The Importance of Folklore and Fairy Tales in College Education
This essay argues that folklore and fairy tales deserve a place in college education because they preserve the cultural values, moral frameworks, and lived experiences of non-elite, often illiterate populations. Drawing on the Brothers Grimm's "The Juniper Tree" and Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes," the paper demonstrates how these tales encode sociological realities — from the dangers of childbirth to the censure of vanity — that written literary traditions overlook. By incorporating folklore into university syllabi, educators can offer students a more complete and accurate picture of how ordinary people understood justice, morality, and community.
- Introduction: Rethinking Fairy Tales Beyond Disney: Folklore's origins beyond children's entertainment
- Folklore as a Record of Common Cultural Values: Why colleges should teach non-elite oral traditions
- The Brothers Grimm and 'The Juniper Tree': Grimm tale as mirror of peasant social realities
- Hans Christian Andersen and 'The Red Shoes': Andersen's moral tale and Christian cultural values
- Conclusion: Folklore's Place in the University Curriculum: Folklore's extremity as authentic popular moral record
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What makes this paper effective
- Uses specific primary texts ("The Juniper Tree" and "The Red Shoes") as concrete evidence for its broader argument about folklore's pedagogical value, rather than making only abstract claims.
- Connects narrative details — cannibalism, scarcity of food, amputation of feet — directly to sociological and historical context, demonstrating close reading skill.
- Frames folklore as a counterweight to the traditional university canon, making a clear, original curricular argument that gives the essay a persuasive purpose.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses textual analysis anchored in cultural and historical context. Rather than summarizing plot, the writer interprets specific story elements as evidence of real social conditions — for example, reading the stepmother's cannibalism in "The Juniper Tree" as a reflection of food scarcity in peasant society. This move from text to context is a foundational skill in literary and cultural studies.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by challenging the assumption that fairy tales are merely children's entertainment, then builds a general argument for folklore's educational value. It pivots to two extended examples — one from the Grimm tradition and one from Andersen — before closing with a reflection on why the extremity of folkloric moral justice gives students a more authentic understanding of popular sentiment than elite literary texts alone can provide.
Introduction: Rethinking Fairy Tales Beyond Disney
Although fairy tales are often considered to be simply palatable, easy-to-understand stories for children, this perception has more to do with the modern legacy of Disney cartoons than with the actual genealogy of this literary tradition of oral narrative. In fact, these stories did not originate as tales meant to ensure that young people behaved in a proper and decorous manner. Rather, they are quite literally tales of the common folk — hence "folktales" or "fairy tales" — and of the wider populace. These tales provide snapshots of common cultural values particular to a people and to a cultural tradition.
The Brothers Grimm quite explicitly attempted to catalogue the oral narratives of their native, rural Germany, producing a bloody chronicle of the sociological values and assumptions of that heritage. Even though Hans Christian Andersen constructed his stories more deliberately as an individual author, his Christian and Scandinavian values are still evident in the ways he shapes his tales, which are rooted in the legends of his own childhood.
Folklore as a Record of Common Cultural Values
It is vitally important that the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm be studied in college because they are among the few surviving texts that encompass the common values and narrative structures of individuals who may or may not have been literate. The tellers of these tales did not have the means to preserve their words in published form, yet they still created a vibrant oral art. In college, too much privilege is given to the history and literature of the higher echelons of society — those who were literate, educated, urban, and quite often male. By including folklore in the curriculum, this tendency of the university syllabus is subverted, or at least minimized.
The Brothers Grimm and 'The Juniper Tree'
The cultural heritage evident in folklore is powerfully illustrated in one of the Brothers Grimm's most infamous tales: The Juniper Tree. This story highlights the conflict that arose between the children of an earlier marriage and reflects the commonality of reconstructed families in a society where women frequently died in childbirth. The story ends with a grotesque banquet in which the stepmother, driven by jealousy, commits a horrific act of cannibalism — an episode that also highlights the scarcity of food in peasant society, where life was very often, in the most elemental terms, an eat-or-be-eaten struggle.
Conclusion: Folklore's Place in the University Curriculum
The extremity of her punishment strikes the modern reader as harsh, but it reveals the importance of community censure in the environment Andersen inhabited. Quite often the elements of all folkloric tales are extreme, but in their extremity and in the roughness of their narrative structure and moral justice, university students receive perhaps a more accurate sense of how justice and morality were felt by the common populace, rather than simply intellectualized by cultural elites. This is precisely why folklore deserves a place in higher education.
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