单项选择题A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a
rule, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead
parents to treat printed fairy stories as formal texts. It is always much better
to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what,
in the actual situation of the time and the child, is an improvement on the
printed text, so much the better.
A charge made against
fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him sad
thinking. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment
that children who have read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than
those who had not. As to fears, there are, I think, some cases of children being
dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises (出现) from
the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition
turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered.
There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds
that they are not objectively true, that giants, witches, two-headed dragons,
magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that, instead of being fond of the strange
side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying
history. I find such people, I must say so peculiar (奇怪的) that I do not know how
to argue with them. If their case were sound, the world should be full of mad
men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a stick or covering a
telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved
girl-friend.
No fairy story ever declared to be a description
of the real world and no clever child has ever believed that it was.
