Volume 15, Number 11 · December 17, 1970
Fairy Tale Liberation
By Alison Lurie
When I was small it was believed in high-minded progressive circles that fairy tales were unsuitable for children. 'Does not Cinderella interject a social and economic situation which is both confusing and vicious?… Does not 'Jack and the Beanstalk' delay a child's rationalizing of the world and leave him longer than is desirable without the beginnings of scientific standards?' as one child education expert, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, put it in the Foreword to her Here and Now Story Book, which I received for my fifth birthday. It would be much better, she and her colleagues thought, for children to read simple, pleasant, realistic stories which would help to prepare us for the adult world.
Feature, 2158 words
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