During the story-telling one must ask, “In all this what is the part the child has to play?” In the telling the teacher has aimed to give what there is in the tale.  The child’s part is to receive what there is in the tale, the emotion, the imagination, the truth, and the form embodied in the tale.  The content of feeling, of portrayal, of truth, and of language he receives, he will in some way transmit before the school day is ended, even if in forms obscure and hidden.  Long years afterwards, he may exhibit this same emotion, imagination, truth and form, in deeds that proclaim loudly the return from his fairy tales.  However, if the child is being surrounded by pragmatic influences through his teachers he will soon become aware that his feelings are useless unless he does something because of them; that what he sees is worthless unless he sees to some purpose; that it is somewhat fruitless to know the truth and not use it; and if words have in their form expressed the life of the tale, he is more dead than words not to express the life that teems within his own soul.  The little child grows gradually into the responsibility for action, for expression, into a consciousness of purpose and a knowledge of his own problems.  But each opportunity he is given to announce his own initiative breaks down the inhibition of inaction and aids him to become a free achieving spirit.  As the child listens to the tale he is a thinking human creature; but in the return which he makes to his tale he becomes a quickened creator.  The use which he makes of the ideas he has gained through his fairy tales, will be the work of his creative imagination.

Fairy tales, though perfectly ordinary subject-matter, may become the means of the greatest end in education, the development in the child of the power of consciousness.  The special appeal to the various powers and capacities of the child mind, such as emotion, imagination, memory, and reason, here have been viewed separately.  But in life action the mind is a unit.  Thinking is therefore best developed through subject-matter which focuses the various powers of the child.  The one element which makes the child manipulate his emotion, imagination, memory, and reason, is the presence of a problem.  The problem is the best chance for the child to secure the adjustment of means to ends.  This adjustment of means to ends in a problem situation, is real thinking and is the use of the highest power of which man is capable, that of functional consciousness.  The real need of doing things is the best element essential to the problem.  Through a problem which expresses such a genuine need, to learn to know himself, to realize his capacities and his limitations, and to secure for himself the evolution of his own character until it adapts, not itself to its environment, but its environment to its own uses and masters circumstances for its own purposes—­this is the high hill to which education must look, “from which cometh its strength.”  The little child, in listening to a fairy tale, in seeing in it a problem of real need, and in working it out, may win some of this strength.  We have previously seen that fairy tales, because of their universal elements, are subject-matter rich in possible problems.