days, having found certain history stories successful with children of seven, I tried the same with children of six, but only once.  Edmund of East Anglia dying for his faith fell very flat.  “What was the good of that?” said one little fellow, “’cause if you’re dead you can’t do anything!  But if you’re alive, you can get more soldiers and win a victory.”  The majority of the class, however, seemed to feel with another who asked, “Why didn’t he promise while the Danes were there?  He needn’t have kept it when they went away.”

Another way of stating our aim in telling stories to children is that a story presents morality in the concrete.  Virtues and vices per se neither attract nor repel, they simply mean nothing to a child, until they are presented as the deeds of man or woman, boy or girl, living and acting in a world recognised as real.  One telling story is that of the boy who got hold of Miss Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant and who said to his mother, “Mother, I’ve been reading ‘The Little Merchants’ and I know now how horrid it is to cheat and tell lies.”  “I have been telling you that ever since you could speak,” said his mother, to which the boy answered, “Yes, I know, but that didn’t interest me.”  Our children had been told the story of how the Countess of Buchan crowned the Bruce, a duty which should have been performed by her brother the Earl of Fife, who, however, was too much afraid of the wrath of English Edward.  A few days after, an argument arose and one little girl was heard to say, “I don’t want to be brave,” and a boy rejoined, “Girls don’t need to be brave.”  I said, “Which would you rather be, the Countess who put the crown on the King’s head, or the brother who ran away?” And quickly came the answer, “Oh! the brave Countess,” from the very child who didn’t want to be brave!

Froebel sums up the teacher’s aim in the words:  “The telling of stories is a truly strengthening spirit-bath, it gives opportunity for the exercise of all mental powers, opportunity for testing individual judgement and individual feelings.”

But why is it that children crave for stories?  “Education,” says Miss Blow, a veteran Froebelian, “is a series of responses to indicated needs,” and undoubtedly the need for stories is as pressing as the need to explore, to experiment and to construct.  What is the unconscious need that is expressed in this craving, why is this desire so deeply implanted by Nature?  So far, no one seems to have given a better answer than Froebel has done, when he says that the desire for stories comes out of the need to understand life, that it is in fact rooted in the instinct of investigation.  “Only the study of the life of others can furnish points of comparison with the life the boy himself has experienced.  The story concerns other men, other circumstances, other times and places, yet the hearer seeks his own image, he beholds it and no one knows that he sees it.”

Man cannot be master of his surroundings till he investigates and so gathers knowledge.  But he has to adapt himself not only to the physical but to the human environment in which he lives.  In stories of all kinds, children study human life in all kinds of circumstances, nay, if the story is sufficiently graphic they almost go through the experiences narrated, almost live the new life.