2022 Education Conference: Learning for Life

J.R.R. Tolkien, in his lecture “On Fairy Stories,” delivered at St. Andrews in honor of Andrew Lang, one of the great revivalists of the fairy tale tradition, makes a surprising distinction among the variety of stories that we call fairy tales. In fact, he suggests that most of the tales Lang collected in his many anthologies were not, in fact, fairy tales proper, but rather they belonged to the tradition of travelers’ tales and beast fables. These time-honored stories include the likes of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” and “Puss-in-boots.” His concern with properly defining a faerie story was one that he took seriously, for the very fact that he worried that all such stories would be consigned solely to the nursery. One may call this argument a friendly repartee among a set of like-minded thinkers, who all had in mind the important preservation of classical children’s tales, but his challenge is one that we may consider important to the overall task of education, whether it’s our own or that of our children. The drawback that Tolkien anticipated in Andrew Lang’s and George MacDonald’s noble work has in fact come to pass. Most education consigns such tales to the earliest stages of life and forgets their importance to one’s overall education. What I hope to show is that faerie stories and fairy tales must persist as an imaginative framework throughout life. In a word, that we should believe in fairies and the faerie world for the sake of our spiritual and moral formation.

Kathryn Smith is co-director of the MAT in Classical Education and Assistant Professor in Classical Education in the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. Prior to joining Eastern, she was a visiting lecturer at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. She holds a M.A. and Ph.D. in literature from the University of Dallas (Irving, TX), where she was a Louise Cowan Scholar; and a B.U.S. in liberal studies from the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM).

Kathryn’s academic interests include classical education, modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics, as well as ancient and modern rhetoric. Dr. Smith has taught literature and writing for nearly twenty years at both secondary and post-secondary institutions. During this time, she and her husband, Bryan, have been active in classical private and charter schools, having been involved in the founding of three classical schools and a national organization for Orthodox Christian education.