The Dramatic Instinct In Children

THE development of the dramatic instinct in children is the special responsibility of parents. The public school and church school programs are gradually including dramatics and the teachers in many of these schools can go far in sharing this responsibility. But it is in the home where room and time, equipment and motive, suggestions and cooperating friends are found. Parental skill is revealed in helping a child to try on a new character or virtue as well as a new blouse or pair of shoes. Social and moral imagination in the child can be realized under the direct guidance of father or mother. Voyages are taken, investigations made, treasure islands discovered, animals subdued, robbers put to flight, the plans of sly Indians frustrated, and fierce battles waged by the child whose parent-teacher is versatile and imaginative. The dull, uninteresting parent, whose chief virtue is that of routine, long-faced fidelity, narrows his children’s world and correspondingly limits the range of their moral development. What faith is to the adult the dramatic instinct is to the child: it is the substance, the substantial realization of things hoped for. It is the power to make things happen. It is the victory that overcomes the prosaic, saw-dust affairs of life. If this pamphlet, carefully studied, helps parents to see and properly awaken the sleeping dramatic powers of their children and give them a new motive in guiding its various expressions, the purpose of the writers will have been realized...FROM THE BOOKS.

How "virtual adulthood"--children's role play in simulated cities, states, and nations--helped construct a new kind of "sheltered" childhood for American young people. A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work--passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks--inside virtual worlds. In this book, Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of "junior republics" and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of "sheltered" childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor force and public life, children inhabited worlds that mirrored the one they had left. Light describes the invention of junior republics as independent institutions and how they were later established at schools, on playgrounds, in housing projects, and on city streets, as public officials discovered children's role playing helped their bottom line. The junior republic movement aligned with cutting-edge developmental psychology and educational philosophy, and complemented the era’s fascination with models and miniatures, shaping educational and recreational programs across the nation. Light’s account of how earlier generations distinguished "real life" from role playing reveals a hidden history of child labor in America and offers insights into the deep roots of such contemporary concepts as gamification, play labor, and virtuality.

Excerpt from Dramatics in the Home This pamphlet is practically a sequel of The Dramatic Instinct in Children, one of the units in the American Home Series. The two should be studied together. Children are naturally dramatic in giving expression to their ideas and convictions. But they need guidance in order that this inborn capacity for forcefulness, vividness, or charm may be realized. Supervised practice in controlling the imagination is no less important than is that of controlling impulses. To play a part in a little homemade drama or pageant helps the child to find his place and to do his part in the world's work - and play. This pamphlet seeks to answer the question: How? as its companion undertakes to show what this disposition is. The dramatic method in teaching has already found its way into the best schools. It will have an increasingly large place in the best homes. It should be carefully noted that this brief study is not concerned primarily with amateur dramatics or theatricals. The author is not trying to tell parents how to train their children to become professional actors. He desires, rather, to point out how parents can help their children develop the latent powers of expression. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.