STORY-TELLING 



5564 



STORY-TELLING 



'TORY-TELLING. Children have al- 

 ways known that there is nothing in the world 

 more delightful than a good story, well told, but 

 grown people had forgotten the fact for many, 

 many centuries. Time was, in the younger days 

 of the world, when kings and warriors knew no 

 higher pleasure than listening to tales about 

 brave men and beautiful women, but when 

 books became common the story-tellers lost 

 their hold on their audiences, and gradually the 

 art of .story-telling was almost lost. Mothers, 

 to be sure, still told tales to their children in 

 the firelight, but the wider phases were almost 

 unknown. 



In very recent years, however, there has been 

 a rebirth of the ancient art. Not only do 

 mothers and teachers make constant use of it, 

 but professional story-tellers delight men and 

 women as well as children with this new-old 

 form of entertainment. 



The Purposes of Story-Telling. The child, 

 with his incessant demand for stories and "just 

 one more" story, has but one idea in mind 

 to be amused and entertained. The mother or 

 teacher who makes use of stories for other pur- 

 poses must therefore bear one fact in mind: 

 unless the story is interesting the child will not 

 listen; and if he does not listen, the other pur- 

 poses are defeated at the outset. The first, 

 great purpose of story-telling, then, must be to 

 entertain. Nor need this be looked upon as 

 an unworthy aim. The picture, the statue, the 

 poem exist to give joy, and the story is but 

 another means for appealing to the love for the 

 beautiful. 



But story-telling may and does accomplish 

 other things. It may be made, without devel- 

 oping an unpleasantly aggressive moral char- 

 acter, to teach lessons of thoughtfulness, of 

 patriotism and of faith. In fact, the story fur- 

 nishes so surely the easiest and most direct 

 road to the child's heart and conscience that 

 one wonders how the mother who cannot or 

 will not tell her children stories ever teaches 

 them any moral lessons. 



Then, too, story-telling develops the imagi- 

 nation. There is little danger that, as some 



parents fear, the child's imagination will be 

 overdeveloped by the use of fairy tales or 

 myths; the danger is far greater that, without 

 these aids, the imagination will be totally un- 

 developed, and the person will live always in 

 the valleys and never on the mountain tops 

 where imagination gives him the right and the 

 ability to live. 



From the teacher's point of view it is of the 

 utmost importance that a love for nature, for 

 history, for many of the works of the great au- 

 thors may be awakened by means of stories. 

 This does not mean that the pupils should be 

 given their nature study, their history or their 

 literature all in the form of stories; these 

 should be merely the introduction, the appe- 

 tizer which stimulates a desire for the more 

 solid things. 



Other purposes may be mentioned hastily. 

 Powers of concentration are strengthened by 

 listening to stories; the vocabulary is increased 

 and the foundations of an easy, grammatical 

 English style are laid unconsciously. A child's 

 comprehension and sympathies are broadened, 

 too, and he is brought into contact with lives 

 spent amid entirely different surroundings from 

 his own. 



How to Choose a Story. Of course the pur- 

 pose for which a story is told influences to a 

 certain extent the choice; but there are cer- 

 tain qualities which every story must possess 

 if it is to fulfil any purpose. Older people may 

 listen, through courtesy, to things in which they 

 are not interested, but the child has no con- 

 science on this matter he listens only to what 

 is so interesting that it holds his attention in 

 spite of himself. 



First of all, the story must have action, from 

 beginning to end, and all the action must point 

 to one definite conclusion. Explanations, long 

 descriptions, "preaching" have no place in a 

 story. Frequently a practiced story-teller can 

 see in some tale overburdened with these unde- 

 sirable elements a basis of action which is just 

 what she wants, and can prune away all that 

 retards this action. This one principle cannot 

 be too strongly emphasized the action need 



