Fanciful Tales

From the Introduction. Joy as a factor in education is too apt to be ignored. Feeling and pleasure are too often counted out as not being related to the needs of the child. Good-natured merriment is hushed. School is invested with a school-consciousness, an insupportable dryness and solemnity which precludes the spontaneous laughter of a normal growth. Discipline is enforced by direct didactic teaching or through sarcasm rather than encouraged by the fun which has no sting in it. There is no writer before the public who has added more to the wholesome humor of the age than Mr. Stockton-no writer whose stories are so full of pure wit, entirely free from poison, and pointing to healthy, happy action, while probing false sentiment. What child could fail to raise his own standard and guard himself against egotism after following Arla through her trials in attempting to regulate the Clocks of Rondaine? What boy could fail to appreciate the sweetness and quiet in the character of the Minor Canon? Every school would be the better for such reading. The notes from the pipes of "Old Pipes" come floating down to me from the happy reading lessons of years ago, when my own pupils loved to read the story. What a happy mood it threw over the school-room! It is the realization of a long hope that one of my pupils has selected this story as one that ought to come into an inexpensive school-book where children in general may enjoy it. And why should not children have such reading, and have it related to school work? Why should the librarian at the public library be the real teacher of reading, the one to whom children go to get what they like and want? Why should the public library instead of the school-room be the literary resort for children? Why should not the children, who form the best part of the "reading public," be in intimate relation to the literary life of their land? Why should they not get at the man who sings out of his heart because he has something to sing? What would it mean to the children of the United States if all the reading-books gotten up for commercial purposes were swept out of existence and the works of good writers substituted? What would it mean to the public? What, to teachers, authors, publishers? To the child it would mean stores and stores of knowledge, contact with the best life agoing, the conservation of his youth, economy of his time.