Lucy Sprague grew up in a family where children were to be seen but not heard. Her strict upbringing gave her the idea that children should be allowed more freedom and that childhood play was the basis for learning and becoming "whole children" who could contribute to building a "progressive, humanistic society." As part of her mission to change the way children were taught, she wrote a book for young children titled HERE AND NOW. It was a book with many stories in it, some inspired by children. The stories were based on what Sprague considered familiar subjects such as boats, trains, dogs, cats, hens, and horses. In most cases the stories did not have much of a plot but lots of sounds and movement and sometimes a short song. "To the child," she wrote, "the familiar is interesting....It is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting. The atempt to amuse children by presenting them with the strange, the bizarre, the unreal, is the unhappy result of the adult blindness." Sprague did not seem to care much for fairy tales. "The fairy story," she said, "the circus, novelty hunting, delight the sophisticated adult; they excite and confuse the child." She further alleged that "for brutal tales like Red Riding-Hood or for sentimental ones like Cinderella I find no place in my child's world," but she denied that she was against fairy stories and explained that she was "merely pleading not to have them accepted en masse on the ground that they 'have survived the ages' and 'cultivate the imagination.' " She followed up with a declaration that "It is only the jaded adult mind, afraid to trust to the children's own fresh spring of imagination, tht feels for children the need of the stimulus of magic." There are many who would disagree.
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