Children -- Books and reading; Children's literature -- Bibliography; Children's stories -- Bibliography; Storytelling
"I remember well the feeling roused in my mind at the mention or sight
of the name _Lucifer_ during the early years of my life. It stood for
me as the name of a being stupendous, dreadful in moral deformity,
lurid, hideous and mighty. I remember the surprise with which, when I
had grown somewhat older and began to study Latin, I came upon the name
in Virgil where it means _light-bringer_--the herald of the Sun."
Plato has said that "the end of education should be the training by
suitable habits of the instincts of virtue in the child."
About two thousand years later, Sir Philip Sydney, in his "Defence of
Poesy," says: "The final end of learning is to draw and lead us to so
high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay
lodgings, can be capable of."
And yet it is neither the Greek philosopher nor the Elizabethan poet
that makes the everyday application of these principles; but we have
a hint of this application from the Pueblo tribe of Indians, of whom
Lummis tells us the following:
"There is no duty to which a Pueblo child is trained in which he has
to be content with a bare command: do this. For each, he learns a
fairy-tale designed to explain how children first came to know that
it was right to 'do this,' and detailing the sad results that befall
those who did otherwise. Some tribes have regular story-tellers, men
who have devoted a great deal of time to learning the myths and stories
of their people and who possess, in addition to good memory, a vivid
imagination. The mother sends for one of these, and having prepared a
feast for him, she and her little brood, who are curled up near her,
await the fairy stories of the dreamer who after his feast and smoke
entertains the company for hours."
In modern times, the nurse, who is now receiving such complete training
for her duties with children, should be ready to imitate the "dreamer"
of the Indian tribe. I rejoice to find that regular instruction in
story-telling is being given in many of the institutions where the
nurses are trained.
Some years ago there appeared a book by Dion Calthrop called "King
Peter," which illustrates very fully the effect of story-telling. It
is the account of the education of a young prince which is carried on
at first by means of stories, and later he is taken out into the arena
of life to show what is happening there--the dramatic appeal being
always the means used to awaken his imagination. The fact that only
_one_ story a year is told him prevents our seeing the effect from day
to day, but the time matters little. We only need faith to believe
that the growth, though slow, was sure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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