
action of the story.
George Goschen says:
"What I want for the young are books and stories which do not simply
deal with our daily life. I like the fancy even of little children to
have some larger food than images of their own little lives, and I
confess I am sorry for the children whose imaginations are not
sometimes stimulated by beautiful fairy tales which carry them to
worlds different from those in which their future will be passed. . . .
I hold that what removes them more or less from their daily life is
better than what reminds them of it at every step."[22]
It is because of the great value of leading children to something
beyond the limited circle of their own lives that I deplore the
twaddling boarding-school stories written for girls and the
artificially prepared public school stories for boys. Why not give
them the dramatic interest of a larger stage? No account of a cricket
match or a football triumph could present a finer appeal to boys and
girls than the description of the Peacestead in the "Heroes of Asgaard":
"This was the playground of the Aesir, where they practiced trials of
skill one with another and held tournaments and sham fights. These last
were always conducted in the gentlest and most honorable manner; for the
strongest law of the Peacestead was that no angry blow should be struck
or spiteful word spoken upon the sacred field."
For my part, I would unhesitatingly give to boys and girls an element
of strong romance in the stories which are told them even before they
are twelve.
Miss Sewell says:
"The system that keeps girls in the schoolroom reading simple stories,
without reading Scott and Shakespeare and Spenser, and then hands them
over to the unexplored recesses of the Circulating Library, has been
shown to be the most frivolizing that can be devised." She sets forth
as the result of her experience that a good novel, especially a
romantic one, read at twelve or fourteen, is really a beneficial thing.
At present, so many of the children from the elementary schools get
their first idea of love, if one can give it such a name from vulgar
pictures displayed in the shop windows or jokes on marriage, culled
from the lowest type of paper, or the proceedings of a divorce court.
What an antidote to such representation might be found in the stories
of Hector and Andromache, Siegfried and Brunnehilde, Dido and Aeneas,
Orpheus and Eurydice, St. Francis and St. Clare!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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