The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.

But though I might fill the world with dragons I never had the slighest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons. I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes the fable because it is moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious.

A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers.