A

Introduction

PREMISE OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is to offer opportunities for every child to reach the utmost of his individual capabilities in cooperation with his peers. EduIcation of this kind was indicated in the theme of the 1960 White House Conference, the purpose of which was "to promote opportunities for children and youth to realize their full potential for a creative life in freedom and dignity."

It is the belief of the majority of those who work with children that in order to help them realize their full potential for a creative life in freedom and dignity, all children should have daily experiences in the arts. Since drama is a fusion of all the arts and deals with the actions and motives of man, it can perhaps be more closely integrated with the child's everyday living than many others. Creative dramatics encourages freedom and dignifies dreams; it helps to cultivate imaginative thinking.

As never before, the United States needs an original approach to the problems confronting her within the community of nations. Drama with and for children compounds the creative dynamics which contribute to the ingenuity characteristic of America.

VII

PART I

An Interpretation

RAMA COMES IN THE DOOR of the school with every child.

Almost from the day he is born, the baby begins using drama as his way of learning. His parents are always surprised and amused at the first signs of his intuitive response to drama. Even before he can walk, he shows his enjoyment of make-believe by his delighted participation in the dramatic game of peek-a-boo, with its simulated suspense and relief; his early imitation of the "bow-wow"; his hilarious pretend-riding on a pony as he bounces up and down on daddy's foot to the rhythm of "Ride a Cock Horse."

The amazing amount of knowledge a little child accumulates by his dramatic interpretation of the people around him often goes unobserved. "The child of three, four, or five cannot discover what it feels like to be a mother except by going through the motions of mothering, and the son of a truck driver feels closer to his father by pretending to drive a truck." Those who have studied children know that this is nature's way of helping a child to interpret the world and himself in terms he can understand so that he will be fitted to live in the society in which he finds himself.

1

The following incident relates to what happened in a family that heard groans and moans of agonizing pain coming from the back of the house one evening. On rushing out to see what was the matter, they discovered 4-year-old Marjorie slowly and apparently painfully climbing up the back stairs.

"Aunt Jessie goes upstairs just this way," she announced, "and now I know how she feels." Aunt Jessie, it seems, suffered from

Hartley, Ruth E., Frank, Lawrence K., and Goldenson, Robert M. Children's Play. New York, Columbia University Press, 1952.

p. 28.

* Merrill, John, and Fleming, Martha. Play-Making and Plays. millan Co., 1950. p. 9.

Understanding

New York, The Mac

rheumatism, and her little niece, by assuming the physical actions of her aunt, was experiencing to a degree her inner state.

During the first 4 years of his life, the child is constantly interpreting his little world and experimenting with new ideas of his own. He plays train and plane; he becomes first the milkman, then a whole fire department. He plays out countless parent activities. If he has no friends to play with, he often conjures up an imaginary playmate with whom he plays happily (with no fights whatever) for days on end. Often he works hard at his play, thinking up the most ingenious devices for boats and trucks and many other things. He explores widely and puts new information to use at once.

Then comes school, which in former days brought an abrupt end to this wonderful source of fun and learning. Drama came in the door with the child, but it was not allowed to stay. Here was a kind of play which was the prelude to a great art-the child's first art— and it was ignored in school.

The difficulty was that the only drama the teachers knew was the formal play, and that did not fit into the school curriculum. Whenever a play was being rehearsed for a special occasion, it so disrupted the school program that most teachers regarded it as an ordeal. It never seemed to occur to them to take their cue from the child's own way in drama-the spontaneous, uninhibited way. Instead, the only drama to be found in most elementary schools (there were a few exceptions) was the exhibitional type of memorized plays belonging to special occasions such as Christmas and "last day" exercises.

At one period, when the catchword in education began to be motivation, all kinds of plays were written to motivate the learning of facts: Arithmetic plays, geography plays, health plays, and history plays. Dramatics was welcomed as a "cart-horse," as someone expressed it, to carry every other subject in the curriculum. It would have been bad enough if the children had been given the experience of making up the plays themselves. But they had to memorize lines which were not at all a natural expression for them, and the result was that the children simply recited.

All too familiar are the artificial ways in which children give their speeches when they are "drilled" by parents and teachers to repeat lines they only half understand, or move through pageants with never a flicker of feeling on their impassive faces. Even when the children, with their teacher, write the plays themselves, they find it a strain to make up dialog which remotely resembles natural conversation if the objective of the play is instruction. The pictures of one play on soil conservation show a row of the children standing stiff and straight, representing the stumps of trees that have been burned by a forest

fire, while others are lying flat on the ground as "eroded topsoil." One wonders in how many children's lives the love of drama was snuffed out forever by such experiences as these.

Drama With Children

With the increasing emphasis in education on creative thinking and the development of individual powers, a way of using the child's natural love for the dramatic has developed which is not only suited to the classroom but has remarkable potentialities for his personal development. It is based on his own free, informal play, but guided into an orderly creative process by an imaginative teacher.

Courtesy, School of Drama, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash.

"Who's trip-tropping over my bridge?" Drama created by children from the Billy Goats Gruff.

This is drama with children. Because it is original, it has come to be known as creative drama, creative dramatics, or playmaking. In place of a written script, with lines to be memorized, such drama is created by a group of children, guided, but not directed by a teacher or leader. It is always played with spontaneous dialog and action,