what use are fairy tales?
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Albert Einstein
While I’m hesitant to take issue with anything said by someone who was clearly a whole lot smarter than me, I can’t help wondering if fairy tales are an appropriate path to intelligence. I’m more inclined to think that fairy tales convey outdated traditional control mechanisms and fear seeped in ignorance that haunted previous generations.
After all, what do the bulk of fairytales tell us about life?
- It’s important to be pretty because pretty people are nice, e.g. ugly and nasty step-sisters, beautiful and nice Cinderella.
- There is a one true love in the world, a heterosexual and physically attractive partner who is brave as a man and in need of rescue as a woman, e.g. Snow White
- It’s great that people inherit positions of power – to be a king, queen, prince or princess, through birth or marriage (and chosen for nuptials because of beauty), is ultimately desirable e.g. Beauty and the Beast
- Good and evil are absolute characteristics e.g. every wicked witch and every pretty princess
- Life holds a promise of ‘happily ever after’, e.g. every single fairy tale
These are stories designed to make children afraid of unpleasant behaviour, rather that look for reasons; they are stories that limit children’s imaginations in terms of gender roles and romantic love; and they idealise naive aspirations that life will never deliver.
These well-known failings in traditional stories have been updated in some places by modern story-tellers. You can find films such as Ever After and Snow White and the Huntsman that attempt to tackle at least the glaringly awful female and male stereotypes. The TV series Once Upon a Time has a go at a more rounded depiction of characters such as Rumpelstiltskin – the ugly little man has a story behind his behaviour. But these are all for adults. The basic fairy tales that are presented to the developing minds of young children go largely unaltered.
I propose that rather than reciting traditional fairy tales to our children, they be archived and preserved only for historical curiosity. There are plenty excellent stories penned by our own generation that stimulate the imagination and won’t leave a lasting stain on our childrens’ brains. Traditional fairy tales remind me of religion – you can find limited moral lessons in there somewhere but the overall effect is clearly harmful.
Post inspired by Clare Flourish and Philip Pullman interview in the Guardian
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An interesting link, but I don’t think these are designed for children. I was thinking more about the harmful ideas perpetuated by continually feeding the same old traditional fairy tales to children. I think the answer lies in abandoning the old stories and presenting much more thoughtful modern stories to children. Adults tend to have a kind of nostalgia about the stories from their childhood, but that doesn’t mean they actually have a positive effect.
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I love fairytales, especially the darker European ones. Think about the pied piper… he kills all the kids!
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Then you will LOVE Pratchett’s ”Maurice and his educated Rodents”
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Yeah, I should have been clearer about that. There is something interesting about them, but I don’t think they’re the ideal stories to feed specifically to children. They’re frightening, dark, two-dimensional and full of horrid messages. I think for young children they should be avoided completely – they don’t help lay useful neural pathways (or something).
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Not even Alice? Careful, Violet, Alice is my literary hero…
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Like I said John, not interested in your threats till you can produce those clown shoes and get this cult up and running. I don’t like Alice either (unless you’ve got your shoes on …)
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I adore Alice (who the f*** is Alice?) It’s just as fun reading it now as it was when I was a kid.
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That’s why you’re so angry. All those nasty fairy tales messed you up. 🙂
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“Off with her head”!
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Who’s to say I don’t already have them on, gently tapping the rug 😉
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I agree…they can read Pratchett. Much more fun!
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I’m going to add Pratchett to my reading list so I can be more explicit about why he’s rubbish. 🙂
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My brother feels the same. He believes Pratchett is for children and idiots.
I suggested that he should read him then. It went over his head.
I doubt Terry P cares either way.
His writing is actually very intelligent.
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Well, if you’re going to include ‘actually’, you probably have a point …
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The ‘actuallys’ do it every time. Just adds that little bit of Je ne sais what , as Le French say.
The photy is quite impressive btw. Interesting angle and looks good blown up. What is the flower?
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Hmm, I can find that out for you.
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It looks a bit like an Agapantha. They are South African but are exported all over the show, but Scotland might be a tad chilly?
Are the leaves long and waxy?
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Just googled it. No, not agapantha.
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When did you and whisper man become buddies again? It’s really difficult to keep up with your fans. And what am I missing about his CRAZY blog?
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Who is whisper man? I am feeling a bit slow this evening…
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the Lux one, satan is whispering evil all over the world … is he not a bit nutty? You keep arguing with him and then being best buddies again. I feel like I misread his blog.
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Ah…Lux. Fair enough. He seems to have tempered his comment policy and although I’m still moderated he seems keen to get me posted asap. I fear he realizes his blog would become quite empty without my astute observations.
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There are so many stories without having to go to the traditional ones. All those picture books. I was struck by Who Flung Dung, in which a chimp is minding his own business when poo hits him on the back of the head. It is a Quest story: he goes to find out the perpetrator. Your local Waterstones has all sorts of messages for young minds: irreverent, scary, serious Environmental stories for baby Quakers or Woodcraft Folk types; no princesses are necessary. If I had a young daughter I would be chary of Disney Pink dresses.
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Yes, there are great ones, But these awful old ones still get marketed to death when they should really be shelved. I’ll look out for Who Flung Dung!
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You post so much, and I would like to comment on so many of your topics, but I simply do not have the time. Darn…
Anyway, I love fairytales, but not all of them. I agree that the old European stories are not very good for little children. They were not necessarily even meant for children. And if they were by someone meant as childrens books, then it seems, that someone was a bit of an idiot, or even malicious. The stories by brothers Grimm are truly so grim, that most of them are not really suitable for kids. And same goes for Hans Christian (Hard Core) Andersen. But like religious scriptures, the fairy tales are often period pieces. The Grimm bross. collected a valuable set of traditional German oral tradition. It was so late, that they engaged in this task, that we do not know what these stories were like centuries before, when many of them originated. I honestly do not think they were childrens stories as such, alltough many of them may have been used to frighten kids into obidience by parents lacking in empathetic skills.
The thing is, that social morals evolves as our knowledge and understanding of the reality grow. Therefore the good teachings of past ages are not necessarily the best thing a little impressonable child should be exposed to. But there is allways a part of society that hold very conservative values, because they have this conception of past golden age, that was when they themselves were kids, because naturally to them the time when they were not really responsible, and were protected by their parents seems like the best of times. It seems to me, that these people are just unable to realize the actual reasons why they have an emotional connection to the particular era and they sincerely believe that everything was better in a world where they personally had not even heard of about all the problems.
I do not mean that kids should be pampered either. Fairytales are good for preparing the imaginations of a child to meet up whith the real world. When I was a kid I used to escape rigours of everyday life into the fantastic worlds of Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other semi-modern fantasy novelists. But I do think that I was too young for some of them and that they might on some level explain my fascination to medieval stuff.
The good thing about a fairytale book, is that most of the horrors described in them are limited by the imaginations of the reader. But for decades the fairytale books have been turned into films. Today computerized graphics can puff into life any imagined monster from the imagination of the adult animators, directors and producers of films, even movies made from childrens books have become rather frightening. The orcs I imagined when I as a kid read the Lord of the Rings (albeit, it is not really a childrens book) were not half as frightening as the ones on film. And I can only imagine what the ghosts and monsters look like to the youngest of viewers of Harry Potter movies.
A film allways makes a book even a bit more real and when I was a kid I could kind of appease myself when a terrible monster appeared on the film, that it looks like a puppet and it is a puppet. I wonder, if kids today tell themselves, that the monster looks like computer graphics and it is just computer graphics.
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Well Raut, I love when you do find time to comment because your thoughts are always interesting. Speaking of which, you haven’t done a post for ages, have you? Are you not still working on the series of posts about Finland?
I wonder what effect bringing up a child with no fantasy stories would have – no religion, no other worlds, no fairy tales. I wonder if an upbringing based on facts would limit their imagination or if it would just give them more useful things to imagine. I feel sorry my four year old niece at the moment who has the same dream every night – that a witch is chopping her body up. I just wonder how much of these sort of nightmares could be avoided. It’s so difficult to understand the line between fantasy and reality when you’re child.
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Yes, I have several posts under work about the Finnish history. But these things take time, because I need to check out the facts ans sources. (It is not like we have just one book to turn to in this matter. 😉 )
Anyway, to me it seems the level on which a child takes fairytales for real might be influenced by the level on which adults surrounding this child take supernatural and other such fairytale elements for real. How fairytale elements are presented in general to the child. To many adults it seems very important to have the chance to play the game of decieving a child by for example telling them, that Santa is for real. I can not say I was ever hurt by the fact, that my parents played that game whith me, but I think it might work two ways. Either a kid who has been told Santa is real, learns skepticism when she/he realizes this is not so, or the kid learns to hang on to the peculiar feeling of something hidden in reality, that provides a basis for the strong emotions of supernatural presence. It all depends. I do not know.
Anyway, I think in general fairytales are very usefull to us humans in teaching us about how what people tell us does not have to be true and in teaching us to use our natural emphatetic skills. Intriguing stories help us to learn how to put ourselves in the position of others, and understanding that people in totally different situations are still people.
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