1、 1Dawkins, fairy tales, and evidence “I dont know what to think about magic and fairy tales er I would like to know whether theres any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards, and er - magic wands and, and things turning into other things umm it, it, it is unscientific I
2、think its anti-scientific umm whether that has a pernicious effect I dont know.” So said Richard Dawkins on More4 News recently. He was talking about what he was going to do now hes retired from being the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and he said that hed like to write
3、a book for children. Like many people who write books that children read, I find my ears prick up when people not known for that activity say theyre going to write a childrens book. In many cases, of course, what that means is that the publisher will pay a ghost writer to write some catchpenny trash
4、, and the latest celebrity will put their name to it and pocket an enormous advance. I see that David Beckham is now also “going to write a childrens book.” But Richard Dawkins doesnt come into that category. I have the utmost respect for Dawkins; I think that as a writer on science he is among the
5、every greatest, with a brilliant prose style, an ability to find analogies and metaphors that are endlessly inventive and illuminating, and a profound sense of wonder at the universe that science investigates. Hes also a man of complete integrity, and when he says “I dont know what to think about ma
6、gic and fairy tales,” I believe him. Hes not condemning them without thinking: he really does want to find out whether such things damage a childs understanding, and hed like to find some evidence. And that, of course, is the ethical way to go about it. Now Ive been thinking about fantasy and fairy
7、tales for a long time, and when I read what Dawkins had said, and watched the clip of the interview, it set me wondering what sort of evidence we could realistically expect to find that would settle the question one way or the other. Or perhaps, of course, wed find that no matter how hard and how fa
8、r we looked we would find no evidence at all, reminding ourselves that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I also 2began to wonder about my own attitude to fantasy and fairy tales and what that was based on; and this seemed like a good opportunity to think these things through. So: what
9、do we mean by evidence? What kinds of evidence are there, and which one might be applicable in this case? Well, we believe different things in different ways and for different reasons. Gradually, at various points in our childhoods, we discover different forms of conviction. Theres the rock-hard cer
10、tainty of personal experience (“I put my finger in the fire and it hurt,”), which is probably the earliest kind we learn. Then theres the logically convincing, which we probably come to first through maths, in the context of Pythagorass theorem or something similar, and which, if we first encounter
11、it at exactly the right moment, bursts on our minds like sunrise with the whole universe playing a great chord of C Major. Then there are other ways of believing that things are true, such as the testimony of trusted friends (I know him, and hes not a liar), the plausibility of likelihood based on e
12、xperience (its exactly the sort of thing youd expect to happen), the blind conviction of the religious zealot (it must be true because God says so and his holy book is inerrant), the placid assent of those who like a quiet life (“If you say so, dear”), and so on. Some of these, especially the last,
13、carry within them the possibility of quiet scepticism (I know him, and hes not a liar, but he does exaggerate a bit). In fact theres not just one way of believing in things but a whole spectrum. We dont demand or require scientific proof of everything we believe, not only because it would be impossi
14、ble to provide, but because in a lot of cases it isnt necessary or appropriate. However, in this case I imagine Dawkins would like something reasonably objective. Are there any models for examining childrens experience in this way? As it happens, there are. One very interesting one was carried out t
15、hirty or more years ago by a team led by Gordon Wells and his colleagues at Bristol University, and described in a book called The Meaning Makers: Children learning language and using language to learn (1987). Wells and his team wanted to find out how childrens language was influenced by what they h
16、eard around them. They selected a large number of families with children of two and three years old, whom they followed right up to the end of their primary education, and gave them unobtrusive lightweight radio microphones that could be worn under their clothes. They could pick 3up not only what th
17、e children said, but also what was being said by parents or other adults nearby. The microphones were switched on at random intervals for 90 seconds at a time, the results recorded and transcribed, and then an enormous amount of analysis was done on the results. What they found wasnt surprising, but
18、 now they had evidence for it. Briefly, they discovered that the more talk went on around young children, the more included they were in conversation and chatter, the quicker and more fully they picked up language skills. One interesting discovery was that the most enriching experience of all was th
19、e open-ended exploratory talk that arises from the reading of stories. Wells says “Several investigators have noted how much more complex, semantically and syntactically, is the language that occurs in this context. It also has a particularly important contribution to make to the childs imaginative
20、development. Furthermore, the frequency with which children are read to has been found to be a powerful predictor of later success at school.” (Gordon Wells and John Nicholls, Language and Learning: An Interactional Perspective, 1985). So its not impossible to set up rigorous experiments to test wha
21、t and how children acquire various forms of understanding, and to learn interesting things from them. But to go back to Dawkins and his question, how on earth would we set up an experiment to test the effect of fairy tales? It would have to be of much longer duration than the Bristol study of langua
22、ge development: it would have to last as long as childhood itself, or at least until the children could be considered to be beyond any further influence. Till they leave school, at any rate. And it would have to differ from the Bristol study in an important way, because youd have to have a control g
23、roup. Whereas the Bristol scholars were only concerned with finding out what actually happens in the natural course of a childs life, this study would depend on having some children who were allowed fairy tales, and another group who werent. To make it absolutely beyond question, it would have to be
24、 policed pretty rigorously: no Harry Potter under the bedclothes. Actually youd probably have three groups: one group that was left alone, and which could be presumed to experience a normal childs exposure to fairy tales and magic, another group that was allowed realistic fiction but no fantasy, and
25、 a third group that was allowed all the non-fiction they desired but no stories at all. No nursery rhymes, which are full of nonsense like a cow jumping over the moon; no 4Cinderella; but also no Swallows and Amazons, no Beano, no Jacqueline Wilson, no Roald Dahl, no stories of any kind whatsoever.
26、And youd follow the children all the way through their schooling right up to leaving age, and see whether the ones who were kept away from magic and spells were thereby advantaged in their understanding of science, and whether the ones who were allowed realistic fiction differed in any way from thos
27、e who were allowed no fiction at all. That would probably answer the question with the objective answers you wanted, but of course you wouldnt do it. Firstly, it would be impossible to police, and secondly if you did police it at all rigorously, it would amount to child abuse. Youd have to keep them
28、 in a sort of prison camp. But Dawkins knows this; he wouldnt ask for the unreasonable, or the impossible, or the cruel. So when he says hed like to see some evidence, I can only assume that hes prepared to be a little generous in his view of evidence, and admit testimony of a kind that while it mig
29、ht not satisfy a scientist, or a criminal court, which requires proof beyond reasonable doubt, would be enough for a civil court, which requires the balance of probability. We dont demand or require scientific proof of everything we need to know about, not only because it would be impossible to prov
30、ide, but because in a lot of cases it isnt necessary or appropriate. And the only way we know whats going on in the mind of someone who reads a story is to believe them when they tell us about it, and compare it with our own experience of reading, and see what we have in common. So when it comes to
31、the matter that Dawkins is concerned about, which is also a matter of belief namely the question of childrens belief in fairy tales and magic and spells all we have to go by is belief itself, belief and trust, but then as I say, we do have our own experience to compare it with. Its that sort of evid
32、ence, and thats the only sort weve got, but then, we get by pretty well with that in most of our dealings with other people, unless were paranoid. So: do children believe what they read in stories, or dont they? And if they do, in what way do they believe it? Well, this is what I think about it. I t
33、hink its very like play perhaps more like play than like anything else. We used to say “Lets pretend ” When I was a boy of eight or nine, in Australia, what we said was “Lets make out ” which is a 5phrase that would have got me into trouble in the USA if Id tried it there. “Lets make out were cops a
34、nd robbers ” So we pretended to be figures from the stories wed seen in comics, or heard on the radio, or seen at the cinema, and we acted out stories that we improvised as we went along. I knew I wasnt really Batman, or Davy Crockett, but at the same time I was imitating things Id seen Batman do on
35、 a printed page or Davy Crockett do on the cinema screen say at the siege of the Alamo, where the defenders held out for as long as they could, while knowing that they were outnumbered and they were probably going to die. And when we died we did so with heroic extravagance. My body was doing all a n
36、ine-year-old body could to run out from behind a wall, fire a musket, clutch my chest, stagger, crumple to the ground, slowly drag a revolver from a holster with a trembling hand, and kill six Mexicans as I breathed my last. Those were the physical things my body was doing. What was my mind doing? I
37、 think it was feeling a little scrap, a tiny fluttering tattered cheaply printed torn-off scrap of heroism. I felt what it was like to be brave and to die facing overwhelming odds. That intensity of feeling is what both fuels and rewards childhood play. When we children play at being characters we a
38、dmire doing things we value, we discover in doing so areas and depths of feeling it would be hard to reach otherwise. Exhilaration, heroism, despair, resolution, triumph, noble renunciation, sacrifice in acting these out, we experience them in miniature, or, as it were, in safety. The other thing to
39、 be said about the kinds of play I used to take part in is that as far as I can remember, it almost always embodied story of one kind or another. It consisted not of musical tones, or shapes and colours, or words, but of events of ambushes, betrayals, combats, the making of alliances, the tracking o
40、f prey. Even when the play was formalised by a set of rules, as in games of football or cricket, it was experienced as a drama, with an opening, a tussle for supremacy, a fightback, a final triumph or defeat. You could tell the story of it. And even the rules themselves could be co-opted into the na
41、rrative. I remember being outraged by the behaviour of the other team the first time I played street cricket soon after we moved to Australia; they insisted that I was out even though the fielder had caught the ball after it had bounced. “One bounce, one hand,” they crowed, mocking me for my ignoran
42、ce as I denounced them for 6their unfairness. So the story of that game became part of a larger story in which I learned about local rules; I learned that what I took to be universal truths, such as the laws of cricket, were not all that universal after all; or a story in which yet again England got
43、 beaten by Australia. But I was wondering about belief, and the way we believe in stories, and in play. At no time during the endless hours of play I spent as a child did I believe that I was anyone other than myself. I was acting; I was pretending. Sometimes I was me, and sometimes I was me pretend
44、ing to be Davy Crockett. But now that I think about it carefully, I realise that it was a little more complicated than that. The two kinds of me were superimposed and not separate; I could be Davy Crockett to the hilt, and be me at the same time, trying out what it would be like to be Davy Crockett
45、to be still myself, but close to Crockett-hood. But it wasnt consistent; it varied a lot. When I was playing with my brother and my friends, I was almost entirely Crockett, or Batman, or Dick Tracy, or whoever it was (and I remember games when there were about six different Batmans racing through th
46、e neighbourhood gardens). It was when I played alone that I found it possible to be myself, but a different myself, a myself who wasnt Davy Crockett but who was Davy Crocketts close and valued friend, who sat with him beside a campfire in the wilderness or tracked bears through the primeval forests
47、of suburban Adelaide. Sometimes I rescued him from danger and sometimes he rescued me, but we were both pretty laconic about it. In some ways I was more myself at those times than any other, a stronger and more certain myself, wittier, more clearly defined, a myself of accomplishment and renown, som
48、eone Davy Crockett could rely on in a tight spot. Whats more, he seemed to value me more than my friends and family did. He saw the qualities in me that their duller eyes, unused to sharp-shooting, failed to see. In fact Davy Crockett wasnt alone in this superior perception; I remember that King Art
49、hur had a high opinion of me, and so did Superman. Now I think that those experiences and every child who has the chance of both playing with friends and playing alone will experience something like that were an important part of my 7moral education as well as the development of my imagination. By acting out stories of heroism and sacrifice and (to use a fine phrase that has become a clich) grace under pressure, I was building patterns of behaviour and expectation into my moral understandin
