es of the ideas he
has gained through his fairy tales, will be the work of his creative
imagination.

Fairy tales, though perfectly ordinary subject-matter, may become the
means of the greatest end in education, the development in the child
of the power of consciousness. The special appeal to the various
powers and capacities of the child mind, such as emotion, 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 own to work out through the literature,
because he has some purpose of his own in listening, because he enjoys
the story and wishes to find out what there is in it, or because he
expects it to show him what he may afterwards wish to do with it. In
any case the child's part is to see the characters and what they do,
to follow the sequence of the tale, and to realize the life of the
story through the telling. He may have something to say about the
story at the close of the telling, he may wish to compare its motifs
with similar motifs in other tales, or he may wish to talk about the