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. 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. The dull, uninteresting parent, whose chief virtue is that of routine, long-faced fidelity, narrows his children’s world and correspondingly limits the range of their moral development. What faith is to the adult the dramatic instinct is to the child: it is the substance, the substantial realization of things hoped for. It is the power to make things happen. It is the victory that overcomes the prosaic, saw-dust affairs of life. If this pamphlet, carefully studied, helps parents to see and properly awaken the sleeping dramatic powers of their children and give them a new motive in guiding its various expressions, the purpose of the writers will have been realized...FROM THE BOOKS.

The text of a 1934 lecture by Granville-Barker on the study of 'drama as drama, considered in relation to the theatre'.