“ During very early childhood little folks express the dramatic instinct entirely by imitation. They imitate people, birds, animals, noises; they try to enter into every experience which is within their reach by gesture, speech, or repeated action. As Joseph Lee tells us, “The mind first learns things by getting inside them, by being what it studies.” The child’s imagination is not capable of creating new situations, it simply enables him to reproduce the actions of other people in familiar ones. He mirrors the world as he understands it. ”

“ The dramatic instinct has a great moral value. It gives a wholesome outlet to a child’s energies; it develops unselfishness; it creates a sympathetic imagination; and it gives a child the opportunity to understand moral issues by having imitative experiences of them.
The dramatic instinct has great inspirational value. It carries fancy through life, is the only possible door to romance for many, and furnishes through hero-worship, the strongest possible incentives to keep noble ideals. ”

“ Braucher says, “are somehow missing the childlike fancy, the buoyant self-forgetfulness, which comes from living in a half-real world. Perhaps they are poor rich children with mechanical toys and so many opportunities to see stupendous productions of the old fairy tales behind real footlights that the home plays seem crude. Perhaps they are rich poor children who live so close to the pain and the burden and the specter that the airy forms of fairy life have quite flitted away. ”

“ The desire to appear before an audience persists usually only as there are easy opportunities for doing so, but the youth of unspoiled fancy continues all his life long to create imaginary people and to live in a world of ideals. It is thus that he is able to keep the spirit of youth by which he can sympathize with those of the younger generation, and continue to hope and have faith even when the world appears to be too much for him.
The matter of actual dramatic impersonation is but a small and temporary part of the range of the dramatic instinct. ”

“ The simple and imperfect images of childhood are vivified and crystallized by being transformed into the movements which express them, and a child emerges from dramatic representation fortified in his mental imagery. ”

“ Children show this faculty of imagining themselves other persons in other circumstances not only in play, but in story-telling. It seems to be true that a child imagines himself the hero of every story that he hears or reads, and every normal child acts out afterward most of the stories he hears or the drama he witnesses. “Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves,” says Stevenson; “some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realized in the story with enticing and appropriate details. ”

“ In later childhood and youth young people begin to organize themselves into clubs and societies, which represent the people and customs of another age or the social organizations of adults. This instinct is seen even among grown people in the secret lodges, where men, who have apparently outgrown the play spirit, find a genuine satisfaction in being known as “knights,” engaging in secret rites reproductive of magic and mystery, and banding themselves into fraternities which bring down the names, traditions and ideals of mediæval guilds and chivalric orders. ”

“ Active imagination begins where passive imagination leaves off, and comes forth to play and work with actual materials or circumstances in an imaginative fashion, and sets about making the fanciful future actual.
With young persons under fourteen active imagination is uppermost. Says Stevenson: “We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall and die, all the while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly what a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can find anything else. ”

“ In her play with her doll, the little girl learns self-control. Because to her the doll is as real as her baby brother or sister, she can be made to feel that she, as its mother, must be a good example and not lose her temper. Working together with others, in later childhood, while dramatizing a story or playing a dramatic game, further assists the child to gain control of self with all its conflicting impulses.
By making work pleasurable, the habit of industry may be rooted early in the child’s life through the use of the dramatic impulse. ”

“ Both have their place in a man’s life. Passive imagination enables the individual to transfigure commonplace circumstances or surroundings in the glamour of beauty and to forecast ideal situations yet to be. ”

“ This kind of play is individualistic at the beginning and gradually becomes social. By and by the little child wishes for comradeship. If he has no human companions, he usually engages in the pathetic make-believe of inventing an imaginary playmate, with whom he often lives continuously. This sort of expression is as ancient as it is universal. The toys with which children have rebuilt an ideal world have been discovered in the ruins of every buried city. ”

“ The parent is performing the highest moral service to his children who can furnish them heroic dramatic examples, if possible by his own activities and career, or by entering heartily with them into dramatic play of such a character as to create the illusion of adventure, or by exposing them to wholesome persons of an age a little greater than their own who are either spectacular in act or dramatic in play. ”

“ The welcome occasionally extended to adult leadership in youthful gangs has this same explanation: the adult keeps thinking of something new to do when the resourcefulness of his juniors runs dry.
But adult supervision should not prevent the child from using his constructive instinct which is fast developing during this period. It can aid the expression of the dramatic impulse in the creation of costumes, properties, etc., for the representations of characters and scenes from myths and stories. The reading should now be made wide enough to include many models for the child’s dramatic play. ”

“ From six to nine children are eagerly becoming acquainted with the world outside the home. The dramatic impulse is then expressed in the imitation of every occupation and custom known to them. The developing tendency to construct aids the dramatic play.
Parallel with this, perhaps at about the tenth year, comes the period when they begin to take pleasure in impersonating dramatic ideas to an audience. This expression of the instinct tends to fade away after adolescence.
The dramatic instinct is of great educational value. It helps the child to realize his world and organize his thinking. ”

“ During childhood, boys and girls pass through three periods in the evolution of the dramatic instinct. Little children imitate people and animals in real situations, endeavoring to mirror the world as they understand it. Beginning at about the third25 year, they commence to create a play-self living in a play-world, and this power of making illusions, as the expression of the hunger to realize life to its fullest extent, lasts as long as people live. ”

“ It is the force which makes the soldier on the battlefield grasp his country’s flag, and raising it high above his head, cry out, ‘On to victory,’ even though that victory includes the death of his own body. ”

“ In the individual it is felt from early childhood throughout life. If neglected, it may fade away in maturity until it is hardly noticed; but, if properly developed, it is one of the greatest sources of human joy and strength.
Imagination is said to be of two kinds—passive6 and active. Passive imagination is that which dominates all other mental factors, making them subordinate. Active imagination is that of which the individual himself takes charge. An illustration of passive imagination is daydreaming. Play and dramatics are examples of active imagination. ”

“ G. Stanley Hall calls attention to the fact that, while little children will imitate animals, there soon comes a time when they cease to do so and imitate only human beings: during childhood those who perform the more active occupations; during adolescent those who express what are to them the ideals of character. ”

“ In early childhood the tendency to create playmates is so strong that the child enjoys playing alone. During the self-assertive years between six and nine, however, the child plays, more or less quarrelsomely, with others, taking them in as characters of his mimic world and enriching his own play by their conjunct12 imaginativeness. This explains why the leader of the gang is usually the most resourceful individual in the group, since he is the one who is depended upon to successfully conduct their imaginative play. ”

“ The child who plays dramatically can be whatever he likes, and have whatever he likes, and always has something to do. And in later life it stands to reason that it will be the men and women who have habitually seen with their imaginations, who have visualized unexpected situations, who will display “faculty” and effectiveness. ”

“ Voyages are taken, investigations made, treasure islands discovered, animals subdued, robbers put to flight, the plans of sly Indians frustrated, and fierce battles waged by the child whose parent-teacher is versatile and imaginative. ”

“ Or, perhaps, they are just normal healthy children whose childlike realism, for want of the suggestive touch of fancy, has shut out the dim fairy figures—whoever they are, wherever they are, do you want them to lose this unreal, very real part of their lives? ”

“ The writer might have added, it represented in most distinct form the dramatic instinct. One reason why playground leaders have begun to add theatricals to the play-shelters connected with the Chicago playgrounds is because they believe that the origination called forth by story-playing will overcome the dead inertia of the oversupervised and overdictated playgrounds.
It is through environment and the adequate supply of implements, rather than direction, that the dramatic impulse of these years can best be developed. ”

“ When his story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of a sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of breath. When he comes to ride with the king’s pardon, he must bestride a chair, which he will so hurry and belabor and on which he will so furiously demean himself that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody with spurring, at least fiery red with haste. ”

“ Just as he must take into his hands the concrete thing he studies, and by physical contact understand it, so, to understand thought, emotion, character, he must assimilate them, lose himself in them, and become for the time being that thing which he interprets. ”

“ The dramatic instinct brings out a number of traits of very great value. It develops initiative and ingenuity and resourcefulness. It helps make18 clear the difference between the imaginary and the real. It helps one to acquire unconsciousness of self, grace of demeanor and the correct use of the voice. It develops the power of action in groups and of ready and unselfish cooperation. ”

“ Perhaps our greatest moral task with young folks is to persuade them that it is not only wise to be good, but happy to be good. If we are going to do this, we must reveal to them larger sources of joy. ”

“ Every personality he assumes stretches his own in one direction or another, enriches it perhaps, or at least broadens it. Through personation one gets the point of view of others; he discovers how it feels in a broad sense to do as they do, and is put in a way to sympathize with them. ”

“ The development of the dramatic instinct in children is the special responsibility of parents. The public school and church school programs are gradually including dramatics and the teachers in many of these schools can go far in sharing this responsibility. But it is in the home where room and time, equipment and motive, suggestions and cooperating friends are found. Parental skill is revealed in helping a child to try on a new character or virtue as well as a new blouse or pair of shoes. Social and moral imagination in the child can be realized under the direct guidance of father or mother. ”

“ The portrayal of scenes from polite life helps politeness, and to imitate a courteous character tends toward the habit of courtesy. “A book on manners and customs will be little used until the child needs the information which it contains to portray some character.” ”

“ Life becomes larger as he learns to lay aside his own limitations and put himself in the other man’s place. He need not wait to enlist in the army to become a soldier, nor carry a real gun to acquire a martial step. ”

“ What we remember out of books is that which we have in some fashion16 ourselves reproduced. Our memories of the Bible even are chiefly those related to some dramatic event, such as the ritual of the church, a revival or some dramatic method which was used incidentally or purposefully in our Bible study. ”

“ Letting the children act out such stories as those of Moses, Joseph and Samuel, as is being done in many of our church schools to-day, not only arouses interest but helps to fix the knowledge of the Bible’s wonderful hero stories firmly in their minds. ”