The importance of children's folklore is, primarily, the excitement it brings children. This wisdom appears strange only because adults spend so much time trying to cure children of their childhood. If adults thought of children as being more like themselves, they would say of children's play, "Of course, they enjoy the same as we enjoy."

When adults gather in a club or theater or on a playing field, they enjoy the amusement or excitement of those places. Yet they find it hard to allow children the same sort of fun.

We know that children get in much amusement and horse play when we are not around, yet we prefer not to think of that as relevant to how we relate to them. We think our job is to reform children, not indulge them. Our job is not to find how they are like us; it is to find how they are different from us and how we can, by our own industry and good faith, save them for maturity.