HOME AND EDUCATION
Hunt, Caroline L. & Follette, Belle Case La
HOME AND EDUCATION The home is the real seat of government, and the Wise Men of all nations bring their gifts to the cradle Conducted by BELLE CASE LA FOLLETTE and CAROLINE L. HUNT One's Mental...
...And certainly the accomplishment of its larger purpose, that of "aiding in the restoration of the drama to its honorable place as the most intimate, most comprehensive, most democratic medium for the self-expression of the people," demands that full recognition be given to the strength of the dramatic instinct in children, and warm encouragement to its expression in the most poetic and most worthy forms...
...They meet once a week during a season of twenty or thirty weeks to study and act plays suitable to their age, under the leadership of a competent instructor...
...At its first public meeting, which was held in Chicago, May 6, 1910, Mrs...
...Speaking of their different reactions toward society and law, she says, "Two men looked out from prison bars...
...It was no Froebel lesson in chivalry, love and tenderness...
...she cried delightedly, pointing to a tiny crescent in one corner of the page of horrors...
...The teacher, dismayed at the influence of such a picture on the child's mind and disheartened with her efforts to teach the good and beautiful, was about to destroy the sheet, when the excited child urged her to look at it...
...THE DRAMA LEAGUE committee in charge of the work, of which Miss Cora Mel Patten, 485 Chaplain Ave., Chicago, is chairman, expects to issue suggestive courses twice a year...
...The League has also kept in close touch with teachers interested in the drama as an educational force, giving suggestions as to plays suitable to be either acted by children or read in the class room, and receiving in turn valuable information as to experiments that had been made along this line...
...Maude Ballington Booth emphasizes this same psychological law of the influence of mental focus upon the individual life in one of her lectures on her work among prison convicts...
...The only requirement of the parent League is the payment by each chapter of annual club dues of $2.00...
...One of these has already been issued...
...What we see—and what we are—from early childhood up through all the years of one's life largely depends upon our habitual mental focus,—whether we see the sky, moon and stars or the mud...
...Chicago was a peculiarly favorable place for such co-operation because of the work already done in producing plays by children at Hull House and other social settlements, and in some of the schools of the city...
...Wise women of the Drama League...
...HOME AND EDUCATION The home is the real seat of government, and the Wise Men of all nations bring their gifts to the cradle Conducted by BELLE CASE LA FOLLETTE and CAROLINE L. HUNT One's Mental Focus A LITTLE CHILD in one of the free kindergartens of Chicago brought her teacher a lurid picture from the Police Gazette...
...As a fitting close for the season, the League recommends a dramatic festival continuing for one or more days, during which plays may be given public presentation with an admission fee charged in order to secure funds for further work...
...FROM THE FIRST this relation of their work to children has been in the minds of the founders of the League...
...One saw the mud, the other saw the stars...
...Among plays which may be studied and from which scenes may be given are Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and Julius Caesar, Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird, and Josephine Preston Peabody's The Piper...
...See the pretty Lady Moon...
...The Junior League may be organized by public or private schools, churches, clubs, or other educational or social institutions, or by an individual, if recommended and assisted by an advisory council of four or more local members of the Drama League...
...It includes not only collections of plays especially prepared for children, adaptations from Hawthorne's tales, from Scott's Ivanhoe and The Lady of the Lake and from Pyle's Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, fairy playlets by W. B. Yeats, the German folk tales, but also arrangements of Milton's Comus and Sophocles' Antigone...
...Organized only about eighteen months ago, it has now a membership of over 65,000, and has come to be recognized the country over as a great force in theatrical affairs, approved of by the best actors and consulted by managers desirous of giving the public the best plays it will support...
...In order that dues may be kept as low as possible, it is suggested that meetings be held in the public schools or homes or other places where there will be no attendant expense...
...Giving the right direction to one's attention is quite as important as paying heed to diet and bodily cleanliness...
...The Junior Drama League USING THE DRAMA AS AN EDUCATIONAL FORCE THE DRAMA LEAGUE OF AMERICA, an account of which was published in La Follette's, September 10, 1910, has met with remarkable success in its effort to build up a theater-going public appreciative of the best plays...
...Out of such training would develop a clearer understanding and keener appreciation of the best in dramatic art, a higher ideal such as we seek to secure for children in music and the fine arts through instruction and familiarity with the works of the great artists and composers...
...A. Starr Best, the President of the League, expressed her hope that avenues would be opened for bringing about "careful drama courses in the primary schools of the country...
...It was a blood and thunder scene,— night in a miserable city quarter, a half naked woman dead on the pavement, killed evidently by a brutal ruffian who is in the act of firing upon a group of frenzied men and women...
...The imagination and power of impersonation which children show in their "pretending" games, in their Indian and cowboy adventures, in their store-and house-keeping enterprises, in the simple dramas of their own construction, would, if properly directed, enable them to enter and interpret much of the best and most beautiful thought which great creative minds have expressed in dramatic form...
...One of their songs was of the "Lady Moon" and their teacher had taught them to see and admire the moon and so the child saw only the "Lady Moon:" the rest of the awful scene was lost on her...
...Encouraged by this success among adults, the League has now enlisted the children of the country through the formation of Junior Drama Leagues...
...The general purposes of the parent League pointed naturally in this direction...
...Everything connected with the presentation of the plays,—interpretation, stage setting, and costuming, is to be handled in the simplest manner, avoiding the spectacular, and making all efforts bend toward that which is educational and uplifting...
...With the dramatic instincts of the children of the country nourished on such food as this, the day would not be far distant when their vision of an ennobled and ennobling national drama would be fully realized...
...Children of public school age are eligible as members, the individual chapters being limited for effective work to a membership of twenty-five...
...A list is also given of stories and poems which may be easily dramatized, such as The Christmas Carol, Alice in Wonderland, and parts of the Iliad and Odyssey...
...If its minor purpose only is considered, that of securing audiences for good plays through training in dramatic literature, it is clear that the training, to be most effective, should begin in childhood...
Vol. 3 • September 1911 • No. 39
