Page:A Study of Fairy Tales.djvu/147

Rh, imagination, memory, and reason, here have been viewed separately. But in life action the mind is a unit. Thinking is therefore best developed through subject-matter which focuses the various powers of the child. The one element which makes the child manipulate his emotion, imagination, memory, and reason, is the presence of a problem. The problem is the best chance for the child to secure the adjustment of means to ends. This adjustment of means to ends in a problem situation, is real thinking and is the use of the highest power of which man is capable, that of functional consciousness. The real need of doing things is the best element essential to the problem. Through a problem which expresses such a genuine need, to learn to know himself, to realize his capacities and his limitations, and to secure for himself the evolution of his own character until it adapts, not itself to its environment, but its environment to its own uses and masters circumstances for its own purposes—this is the high hill to which education must look, "from which cometh its strength." The little child, in listening to a fairy tale, in seeing in it a problem of real need, and in working it out, may win some of this strength. We have previously seen that fairy tales, because of their universal elements, are subject-matter rich in possible problems.

During the story-telling what is the part the child has to play? The part of the child in all this may be to listen to the story because he has some problem of his