It’s 1944 and Albert Einstein is walking home from Princeton University, where he works. On his way, he is accosted by an old woman who is with her seven-year-old grandson. She asks the great physicist what her grandson must do to become educated. Einstein answers, without hesitation: “Fairytales. He should read fairytales.”

The old woman presses Einstein further, asking what else her grandson should read. “More fairytales,” he replies.

That seven-year-old boy is now 83-year-old Jack Zipes, a prolific scholar of folk and fairytales who has written many books on the subject. Now retired, he was previously professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota in the US. This “partially true” tale, as Zipes puts it, makes for a cracking story and, for the record, he says that he was already a bookworm long before his Einstein encounter.

But what of Einstein’s advice? In 2021, what value do folk and fairy stories have in schools? After all, they routinely reinforce gender stereotypes, with beautiful but weak women waiting to be rescued by a handsome prince (as in Rapunzel, The Princess and the Pea, Cinderella); they cover murky themes such as threatened infanticide, child abduction, cannibalism (Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, respectively); and they can have pretty horrific endings (see The Gingerbread Man, The Three Little Pigs). In fact, a 2018 survey found that a quarter of parents edit fairy stories when reading them aloud to their children.

Yet a review of children’s literature, published last year in the journal Health Promotion Perspectives, revealed that there are some unexpected benefits that come with fairy and folk tales. In schools, these stories can be motivational teaching tools, and they can play a role in helping students to develop life skills and ways to cope with problems, the researchers found.

Fairytales also have implications for language learning. The authors state that fairytales and fables “are a valuable resource in teaching foreign languages and improving language skills (writing, reading, speaking and listening). The use of narrative in teaching foreign languages has been found to lower the level of anxiety, allowing students to take risks in the language classes, thanks to the familiarity with stories and the relaxing learning environment generated by storytelling.”

For Zipes, such stories have value now more than ever. “I think they’re extremely relevant today because they reflect deep-rooted problems throughout the world,” he says. He points out that in these tales, it’s often the “little person” - the Tom Thumbs, the Thumbelinas - who wins in the end, prevailing over wicked witches and nasty kings, which can be an empowering message for children.

“If we give children the freedom to read and understand these tales, they can bring a lot of joy,” he says.

David Lewin, a senior lecturer in philosophy of education at the University of Strathclyde, considers these traditional stories from a different standpoint. In his recently published paper, “Between horror and boredom: fairytales and modern education”, he looks at the modern moral lessons that can be derived from these ancient tales.

For Lewin, a key concern here is “pedagogical reduction”, by which he is talking about “what it means to produce curriculum”.

“Educators are constantly selecting and simplifying the world in order to teach,” he says. “Curricula don’t just sit there waiting to be shown; we produce them as teachers. It’s important we realise that [curricula] are productions because that means that they’re embodying some of our prejudices, our assumptions, our biases.”

With this in mind, it is important for teachers to explicitly consider how they weave moral education into the curriculum.

Fairytales, Lewin suggests, are a useful vehicle for communicating lessons about morality and how we should treat others. If we were to try to teach those morals outright, he continues, we might be less successful.

“I’m interested in how a child’s moral development is encouraged [by fairytales] and, at the same time, I’m reading some of these stories and considering how they include all sorts of terrible stereotypes: they’re patriarchal, they’re racially biased, they’re politically insensitive. They are morally complex, so they present an interesting challenge,” he says.

Rather than seeing fairytales as a way to directly hammer home maxims to live by - don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t talk to strangers, listen to the grown-ups - Lewin views them as a means of reflection.

“Getting children to reflect is maybe more open in terms of what you’re intending to get out of using a particular story. So you don’t want stories to be imposing a moral too heavy handedly if you want children to reflect. My argument is that there can be different ways of engaging in pedagogical reduction and so a lot of these stories can be used positively for reflection,” he says.

Lewin argues that fairy stories can also be a way of addressing difficult themes with children, such as death, betrayal and greed. “The fact that you’re displacing the conversation or the context on to a narrative, so the relation and the events are happening between characters in a story, allows children to be distanced but, at the same time, to recognise and feel those dilemmas,” he says.

“We sometimes talk about stories in terms of an educational journey. So when a child reads the text, they go on an educational journey, which is partly to do with them learning about the world of the character in the story. But when they do so, it reflects back on themselves. In other words, encountering ‘the other’ and encountering ‘the self’. Those are happening at the same time when kids read stories, which allows for opening up into those difficult conversations, without becoming too personal.

“You’re giving space to the child to see for themselves certain things that you might not want to directly say.”

But what about those really problematic aspects of fairytales - the patriarchal leanings, the racial bias and the political insensitivity? How should teachers navigate those aspects? Should they simply be ignored or edited out?

While it is important to provide students with space for reflection, Lewin suggests that when using fairytales in class, it’s always worth considering authorial intent because many fairytales that are today aimed at children weren’t originally directed towards them. In fact, it wasn’t until around the mid 18th century that the notion of “children’s literature” first appeared at all.

“The very concept of children’s literature is relatively new and, actually, folk tales don’t differentiate younger children from older children or from adults. They’re just stories,” says Lewin.

Teachers therefore have two options. They can either teach an edited version (which may be more appropriate with younger children) or teach a version closer to the original but take the time to discuss with pupils any outdated elements and consider the implications of these. In fact, looking at those elements can provide useful lessons about how our beliefs around what is and is not acceptable have evolved over time.

And fairytales can even be a useful tool for teaching advanced concepts, such as literary criticism. Asking students to consider a familiar tale from a feminist, post-colonial or Marxist perspective can provide an accessible introduction to applying theoretical lenses to texts.

So, fairytales can still have a place in the classroom, warts and all. But what about the trend for contemporary fairytales that subvert the traditional tropes and offer up guys being rescued by gals and that sort of thing? Lewin is sceptical.

“My worry is that they’re a little heavy handed as well. Just as the original, implicit agendas and the structures of prejudice are built into the old tales, now we’ve got a [modern] heavy-handed political intent. And that bothers me a bit, because should stories be used to undo current political prejudices?”

“Re-imagined” versions of fairytales shouldn’t necessarily be avoided in the classroom but teachers should bear in mind that these stories might require just as much interrogation as the originals that came before them.

Christina Quaine is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 16 July 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Fairytales”