4. Fairy and Folk-Tales

Sometimes a mother says: “I do not want to tell my child lies. I will give him only truth, history, biography, or useful stories.” Such a mother fails to see that in excluding fairy and folk-tales from her child’s mind she is simply shutting the door of his imagination and hindering his power to do great things in after-life by closing for him the storehouse of creative imagination. Imagination is the most powerful factor in any life. Helen Keller, when asked what sense she considered the most important, replied, “Imagination!” By imagination the blind see the invisible. By this sense, Newton, Kepler, Davy, Faraday, Edison, and Burbank saw from afar their great discoveries and inventions and brought them near. Such an unpoetic mother would rob her child of his right to his inheritance of an age-long literature; a literature marking his kinship with the race-children of the past; a literature adapted to his needs as to theirs, and a literature which will serve as the basis of all true spiritual culture. “There are those who reduce life to the plane of that of Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind, who cared not for feeling and sentiment, but must have cold, bare, hard facts, enjoying only the practical and the usable, and living in his rectangular house and having everything about him right-angled. But we know that in children there is a place for the sentimental and the free play of feeling, although these are not to be made prominent in training and instruction but provided for in the material used. Doctor Parker said: ‘The atheism, the materialism of the present day in our land, is largely due to the banishment of fiction and fairy tales by the Puritans. “Facts,” Gradgrind “facts,” drive beauty and holiness from the child’s heart.’”[2]

Fancy, imagination, power to see the unseen, need to be fed with suitable food. Imaginative stories exercise and cultivate the imagination, the creative faculty. If a child lacks imagination, fairy stories help to arouse it. If he knows little about nature, tales of woods and fields will quicken and interest. Children who are brought up in cities especially need the counteracting influences breathed by these race-long tales which are so imaginative, objective, and childlike, and which have been the joy of childhood from the morning of the world. The best fairy tales also have great ethical value. They present moral truths in a way that appeals directly to children. “Cinderella” teaches the reward of modesty and humility; the “Golden Goose” shows the reward of charity and a kind heart; “Red Ridinghood” illustrates obedience to parents, the cardinal virtue of childhood; “Boots and His Brothers,” readiness; “Toads and Diamonds,” good and bad speech; and “The Frog King,” keeping a promise. Fairy tales that present perverted ideas of right and wrong or that picture success achieved by lying or theft, or that justify ingratitude, disloyalty, or irreverence, should find no place in collections for children. Yet, in the desire to impress a moral lesson, great care must be taken not to strip these age-long stories of all their native freshness and strength. The best moral effect will be gained by letting the child enjoy the story as a whole without too pronounced emphasis on the moral. Some good collections are: Grimm’s “Household Tales”; Andersen’s “Wonder Stories”; Grimm Brothers and Joseph Jacobs, “Fairy Tales”; Baldwin, “Fairy Stories and Fables.”