I Value of Stories

Stories are the language of childhood. They are mirrors of nature in which the child beholds his natural face “as in a glass.” They appeal to every instinct of child nature. They feed every interest of the soul. They strike a responsive chord in every awakening faculty of the unfolding life. Boys and girls love stories as they love no other form of address. Stories afford amusement and entertainment as play does, for they are the mind’s play, as well as its natural soul-food.

Story-telling is as old as human speech. It was enjoyed by the primitive children of all races and lands, as it is enjoyed by the boys and girls of to-day. There is no better way to convey our ideas, to widen knowledge, experience, and sympathy, or to impress moral truth. Stories with plenty of life and action in them leave nothing to explain. Conduct pictured in them needs no application or obtrusive moral. Good stories, well adapted and well told, not only furnish amusement and hold attention as no other form of speech does, but possess positive value in many other directions. They feed, exercise, and cultivate the imagination; appeal to the emotions; arouse the will; strengthen the power of concentration; develop the sense of beauty; stimulate the idealizing instinct; help to shape thought and language; widen the child’s sympathies and fellowships; broaden his world interests; prepare for future understanding of literary classics, especially poetry; implant ideas of right and wrong; and, in short, make the most lasting impressions of an ethical, esthetic, educational, and cultural nature.

The story method is the golden method of instruction. No method of teaching is so popular or powerful. The story-teller was the first teacher of primitive children in Egypt, Assyria, India, China, and Japan. The stories of the wandering bards, like Homer, in ancient Greece, were the first education of the Greeks. Stories of national heroes, such as we find in Plutarch’s Lives, delighted the Roman boy just as the stories of Joseph and Samuel and David and Daniel charmed and thrilled to patriotism the Jewish boy. During the Middle Ages the monks, troubadours, skalds, jongleurs, wandering bards, and minstrels never lacked an audience when they told or sang their tales of mystery, heroism, or love. Story-telling has been a valuable instrument for philosophers, poets, prophets, statesmen, and great leaders of men in all ages. It was the method of Jesus, the greatest of all teachers. “Without a parable spake he not unto them.” Plato regarded stories for children as so important that he would have none told that had not been approved by the public censor. Froebel, the father of the kindergarten, said: “Story-telling refreshes the mind as a bath refreshes the body; it gives exercise to the intellect and its powers, and tests the judgment and the feelings.” Charles Lamb, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Coleridge, Longfellow, Dickens, Emerson, Lowell, Milton, Hawthorne, Stanley, Hugh Miller, Ruskin, and Wagner tell of the influence of stories, and especially fairy stories, upon them before the age of sixteen, and many before they were twelve. When Henry Ward Beecher arose in Manchester, England, to make an address, during the Civil War, pleading the cause of the Union before a bitterly hostile assembly, he looked out upon a howling mob. He smiled, he waved his hand, he waited in vain. At last he shouted, “Let me tell you a story!” and at once the tumult ceased. He told them a short, pithy story in half a dozen sentences, won their attention, and proceeded with his great plea for human rights. It has been said that Beecher, by this speech, stemmed the tide of popular feeling against the Union and so prevented recognition of the Confederacy by the British Government.

All the world loves a good story. But give the story a place in the heart and mind of childhood early enough, and you have laid the foundation-stone for an enduring character. And beyond all this, as Dr. G. Stanley Hall says, “To hear stories from the great story-books of the world is one of the inalienable rights of childhood.”