Children’s Thoughts on Wonder in Fairy Tales

Abstract

AbstractFairy tales are a means to introduce the Polish language and social education exercises in Polish kindergartens and schools (early childhood literature education). In their methodological proposals, authors of school handbooks use fairy tales as a medium for teaching moral values. The Goldfish is an example of such an approach (Fałdzińska and Rączyńska, 2017). This article presents the thoughts of children aged six to nine (Polish kindergarten and primary school years one to three) constructed around the fairy tale in question, which, on the one hand, can be understood as a cautionary lesson about the importance of remaining satisfied with one’s station (Tatar 2014), and on the other serves as a meta-tale, exposing a rule of the genre’s poetics (Somoff, 2019). Assuming the role of observer-as-participant, intent on providing interpretations, the author of this study aims to identify children’s categories of wonder occurring in Aleksandr Afanasyev’s The Goldfish (Afanasyev, 1984). It was observed that children reflect on the rules of wonder in fairy tales (as culture-specific texts) and derive social meanings significant from the viewpoint of fairy tale categories. As such, they were not only limited to the lesson of condemning greed, which is often assigned to The Goldfish.