released 9/19/2025

Junius Johnson, author of On Teaching Fairy Stories: A Guide to Cultivating Wonder in Students through Great Literature (Classical Academic Press, 2023), discusses the importance of teaching stories, particularly fairy stories, in classical education. Experience and reflection are both integral parts of a human encounter with stories. Johnson’s book engages with J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories,” and is written to help classical education teachers to teach fairy stories well, so that they reveal the real world as both “magical” and “natural.” He acknowledges the wariness some parents and educators feel toward the encouraging of fantasy, as it might cause students to prefer the “fake” world to the real. The solution is not to throw out these stories but to teach them carefully and thoughtfully so they might be agents of good and not harm. A real harm — which is prevalent in modernity — is to teach about life and reality in a way that causes students to see it from a reductionist, purely utilitarian perspective. That mode of teaching “does something to your heart,” Johnson says, and dulls students’ capacity to immerse themselves in and surrender to stories.

25 minutes

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