g to parents and teachers what it has to us,
a new method of approach to literature for little children, and to
children the joy our children have in the stories themselves.

CAROLINE PRATT

The City and Country School
July, 1921

HERE AND NOW STORY BOOK

HERE AND NOW STORY BOOK

INTRODUCTION

These stories are experiments,--experiments both in content and in
form. They were written because of a deep dissatisfaction felt by a
group of people working experimentally in a laboratory school, with
the available literature for children. I am publishing them not
because I feel they have come through to any particularly noteworthy
achievement, but because they indicate a method of work which I
believe to be sound where children are concerned. They must always
be regarded as experiments, but experiments which have been strictly
limited to lines suggested to me by the children themselves. Both the
stuff of the stories and the mould in which they are cast are based on
suggestions gained directly from children. I have tried to put aside
my notions of what was "childlike." I have tried to ignore what I,
as an adult, like. I have tried to study children's interests not
historically but through their present observations and inquiries, and
their sense of form through their spontaneous expressions in language,
and to model my own work strictly on these findings. I have forced
myself throughout to be deliberate, conscious, for fear I should slip
back to adult habits of thought and expression. I can give here only
samples of the many stories and questions I have gathered from the
children which form the basis of my own stories. Suffice it that my
own stories attempt to follow honestly the leads which here and now
the children themselves indicate in content and in form, no matter how
difficult or strange the going for adult feet.

First, as to the stuff of which the story is made,--the content. I have
assumed that anything to which a child gives his spontaneous attention,
anything which he questions as he moves around the world, holds
appropriate material about which to talk to him either in speech or in
writing. I have assumed that the answers to these his spontaneous
inquiries should be given always in terms of a relationship which is
natural and intelligible at his age and which will help him to order the
familiar facts of his own experiences. Thus the answer