(_b_) The story also functions for children in the interpretation of the physical-biological environment or “general science.”
Between six and fourteen years of age is the neglected period for science, and it is the age when the story may function in the biggest way as a natural educational tool. Yet so absorbed are school men in the problem of drilling children in the dissected elements of the written language that they do not even understand one of the two chief characteristics of child nature at this age,—the rapidly expanding curiosity concerning nature. It is the age of the first crude control of the “scientific instinct,” the tendency to experiment and explore. It is the age for fixing the questioning habit and building a common-sense confidence in and familiarity with nature. These results follow from the logical processes involved in the activities, not from being presented with the formalized and logical results of adult science. The child will have none of this latter if he can help it; he wants to do his own experimenting. In this process again the story gives the larger insight. The child acquires facts by experimentation, observation, exploration, but the larger meanings and relationships require imaginative reconstruction. The child can observe the fish or the fly at different stages of their development, but the story of the life history of the fish or fly gives what observation cannot supply. It is as fascinating as any fairy tale when told with the same consideration for dramatic form, and the story is true besides. The child cannot understand evolution as presented by Darwin, or by the teacher of biology in the high schools; but the child even of eight revels in the stories that carry the facts of evolution, and thus he gains a right feeling towards the wonderful meaning of the progress of natural things, which makes later thinking true and easy. So strong is the response to the story that even the history of physical things when set in a natural story form, stimulates.
The fairy tales of the future will be well-told stories from our sciences or human life and nature, the two natural centers of interest in the environment, and we may expect as results in public opinion a broader common sense and a lessened gullibility. In this organization of science and modern thought in story form for its larger use in education the professional story-teller has still a great unfinished task to perform. Its beginnings are in this book, and Mrs. Cather is already at work on a broader compilation of materials for a later volume. In this larger functioning of the story the old fairy tales and myths will take their place as historical data to give comparative insight into the beliefs of people in the past, a sympathetic understanding of their limitations in knowledge, and an appreciation of our privileges in civilization, due largely to the struggles of the past.