Traditional fairy tales teach children moral lessons

The argument

Traditional fairy tales are critical to a child's moral development, and rewriting them for modern sensibilities risks losing the thing that makes them work. When early fables are considered as a type of fairy tale, the purpose of the story is plain: the goal is to teach a moral. Fables like "The Tortoise and the Hare" and "The Ants and the Grasshopper" are built around a single lesson, which is the whole point of the narrative rather than an incidental feature of it. These simple morals teach children valuable lessons that they can incorporate directly into their lives. What makes that possible is simplicity. A story with one clear lesson and a small cast is easy for a child to hold in mind and easy to recall later, at the moment the lesson is actually needed. A more complicated telling, however truer to adult experience, is harder to remember and therefore harder to use. It is the simplicity of these stories that makes them easy for children to remember, and on this argument that economy is not a defect to be corrected but the mechanism by which the moral is transmitted. The concept of simplicity also applies to traditional fairy tales with princes and princesses. Most fairy tales share the same archetypes: the evil character, the damsel in distress, and the good hero of the story. Critics object that these figures oversimplify some moral issues, and in a sense they do. But the argument holds that oversimplification is the appropriate starting point for a young audience, because a child must first grasp that there is such a thing as a moral truth before being able to handle its complications. The archetypes introduce children to moral truths, emphasise the difference between good and evil, and encourage the mindset that good will overcome evil — an orientation a child can refine later but must first possess. Because traditional fairy tales teach children moral lessons in the form children can most readily absorb, they should not be rewritten for the modern world.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There should be more relevant stories to communicate morals. In a rapidly changing society, traditional fairy tales may not connect as well with children anymore. Rewriting fairy tales for a modern society encourages the teaching of moral truths in a more relevant way. While fairy tales may teach that good overcomes evil, a child may struggle to connect the story to the modern world. Therefore, a modern retelling of a fairy tale would be more effective in teaching children moral lessons.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Fables and the princess tales are different forms with different origins, and running them together lets the explicit moral of the first stand in for the second, which the argument never shows carries one. [Rejecting P2] Memorability is not moral instruction. A story easily recalled may be recalled for its images and incidents rather than for any lesson attached to them. [Rejecting P3] The premise concedes that the archetypes oversimplify, which is the retellers' own case. And none of this reaches the conclusion: showing that the traditional tales teach something does not show that a modern retelling could not teach it, which is what the counter-argument proposes.