Folklore and Children's Worlds: Nature, Place, and Belonging in a Romantic Key
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Abstract
John's story, rather his story about storytelling, interests me because of the way it reveals a funny relationship between children and folklore in the summer camp. Embedded in the summer camp is the idea that "lore" is intimately caught up in the proper early development of children; an idea that somehow implies that working with children is like reaching across time. Not only reaching across the nominal years between adults and children (years which at 33 seem infinitely larger than they used to be), but it is a reach sideways across time and history into the timelessness of a past suggested by words like savagery and primitivism, conversely balanced by words like heroism and nobility, all caught up in the meandering of an idealized "simpler time" where belief, thought, and action all existed indissolubly as one. With an eye towards understanding the symbolic place of Folklore in western cultural understandings of children's "normal" or "natural" development, I want to look at these words like signposts across the landscape of cultural and professional writings by camping professionals and educational psychologists from 1900 to 1940. In these writings the developmental stages and cycles of children's development are imagined across a space of nature; an imagining mirrored by the physical movement of children's bodies out of cities and across the rural landscape in ever increasing numbers during this same period.
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