vixal[ FIRST GRADE READERS 375 



Sea." The pupil did not know the meaning of a league but on 

 looking it up returned with the same amount of credulity even 

 though 20,000 leagues means 60,000 miles and the diameter of 

 the earth is about 8000 miles. Any one entertaining any doubt 

 as to the universal faith in such matters should question farmers 

 in regard to the Old Farmers' Almanac and their belief in weather 

 folk-lore. 



The reasons given for the fairy-land route are more traditional 

 than real. The supporters might as well say, — "The more remote 

 an idea is to the life of a pupil the greater is the value of the idea". 

 One purpose of the fairy story is to teach a moral truth. I would 

 give more for one moral taught by the realities of the Boy Scout 

 method than for one hundred morals dramatized by the gaesous 

 vertebrates of fairydom. But, someone says, the children like 

 the poetical and rhymes. Cannot the truth be made as poetical 

 as the untruth ? 



The fairy story trains the imagination. If a little more than 

 50 years ago someone had told General Grant that some of his 

 men would live to see the day when battles would be fought in 

 the air and beneath the surface of the ocean he would have smiled 

 increduously. His imagination could not have conceived the 

 things of the great war of today. These wonderful inventions 

 of science are due to the imagination based on realities. Study 

 the life of any of these great inventors and you will find them based 

 on realities. When the imagination wanders about unrealities 

 the real environment does not change. When imagination is 

 based on reality it accomplishes things. And so it is with the 

 child. His imagination should not be started on the unrealities 

 of life but should be allowed to start from the higher plane of 

 truth. This is what the child does when he uses the stick for a 

 horse and the chair for a boat. Fairy stories are the inventions 

 of adult imaginations forced upon the child and yet we inconsis- 

 tently feel pleased when we can say that "he no longer believes 

 in fairies." 



Then the recapitulation argument. The literature of primitive 

 man was folk-lore and the childhood of the individual should paral- 

 lel the childhood of the race. The mother of the howling savage 

 stilled her papoose with a folk-lore story . Does that excuse the 

 modern (?) mother who awes her little one with "The boogy man 

 will get you" or "I will shut you up in a dark closet ?" That child 



