rily to entertain
children and give them pleasure. Within the last century and a half,
too, many authors have collected and retold for children innumerable
traditional stories from all parts of the earth--traditional fairy
stories, romantic stories of the Middle Ages, legends, and myths.

_The child's inheritance._ As has been indicated, children's literature
is of two kinds: first, the traditional kind that grew up among the folk
of long ago in the forms of rhyme, myth, fairy tale, fable, legend, and
romantic hero story; and, second, the kind that has been produced in
modern times by individual authors. The first, the traditional kind, was
produced by early civilization and by the childlike peasantry of long
ago. The best of the stories produced by the childhood of the race have
been bequeathed to the children of today, and to deprive children of the
pleasure they would get from this inheritance of folklore seems as
unjust as to deprive them of traditional games, which also help to make
the first years of a person's life, the period of childhood, the period
of imaginative play. The second kind of children's literature, that
produced in modern times by individual authors, has likewise been
bequeathed to children. Some of it is so new that its worth has not been
determined, but some of it has passed the test of the classics. The best
of both kinds is as priceless as is the classical literature for adults.
The world would not sell Shakespeare; yet one may well doubt that
Shakespeare is worth as much to humanity as is Mother Goose. To evaluate
truly the worth of such classics is impossible; but we may be assured
that the child who has learned to appreciate the pleasures and the
beauties of Mother Goose is the one most likely to appreciate the
pleasures and the beauties of Shakespeare when the proper time comes.

The true purpose of education is to bring the child into his
inheritance. For many years educators have talked about the use of
literature _in_ the grades as one means of accomplishing this purpose.
The results of attempts to teach literature in the grades have sometimes
been disappointing because often the literature used has not been _for_
the grades; that is, it has not been children's literature. In other
cases the attempts have failed because the literature has not been
presented as literature--it has, for example, been presented as reading
lessons or composition assignments. Students preparing to teach in the