A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a 
rule, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead 
parents to treat printed fairy stories as formal texts. It is always much better 
to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what, 
in the actual situation of the time and the child, is an improvement on the 
printed text, so much the better.
   A charge made against 
fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him sad 
thinking. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment 
that children who have read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than 
those who had not. As to fears, there are, I think, some cases of children being 
dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises (出现) from 
the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition 
turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered.
 
  There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds 
that they are not objectively true, that giants, witches, two-headed dragons, 
magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that, instead of being fond of the strange 
side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying 
history. I find such people, I must say so peculiar (奇怪的) that I do not know how 
to argue with them. If their case were sound, the world should be full of mad 
men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a stick or covering a 
telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved 
girl-friend.
  No fairy story ever declared to be a description 
of the real world and no clever child has ever believed that it was.The author’s mention of sticks and telephones is meant to suggest that 
().
- A、fairy stories are still being made up
 - B、there is some misunderstanding about fairy tales
 - C、people try to modernize old fairy stories
 - D、there is more concern for children’s fears nowadays
 

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