The Wisdom of the Nursery

 

"Those who do not laugh have bad consciences."

- Brothers Grimm, "The Twelve Brothers."

Wise words from the nursery. Fairy tales and fables are the source of accumulated wisdom over the centuries—that is why they exist and persist. It is parental malpractice not to teach them to our children. They are the furniture of a healthy mind.

This one sentence is of tremendous value as a life lesson. It is invaluable for judging character, and it is a valuable lesson not to go down the path of dishonesty yourself—you will never laugh freely again.

Other essential lessons, too easily never learned, hard to convey otherwise, are told by Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Aesop’s “The Frogs Who Wanted a King,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

Longer fairy tales like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, have been obscured because too easily adapted by those with no interest in the original moral. Disney had a tendency in its animated versions to make them all about finding romantic love. “One Day My Prince Will Come.” Not in the mind of the original Snow White. 

Everyone thinks that the story of the princess and the frog is that the princess overcomes some initial revulsion to kiss the frog, and this turns the frog into a handsome prince. So don’t judge by appearances in seeking a life partner, right? But that is not in the original: the princess never kisses the frog. She throws him against the wall. Don’t judge by appearances, yes, but there are other things also going on. This is not about romantic love.

The first failure of our education system is that fairy tales and fables, in the original, are rarely any longer taught.