Fairy tales extend and intensify the child’s social relations.  They appeal to the child by presenting aspects of family life.  Through them he realizes his relations to his own parents:  their care, their guardianship, and their love.  Through this he realizes different situations and social relations, and gains clear, simple notions of right and wrong.  His sympathies are active for kindness and fairness, especially for the defenseless, and he feels deeply the calamity of the poor or the suffering and hardship of the ill-treated.  He is in sympathy with that poetic justice which desires immediate punishment of wrong, unfairness, injustice, cruelty, or deceit.  Through fairy tales he gains a many-sided view of life.  Through his dramas, with a power of sympathy which has seemed universal, Shakespeare has given the adult world many types of character and conduct that are noble.  But fairy tales place in the hands of childhood all that the thousands and thousands of the universe for ages have found excellent in character and conduct.  They hold up for imitation all those cardinal virtues of love and self-sacrifice,—­which is the ultimate criterion of character,—­of courage, loyalty, kindness, gentleness, fairness, pity, endurance, bravery, industry, perseverance, and thrift.  Thus fairy tales build up concepts of family life and of ethical standards, broaden a child’s social sense of duty, and teach him to reflect.  Besides developing his feelings and judgments, they also enlarge his world of experience.

In the school, the fairy tale as one form of the story is one part of the largest means to unify the entire work or play of the child.  In proportion as the work of art, nature-study, game, occupation, etc., is fine, it will deal with some part of the child’s everyday life.  The good tale parallels life.  It is a record of a portion of the race reaction to its environment; and being a permanent record of literature, it records experience which is universal and presents situations most human.  It is therefore material best suited to furnish the child with real problems.  As little children have their thoughts and observations directed mainly toward people and centered about the home, the fairy tale rests secure as the intellectual counterpart to those thoughts.  As self-expression and self-activity are the great natural instincts of the child, in giving opportunity to make a crown for a princess, mould a clay bowl, decorate a tree, play a game, paint the wood, cut paper animals, sing a lullaby, or trip a dance, the tale affords many problems exercising all the child’s accomplishments in the variety of his work.  This does not make the story the central interest, for actual contact with nature is the child’s chief interest.  But it makes the story, because it is an organized experience marked by the values of human life, the unity of the child’s return or reaction to his environment.  The tale thus may bring about that “living union of thought and expression which dispels the isolation of studies and makes the child live in varied, concrete, active relation to a common world.”