Gertrude Stein Wrote a Children’s Book, and It’s As Weirdly Mesmerizing As You’d Think
Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of the Bank Street College of Education, was sick of children’s books. She didn’t want didactic moral tales that told kids what to do, or mythological flights of fancy. Instead, she wanted children’s stories that actually showed children how to experience the world. In 1921, Mitchell published the Here and Now Story Book, stories for children written in direct language that helped readers learn through observation and discovery. Instead of just writing, “Henry looked up,” she believed, a story should say, “Henry threw back his head and looked up.” Children, Mitchell thought, should go through the story in real time, performing the same muscular actions as the storybook kids––monkey read, monkey do.
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