It is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did. All stories in which children have adventures and successes which are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations.
—C.S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children
read the rest of the excerpt here...
1 comment:
you definately need to read The Christian Imagination.
C.S. Lewis is right (...always), and the point of fairy tales is not to give a description of the realistic world, but at least part of the point of them is to show strong, good human character traits in a way that children want to aspire to, and they know that those are the good things to be.
i know thats not his point... but it got me thinking about something else i read recently.
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