FAIRY-TALES AND THEIR USES.
[To Tao EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.']
Sra,—I have read with much pleasure the interesting and suggestive article on fairy-tales in the Spectator of Novem- ber 11th, 1905. No one, I think, who has had any practical experience in teaching children who are entirely ignorant of fairy-tales will be inclined to doubt their value as an educa- tional basis. Some years ago my sister undertook to teach a class of young children in a Sunday-school in a country district in Northumberland. But she found her task exceed- ingly difficult. How teach Bible history, even in its simplest form, to children to whom the terms " King " and "Prince," for instance, were as meaningless as if they had been Greek ? These poor children had never even heard of "Old King Cole," or "the King who was in his counting-house," much less of the Court of the Sleeping Beauty. On one occasion my sister was telling them the story of Joseph, and had come to the part where he leaves the prison and rises high in the favour of Pharaoh. She laid stress on the contrast between Joseph in prison and Joseph as a great lord,—gorgeous robes instead of prison dress, Royal banquets instead of prison fare, a retinue of servants to wait on him instead of being a servant himself, and so on. On the following Sunday she questioned them to find out how much they had remembered, and elicited from them that Joseph, when he obtained the King's favour, had (1) "a new suit o' ekes [clothes] "; (2) "meat to his tales every day "; and (3) "a lass to scrub the floor " ! These children, you observe, were anything but stupid. They had grasped at least part of her meaning, and had translated it in terms of their own experience,—no mean intellectual feat. But who can doubt that if they had been familiar with the lore of fairy-tales their conceptions of Joseph's state and splendour would have been, to say the least of it, less meagre? To familiarise children with terms standing for objects and ideas which are necessarily outside the range of their own experience is not the only, nor the highest, use of fairy-tales, as your
contributor points out. But it is a practical point which may well engage the attention even of those (happily a decreasing class) who consider fairy-tales nonsense.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Carbon P.O., Alberta, Canada. A. M. LAING.
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