Ellen Key on Children’s literature

Ellen key on Children’s literature 
 

Ellen Key devoted most space to stories and books for children: two sections of her Barnets Århundrade – Böckerna mot Läseböckerna e Bilaga – examine the relationship among childhood, stories, literature, and education. 

In the chapter entitled “Böckerna mot Läseböckerna”, the Swedish thinker wrote that children are gifted with an ingenuous idealism and realism that can also be identified in the epic poetry of past peoples: the good, the heroic, and the supernatural present in ancient stories fascinate children, who, between a popular fable and a new version of Andersen would undoubtedly choose the former, because they would find it more entertaining. She also showed that the same thing happened when children were offered first an original story by the old Nordic writer Snorre Sturluson and then a modern paraphrase of the same story (Key, 1900, pp. 176-177). Children liked the old, original story much more than the modern version. These observations by Key were closely linked with other observations on the schoolbooks of her time. In her view, those books recounted artificial, moralistic stories frequently too abstract and fragmentary to be truly appreciated by children. If, she wrote, the authors of texts could hear the opinions of schoolchildren on their books, they would realize that children found the fruits of their labours unattractive: they preferred to read real fables and real poems, and not collections of pieces selected by the authors of the textbooks (Key, 1900, pp. 183-184). 

[Excerpt and Adapt. from: W. Grandi, Children’s stories in the educational theories of Ellen Key, Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori. In «Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education», 11, 2, 2016, pp. 47-66] 

Reference 
Key, E. (1900). Böckerna mot Läseböckerna. In Id., Barnets Århundrade: studie (Vol. 2). (pp. 173-189). Stockholm: Bonnier.