ut the fact that after having been repeated for two thousand years, a story
still possesses a perfectly fresh attraction for a child of to-day, does in-
deed prove that there is in it something of imperishable worth.-Felix Adler.
Whatever has, at any time, appealed to the best emotions and moved the
heart of a people, must have for their children's children, political, historical,
and cultural value. This is especially true of folk-tales and folk-songs.-P.P.
Claxton, United States Commissioner of Education.
I. AVAILABLE TYPES OF TALES
From all this wealth of accumulated folk-material which has come down to
us through the ages, we must select, for we cannot crowd the child with
all the folk-stuff that folk-lore scientists are striving to preserve for scientific
purposes. Moreover, naturally much of it contains the crudities, the coarse-
ness, and the cruelties of primitive civilization; and it is not necessary that
the child be burdened with this natural history of a past society. We must
select from the past. In this selection of what shall be presented to the childwe must be guided by two standards: First, we owe it to the child to hand
on to him his literary heritage; and secondly, we must help him to make
of himself the ideal man of the future. Therefore the tales we offer must
contribute to these two standards. The tales selected will be those which
the ages have found interesting; for the fact that they have lived proves their
fitness, they have lived because there was something in them that appealed
to the universal heart. And because of this fact they will be those which in
the frequent re-tellings of ages have acquired a classic form and therefore
have within themselves the possibility of taking upon them a perfect liter-
ary form. The tales selected will be those tales which, as we have pointed
out, contain the interests of children; for only through his interests does the
child rise to higher interests and finally develop to the ideal man. They will
be those tales which stand also the test of a classic, the test of literature, the
test of the short-story, and the test of narration and of description. The child
would be handicapped in life to be ignorant of these tales.
Tales suitable for the little child may be viewed under these seven classes of
available types: (1) the accumulative, or clock story; (2) the animal tale; (3)
the humorous tale; (4) the realistic tale; (5) the romantic tale; (6) the old tale;
and (7) the modern tale.
I. The Accumulative Tale.
The accumulative tale is the simplest form of the tale. It may be:-
(1) A tale of simple repetition.
(2) A tale of repetition with an addition, incremental iteration.Another tale of simple repetition, whose fairy element is the magic key, is
The Key of the Kingd
of its images, and because of the catastrophe at the end, which affects the
child just as the tumble of his huge pile of blocks-the crash and general up-
heaval delight him. This tale has so many variants that it illustrates well the
diffusion of fairy tales. It is Grimm's The Spider and the Flea, which as we
have seen, is appealing in its simplicity; the Norse The Cock Who Fell into
the Brewing Vat; and the Indian The Death and Burial of Poor Hen. The
curious succession of incidents may have been invented once for all at some
definite time, and from thence spread to all the world.
Johnny Cake and The Gingerbread Man also represent the second class of
accumulative tale, but show a more definite plot; there is more story-stuff
