No one of us ever saw Heaven but all of us can describe it. A place of this world’s grass and flowers and music and familiar, beloved personalities transplanted, renewed, translated--this is our manner of describing, of seeing Heaven.
The child’s method of imaging a fairy and our method of imaging Heaven are identical. From known, experienced, familiar perceptions we make a new, as yet unexperienced concept. If we want a child to see Heaven, we must help him to see fairies. Success, happiness, efficiency, belief--all these in adult life are dependent upon the proper stimulating of the child’s constructive imagination.
_A good fairy story is the best stimulus to child imagination._
Not any fairy story, selected with slight discrimination and told to a child just because it is a story of fancy, however. “Blue Beard,” “Ali Baba,” “The Cruel Stepmother” do little but cause child nightmares and give children ideas of cruelty, vengeance and crime. These concepts will present themselves to the child soon enough in the daily newspapers. Let us shut them out of the story hour. In selecting a fairy story to tell to children, we will first analyze it with exceeding care, asking ourselves these questions in regard to it:
_What constitutes the imaginative element of this story?_
_Is its point of unreality an idea which we want to give permanence in the child’s mind?_
_Is the story told in a series of such familiar, known images that there is material in it for stimulating the child’s constructive imagination?_
If a fanciful story survives these three tests, we may be sure that it is perfect.
There is Hans Andersen’s story of “The Faithful Tin Soldier.” Its climax is told in a lesson of heroism and faithfulness, qualities that we wish to make permanent in the child’s mind through the medium of the imagination. And how are these qualities presented? We find that they are made real to children by means of familiar settings; a little boy is playing with new toys upon his birthday, we see the child going to bed, there is the coming-alive of the toys in the play-room, the tin soldier’s experiences in the street, his return to the kitchen. Every child knows toys, a birthday, a play-room, a city street in the rain, a kitchen; but out of these patches of gray, every-day pigment Andersen paints for children a new, colored picture of fancy. Presented in terms of the real we have the unreal; a live tin soldier who is as heroic and faithful as we wish our children to be. This is a perfect imaginative story, a bit of unreality which we wish to make real for children and told in terms of child experience.