Who's teaching Whom?

Revisiting Gerald Chapman's excellent book, Teaching Young Playwrights (1991), to gather some inspiration as the summer playwrights complete their first drafts. In addition to finding some great revision exercises, I am also revisiting some of Chapman's salient stories about the power of writing for young people.

One such anecdote is excerpted from the book Writing: Teachers and Children at Work (1983) by Donald Graves in which Leon Tolstoy was asked by some children to write a story for them:

"He began composing while his students gathered around his desk. But instead of being awed by this great writer, the children quickly pointed out a mistake in Tolstoy's portrayal of the young thief. In his journal, Tolstoy later wrote that they were right to correct him, and he crystallized his views about this in an essay entitled 'Are We To Teach the Peasant Children to Write, or Are They To Teach Us?'" (quoted in Chapman, p. 101).