ey 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 associations, 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 im