Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
As the popularity of William Bennett's Book of Virtues attests, parents are turning more and more to children's literature to help instill values in their kids. Now, in this elegantly written and passionate book, Vigen Guroian provides the perfect complement to books such as Bennett's, offering parents and teachers a much-needed roadmap to some of our finest children's stories.
Guroian illuminates the complex ways in which fairy tales and fantasies educate the moral imagination from earliest childhood. Examining a wide range of stories--from "Pinocchio" and "The Little Mermaid" to "Charlotte's Web," "The Velveteen Rabbit," "The Wind in the Willows," and the "Chronicles of Narnia"--he argues that these tales capture the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, in which characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong, or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds. Character and the virtues are depicted compellingly in these stories; the virtues glimmer as if in a looking glass, and wickedness and deception are unmasked of their pretensions to goodness and truth. We are made to face the unvarnished truth about ourselves, and what kind of people we want to be.
Throughout, Guroian highlights the classical moral virtues such as courage, goodness, and honesty, especially as they are understood in traditional Christianity. At the same time, he so persuasively evokes the enduring charm of these familiar works that many readers will be inspired to reread their favorites and explore those they may have missed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Guroian is an Eastern Orthodox theologian whose intention is to help busy parents make the right choices of "what books and stories to read with children." But this hasn't the content of William Bennett's anthology, and it's scarcely a guide in the way that Noel Perrin's recent first-rate volume, A Child's Delight, is. Guroian devotes the bulk of the text to explaining the Christian (ergo "virtuous") underpinnings and symbology of a few works by Hans Christian Andersen, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. The problem is he never gives a sense of artistic proportion or shows how or why classic stories are more likely to "waken a Child's Moral Imagination" than a Spiderman comic. Ironically, he points out that "ere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues. It might even backfire, especially when the presentation is heavily exhortative and the pupil's will is coerced." His discussions are often just that, loudly demonstrating nothing so much as his own facility in detecting biblical allusions. He finds that the themes of love and friendship in Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio and Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows owe their sublimity to Christianity rather than their authors' humanity. Having damned critics Roger Sale and Jack Zipes for discerning faults in Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," he says of the story's ending that we must ask ourselves: "why would we want our children or ourselves to be content with when immortality has been proffered?" Unfortunately, such arrogance pervades Guroian's tome. The concluding bibliographic essay is dismally short of recommendations.
