Category: Literature

“I didn’t believe in Magic until today. I see now it’s real. Well, if it is, I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true. And you’re simply a wicked, cruel magician like the ones in the stories.
Well, I’ve never read a story in which people of that sort weren’t paid out in the end, and I bet you will be. And serve you right.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

When my children were young, I questioned the wisdom of Charlotte Mason’s enthusiastic support of fairy tales. After all, they were often heartbreaking (Hans Christian Anderson) or grisly (The Arabian Nights). Some were heartbreaking and grisly (Grimm’s). Ultimately, it was my children who would trust her more than I, as they took me by the hand and led me farther up and further into their most cherished worlds of fantasy.

Certainly, Charlotte was right, in that fairy tales are infinitely more interesting than tired little Dick-and-Jane-type morality tales. She felt that they sparked imagination, and that such imagination was necessary for invention and innovation. Albert Einstein agreed. He attributed his accomplishments to his imaginative mind, having been cultivated by, of all things, fairy tales. He urged parents to read fairy tales to their children if they wanted them to be intelligent.

Charlotte also felt that fairy tales did far more than amuse the children, but had the power to awaken the moral imagination, and inspire children (and adults) to noble deeds. Anthony Esolen, in his fabulous book, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of your Child, finds the moral laws of fairyland to be important to the child’s proper inculcation of virtue: “And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. .. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation.”

Fred Rogers of PBS’ Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood understood that children are already quite aware of the fact that the world is full of evil. He had the ability to look through the television camera and speak directly to children’s fears. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, he told parents that the best way to calm their children’s fears was to tell them to look for the helpers – the policemen, firemen, brave moms and dads who were helping the wounded. Children raised on fairy tales know there is always a helper who will come to the rescue. This is because the fairy tale, like all living tales, fits into the true “master story” which is revealed in the Bible. Peter J. Leithart wrote of this idea in his book, Heroes of the City of Man, saying: “All heroes may be compared to the true hero, Jesus Christ; all damsels in distress are comparable to Christ’s Bride, the church; all rescues are acts of salvation; all weddings anticipate the feast of the Lamb; and all villains, serpent-like, spread their several varieties of poison.”

The best part about fairy tales, is of course, they all live happily ever after, which serves as a glimpse at our own ever-after in Gloryland.


“The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale — or otherworld — setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-stories

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“The question is not, — how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education — but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?”


― Charlotte M. Mason, School Education: Developing A Curriculum

 

My elementary school in the 1970s had a large and lovely library with sunny windows and bright yellow walls . Even the radiators were painted yellow to match the walls, although I do not ever remember the radiators actually being hot in central Texas. The floors were wooden and brown, and there were rows and rows and rows of beautiful books. There may have been tables and chairs, but my favorite spot was on the floor under a window facing the biography section. In my young child- mind, it seems like a large room, but if I were to return as an adult I suspect it would be quite a bit smaller.

In my classroom, we often worked on what were then called duplicates. We would call them copies or worksheets today, but back then they were made on a duplicating machine and thus the moniker. They were white sheets of paper with purple writing. The writing could be very dark purple or faintly lavender, depending on how much ink was in the duplicating machine. Upon these sheets, we practiced our capitalization and punctuation, answered reading comprehension questions, or drew lines to match the gross national product with its proper country or some other social studies type question.

Then the bell would ring, and I would go to the library and my real education would begin.

Heading out to Indian Territory with Mary and Laura in a covered wagon, I would learn all about the pioneer life, Indian culture, the natural world of the American west, agriculture, heritage arts and homemaking, music and poetry, and the self reliance that made Alexis de Tocqueville marvel. When I devoured the whole series, there was only one thing left to do: write my own. I had never physically traveled anywhere in a covered wagon or made a rag doll or proved up a homestead or watched a line of Indians being removed from their land, but the characters in the stories scribbled into my Big Chief notebooks did all of that and more. Often these stories were illustrated Garth Williams-style in my childish hand.

Years later, I would find myself grown up and with my own little baby placed in my arms. I began to read of the ideas of Miss Charlotte Mason, who believed that children are born persons and thus entirely worthy of the very best of books to learn of all sorts of things. She maintained that a child learns best by reading “living” books of well-told stories rather than dull, pre-digested textbooks. Her students practiced their penmanship and grammar by copying passages taken right out of those glorious stories. Children narrated, or told back, everything they remembered from their readings. Sometimes these narrations were oral and sometimes they were written, and children inevitably picked up the vocabulary and style of the author. Sometimes the narrations were drawings of scenes or impressions from the books.

I return to the large, sunny, yellow room when I need to be reminded of this “real” education. I cannot remember the GNP of Ecuador or Argentina. The memory map of my mind cannot seem to pull up the white pages of purple information. But I remember the pack behavior of wolves on a lonely starlit prairie night, the way the wind moans across the lonely moors and wraps around the wall of a secret garden, and the dignity of behaving as a kindly princess even if you are rudely treated and live very poorly in an attic. The sound of my pencil scratching across paper, the words coming faster than I could write – it is a drone in the background of my childhood, still sounding.

My feet are planted firmly, and I care, deeply.

 

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