Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination

by Vigen Guroian

In answer to the skeptics, Chesterton states what he thought to be obvious. Whether we admit it or not, education is bound to indoctrinate and bound to coerce.

One last thing in which I agree with Chesterton. Fairy tales lead us toward a belief in something that, if it were not also so veiled in a mystery, common sense alone would affirm: if there is a story, there must surely also be a storyteller.

In his little gem, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, the philosopher Josef Pieper recalls a popular saying of the Middle Ages: “A man is wise when all things taste to him as they really are.”8 This sums up why people need to look at reality without deceiving themselves. So long as self-deception is at the source of a person’s perception of things, he or she cannot mature into the fullness of being human or lead a successful course through life.