Here and Now Story Book Part 1

Here and Now Story Book.

by Lucy Sprague Mitch.e.l.l.

FOREWORD

Our school has always a.s.sumed that children are interested in and will work with or give expression to those things which are familiar to them.

This is not new: the kindergarten gives domestic life a prominent place with little children. But with the kindergarten the present and familiar is abandoned in most schools and emphasis is placed upon that which is unfamiliar and remote. It is impossible to conceive of children working their own way from the familiar to the unknown unless they develop a method in understanding the familiar which will apply to the unfamiliar as well. This method is the method of art and science--the method of experimentation and inquiry. We can almost say that children are born with it, so soon do they begin to show signs of applying it. As they have been in the past and as they are in the present to a very great extent, schools make no attempt to provide for this method; in fact they take pains to introduce another. They are disposed to set up a rigid program which answers inquiries before they are made and supplies needs before they have been felt.

We try to keep the children upon present day and familiar things until they show by their attack on materials and especially upon information that they are ready to work out into the unknown and unfamiliar. In the matter of stories and verse which fit into such a program we have always felt an almost total void. Whether other schools feel this would depend upon their intentional program. Surely no school would advise giving cla.s.sical literature without the setting which would make the stories and verse understandable. It is a question whether the fact of desirable literature has not in the past and does not still govern our whole school program more than many educators would be willing to admit. What seems to be more logical is to set up that which is psychologically sound so far as we know it and create if need be a new literature to help support the structure.

In the presence of art, schools have always taken a modest att.i.tude. For some reason or other they seem to think it out of their province. They regard children as potential scientists, professional men and women, captains of industry, but scarcely potential artists. To what school of design, what academy of music, what school of literary production, do our common schools lead? We are not fitting our children to compose, to create, but at our best to appreciate and reproduce.

Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l as story teller in this new sense of writing stories, rather than merely telling them, is having an influence in the school which has not been altogether unlooked for. The children look upon themselves as composers in language and language thus becomes not merely a useful medium of expression but also an art medium. They regard their own content, gathered by themselves in a perfectly familiar setting as fit for use as art material. That is, just as the children draw and show power to compose with crayons and paints, they use language to compose what they term stories or occasionally, verse. Often these "stories" are a mere rehearsal of experiences, but in so far as they are vivid and have some sort of fitting ending they pa.s.s as a childish art expression just as their compositions in drawing do.

So far as content is concerned the school gives the children varied opportunities to know and express what they find in their environment.

Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l finds this content in the school. It is being used, it is even being expressed in language. What she particularly does is to show the possibility of using this same content as art in language. She does this both by writing stories herself and by helping the children to write. The children are not by any means read to, so much as they are encouraged to tell their own stories. These are taken down verbatim by the teachers of the younger groups. Through skilful handling of several of the older groups what the children call "group stories" are produced as well as individual ones.

We hope this book will bring to parents and teachers what it has to us, a new method of approach to literature for little children, and to children the joy our children have in the stories themselves.

CAROLINE PRATT

The City and Country School July, 1921

HERE AND NOW STORY BOOK

INTRODUCTION

These stories are experiments,--experiments both in content and in form. They were written because of a deep dissatisfaction felt by a group of people working experimentally in a laboratory school, with the available literature for children. I am publishing them not because I feel they have come through to any particularly noteworthy achievement, but because they indicate a method of work which I believe to be sound where children are concerned. They must always be regarded as experiments, but experiments which have been strictly limited to lines suggested to me by the children themselves. Both the stuff of the stories and the mould in which they are cast are based on suggestions gained directly from children. I have tried to put aside my notions of what was "childlike." I have tried to ignore what I, as an adult, like. I have tried to study children's interests not historically but through their present observations and inquiries, and their sense of form through their spontaneous expressions in language, and to model my own work strictly on these findings. I have forced myself throughout to be deliberate, conscious, for fear I should slip back to adult habits of thought and expression. I can give here only samples of the many stories and questions I have gathered from the children which form the basis of my own stories. Suffice it that my own stories attempt to follow honestly the leads which here and now the children themselves indicate in content and in form, no matter how difficult or strange the going for adult feet.

First, as to the stuff of which the story is made,--the content. I have a.s.sumed that anything to which a child gives his spontaneous attention, anything which he questions as he moves around the world, holds appropriate material about which to talk to him either in speech or in writing. I have a.s.sumed that the answers to these his spontaneous inquiries should be given always in terms of a relationship which is natural and intelligible at his age and which will help him to order the familiar facts of his own experiences. Thus the answers will themselves lead him on to new inquiries. For they will give him not so much new facts as a new method of attack. I have further a.s.sumed that any of this material which by taking on a pattern form can thereby enhance or deepen its intrinsic quality is susceptible of becoming literature. Material which does not lend itself to some sort of intentional design or form, may be good for informational purposes but not for stories as such.

The task, then, is to examine first the things which get the spontaneous attention of a two-year-old, a three-year-old and so up to a seven-year-old; and then to determine what relationships are natural and intelligible at these ages. Obviously to determine the mere subject of attention is not enough. Children of all ages attend to engines. But the two-year-old attends to certain things and the seven-year-old to quite different ones. The relationships through which the two-year-old interprets his observations may make of the engine a gigantic extension of his own energy and movement; whereas the relationships through which the seven-year-old interprets his observations may make of the engine a scientific example of the expansion of steam or of the desire of men to get rapidly from one place to another. What relationship he is relying on we can get only by watching the child's own activities. The second part of the task is to discover what _is_ pattern to the untrained but unspoiled ears, eyes, muscles and minds of the little folk who are to consume the stories. Each part of the task has its peculiar difficulties. But fortunately in each, children do point the way if we have the courage to forget our own adult way and follow theirs.

CONTENT

In looking for content for these stories I followed the general lines of the school for which they were written. The school gives the children the opportunity to explore first their own environment and gradually widens this environment for them along lines of their own inquiries.

Consequently I did not seek for material outside the ordinary surroundings of the children. On the contrary, I a.s.sumed that in stories as in other educational procedure, the place to begin is the point at which the child has arrived,--to begin and lead out from. With small children this point is still within the "here" and the "now," and so stories must begin with the familiar and the immediate. But also stories must lead children out from the familiar and immediate, for that is the method both of education and of art. Here and now stories mean to me stories which include the children's first-hand experiences as a starting point, not stories which are literally limited to these experiences. Therefore to get my basis for the stories I went to the environment in which a child of each age naturally finds himself and there I watched him. I tried to see what in his home, in his school, in the streets, he seized upon and how he made this his own. I tried to determine what were the relationships he used to order his experiences.

Fortunately for the purposes of writing stories I did not have to get behind the baffling eyes and the inscrutable sounds of a small baby. Yet I learned much for understanding the twos by watching even through the first months. What "the great, big, blooming, buzzing confusion" (as James describes it) means to an infant, I fancy we grown-ups will really never know. But I suppose we may be sure that existence is to him largely a stream of sense impressions. Also I suppose we are reasonably safe in saying that whatever the impression that reaches him he tends to translate it into action. At what age a child accomplishes what can be called a "thought" or what these first thoughts are, is surely beyond our present powers to describe. But that his early thoughts have a discernible muscular expression, I fancy we may say. It may well be that thought is merely a.s.sociative memory as Loeb maintains. It may well be that behaviorists are right and that thought is just "the rhythmic mimetic rehearsal of the first hand experience in motor terms." If the act of thinking is itself motor, its expression is somewhat attenuated in adults. Be that as it may, a small child's expressions are still in unmistakable motor terms. It is obviously through the large muscles that a baby makes his responses. And even a three-year-old can scarcely think "engine" without showing the pull of his muscles and the puff-puffing of exertion. Nor can he observe an object without making some movement towards it. He takes in through his senses; and he interprets through his muscles.

For our present purposes this characteristic has an important bearing.

The world pictured for the child must be a world of sounds and smells and tastes and sights and feeling and contacts. Above all his early stories must be of activities and they must be told in motor terms.

Often we are tempted to give him reasons in response to his incessant "why?" but when he asks "why?" he really is not searching for reasons at all. A large part of the time he is not even asking a question. He merely enjoys this reciperative form of speech and is indignant if your answer is not what he expects. One of my children enjoyed this antiphonal method of following his own thoughts to such an extent that for a time he told his stories in the form of questions telling me each time what to answer! His questions had a social but no scientific bearing. And even when a three-year-old asks a real question he wants to be answered in terms of action or of sense impressions and not in terms of reasons why. How could it be otherwise since he still thinks with his senses and his muscles and not with that generalizing mechanism which conceives of cause and effect? The next time a three-year-old asks you "why you put on shoes?" see if he likes to be told "Mother wears shoes when she goes out because it is cold and the sidewalks are hard," or if he prefers, "Mother's going to go outdoors and take a big bus to go and buy something:" or "You listen and in a minute you'll hear mother's shoes going pat, pat, pat downstairs and then you'll hear the front door close bang! and mother won't be here any more!" "Why?" really means, "please talk to me!" and naturally he likes to be talked to in terms he can understand which are essentially sensory and motor.

Now what activities are appropriate for the first stories? I think the answer is clear. His, the child's, own! The first activities which a child knows are of course those of his own body movements whether spontaneous or imposed upon him by another. Everything is in terms of himself. Again I think none of us would like to hazard a guess as to when the child comes through to a sharp distinction between himself and other things or other persons. But we are sure, I think, that this distinction is a matter of growth which extends over many years and that at two, three, and even four, it is imperfectly apprehended. We all know how long a child is in acquiring a correct use of the p.r.o.nouns "me" and "you." And we know that long after he has this language distinction, he still calls everything he likes "mine." "This is my cow, this is my tree!" The only way to persuade him that it is _not_ his is to call it some one else's. Possessed it must be. He knows the world only in personal terms. That is, his early sense of relationship is that of himself to his concrete environment. This later evolves into a sense of relationship between other people and their concrete environment.

At first, then, a child can not transcend himself or his experiences.

Nor should he be asked to. A two-year-old's stories must be completely his stories with his own familiar little person moving in his own familiar background. They should vivify and deepen the sense of the one relationship he does feel keenly,--that of himself to something well-known. Now a two-year-old's range of experiences is not large. At least the experiences in which he takes a real part are not many. So his stories must be of his daily routine,--his eating, his dressing, his activities with his toys and his home. These are the things to which he attends: they make up his world. And they must be his very own eating and dressing and home, and not eating and dressing and homes in general.

Stories which are not intimately his own, I believe either pa.s.s by or strain a two-year-old; and I doubt whether many three-year-olds can partic.i.p.ate with pleasure and without strain in any experience which has not been lived through in person. He may of course get pleasure from the sound of the story apart from its meaning much earlier. Just now we are thinking solely of the content. I well remember the struggles of my three-year-old boy to get outside himself and view a baby chicken's career objectively. He checked up each step in my story by this orienting remark, "That the baby chicken in the sh.e.l.l, not me! The baby chicken go scritch-scratch, not me!" Was not this an evident effort to comprehend an extra-personal relationship?

Again just as at first a small child can not get outside himself, so he can not get outside the immediate. At first he can not by himself recall even a simple chronological sequence. He is still in the narrowest, most limiting sense, too entangled in the "here" and the "now." The plot sense emerges slowly. Indeed there is slight plot value in most children's stories up to eight years. Plot is present in embryonic form in the omnipresent personal drama: "Where's baby? Peek-a-boo! There she is!" It can be faintly detected in the pleasure a child has in an actual walk. But the pleasure he derives from the sense of completeness, the sense that a walk or a story has a beginning and a middle and an end, the real plot pleasure, is negligible compared with the pleasure he gets in the action itself. Small children's experiences are and should be pretty much continuous flows of more or less equally important episodes.

Their stories should follow their experiences. They should have no climaxes, no sense of completion. The episodes should be put together more like a string of beads than like an organic whole. Almost any section of a child's experience related in simple chronological sequence makes a satisfactory story.

This can be pressed even further. There is another kind of relationship by which little children interpret their environment. It is the early manifestation of the a.s.sociational process which in our adult life so largely crowds out the sensory and motor appreciation of the world. It runs way back to the baby's pleasure in recognizing things, certainly long before the period of articulate questions. We all retain vestiges of this childlike pleasure in our joyful greeting of a foreign word that is understood or in any new application of an old thought or design. As a child acquires a few words he adds the pleasure of naming,--an extension of the pleasure of recognition. This again develops into the joy of enumerating objects which are grouped together in some close a.s.sociation, usually physical juxtaposition. For instance a two-or three-year-old likes to have every article he ate for breakfast rehea.r.s.ed or to have every member of the family named at each episode in a story which concerns the group! Earlier he likes to have his five little toes checked off as pigs or merely numbered. This is closely tied up with the child's pattern sense which we shall discuss at length under "Form." Now the pleasure of enumeration, like that of a refrain, is in part at least a pleasure in muscle pattern. My two-year-old daughter composed a song which well ill.u.s.trates the fascination of enumeration.

The refrain "Tick-tock" was borrowed from a song which had been sung to her.

"Tick-tock Marni's nose, Tick-tock Marni's eyes, Tick-tock Marni's mouth, Tick-tock Marni's teeth, Tick-tock Marni's chin, Tick-tock Marni's romper, Tick-tock Marni's stockings, Tick-tock Marni's shoes," etc., etc.

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 a.s.sociations 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 subst.i.tution 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 a.s.sessed 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 a.s.sociations, when he begins to note the sequence, the order of things, from this time he is beginning to think scientifically. It is preeminently 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 ma.s.se. I am merely pleading not to have them accepted en ma.s.se 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?

TWO STORIES BY FOUR-YEAR-OLDS

Once there was a table and he was taking a walk and he fell into a pond of water and an alligator bit him and then he came up out of the pond of water and he stepped into a trap that some hunters had set for him, and turned a somersault on his nose.