Why We Should Teach Fantasy

Animal Farm and Teaching

Why we should teach fantasy in schools, to me, is why we should teach any genre. Yet throughout my education, I’ve been told fantasy is for children and isn’t worthy of academic praise. The closest I’ve come to reading fantasy in school was being assigned Animal Farm, twice. I actually had to read The Great Gatsby three times, no joke, and to this day, in my second term of British Literature, there’s no sign of Tolkien, not even an essay.

When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher gave us weekly assignments where we could write anything we wanted. And yes, she’s the coolest for that. After she read my sixteen-year-old take on a dystopian, near-future political thriller during my junior year (which I wrote in all bold), I figured it was time to make a change and took up writing fantasy.

My fantasy story was much better than Blackout: Dark Nation, but when she gave me feedback on my first installment, I couldn’t ignore what remained unsaid, yet was so apparent in her tone:

“Fantasy, really?”

This reaction caught me off guard (not that it stopped me). As a kid, I was obsessed with The Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and Harry Potter, and after diving into more modern fantasy as well as some classics, I found them much more enjoyable than re-reading Animal Farm over and over again, and I even took more out of them.

But as I continued studying in college, I was met with the same reaction from teachers when I told them I wrote fantasy:

“Really?”

Eventually, I just decided to look up why fantasy wasn’t respected in academics, and here I am writing a paper for my senior capstone class about why it should be. It turns out I wasn’t alone in feeling this, and I learned an important truth about the degree I was about to embark on.

Why we Categorize Literary, Genre, and Classics

To understand why fantasy isn’t respected in academics, we have to look at the broad picture.

Literature classes love two things: Literary Fiction and Classic Literature. It took me some time, but now I can fully say I love these things, too. This may be crass, but I hate to admit it’s been the case throughout most of my academic experience.

Literature classes hate one thing: genre fiction.

When I looked up the difference between Literary Fiction (which I’m capitalizing to be an ass) and genre fiction, I found they weren’t even mutually exclusive. So, a fantasy story could technically be written in the style of Literary Fiction.

To lay some common ground, let’s define these categories.

The oldest stories we have are fantasy: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, Beowulf, The Tale of Genji, the list goes on and on. However, often these works are instead referred to as Classics, while modern fantasy is looked down upon or at least ignored by scholars.

The reason for this is that some people pair fantasy (and the rest of genre fiction, really) with genre fiction’s bottom-of-the-barrel elements of storytelling. These come in the form of tropes, which are actually specific to sub-genres of genre fiction, like fantasy, mystery, thriller, romance, etc. The chosen one trope is a great example of this.

Literary Fiction is written in pursuit of Realism; the characters and setting are realistic and complex, and the story often has some multi-faceted allegory or complex theme to take away at the end.

Yet in defining Literary Fiction, we can see its tropes. Tropes are just common traits certain types of stories typically have. But this isn’t even the whole point.

If a fantasy story is written like a Literary Fiction story, guess what category it goes in? Literary Fiction or Classics. But if a Literary Fiction story is given some tropes of genre fiction, based on how well those tropes are played off, the story will either be genre fiction or Literary Fiction (if it pulls them off well).

This comes from the elusive nature of Literary Fiction. Some of its stories actually have unrealistic elements, but still, it somehow remains categorized as Lit Fic!

It almost feels like there’s an invisible head deciding which stories are genre and which belong to Literary Fiction, based on a certain subjective taste alone, and the crowd following the head just so happens to have that same taste and therefore agrees with it. And that’s not very realistic at all.

The best part is that these two terms were actually created in the 20^th century to help with marketing campaigns.

The vast disparity between these two really says it all. Literary Fiction is nearly impossible to categorize and breaks its own rules, and genre fiction is bloated with sub-genre categories and mashup categories. Ultimately, because of the aloof nature of Literary Fiction, it is up to some unknown force to decide who gets to join the club, and fantasy is out.

Because of this, the entire genre is seldom taught in schools, and it’s even rarer to see a class dedicated to fantasy. This take begins to dive into the issue of how schools approach teaching literature, but we’ll get to that later. For now, remember that fantasy is the oldest genre in literature and is to this day the most popular genre of any medium. . . And that again, it can retain all the aspects of Literary Fiction.

Without argument, Realism is based on fulfilling fundamental expectations of reality. The deciding line between Realism and whatever’s on the other side is placed based on what those expectations are, and they’re different for each story and each person. If Charles Dickens can make us believe in the fictional city of Coketown, then I see no reason why a reader couldn’t view Tarbean, from The Name of The Wind, as realistic. Ultimately, these are both completely fictional settings, written in the spirit of retaining a sense of Realism, a vital part of Literary Fiction.

What happens here is that we circle back to the man in the high castle, deciding subjectively what fits into the unreliable category of Literary Fiction, and what remains as fantasy.

The social stigma around genre fiction, which provides no reason as to why fantasy stories can’t be written in the style of the more esteemed category of literary fiction, is keeping students from learning about the oldest and perhaps most influential genre of humankind.

But Realism is only one half of the equation. The other crucial part of Literary Fiction and all the books we’ve likely read in school at some point, is something you’ve probably heard a few teachers gush about (at least I have).

What this other half boils down to, in terms of what is taught in schools, is if a text can provide something to learn beyond the story it tells. Yes, it’s time to talk about the infamous, “Deeper Meaning”, the one we’ve all been asked to write about in papers that we want nothing to do with. Unsurprisingly, Literary Fiction specifically strives to deliver this Deeper Meaning. That’s what sets apart the new fiction I’ve read in school from the stuff I’ve enjoyed in my own time.

It’s the only thing I’ve seen school try to teach me about literature, and that’s why I’ve never seen an assigned text without it unless, of course, it’s Classic Literature. The craziest part is that just like Realism, the ability to find Deep Meaning from a text is dependent on the person and the individual text, not a category or type of story in general. Of course, a story with elves can have a deeper meaning. Even though Tolkien hated allegory, people can pull a wide variety of underlying, deeper messages from his stories.

Not all stories need to be Literary Fiction to be worth sharing, but this simple categorization issue isn’t the only reason fantasy and other types of genre fiction are worth teaching.

Now that we’ve established that fantasy or any other genre-fiction story can retain every aspect of a Literary Fiction story, I want to get into the negative effects of only teaching stories written in the spirit of Realism and Deeper Meaning. I want to talk about the other half of stories, which can be just as valid learning tools as Literary Fiction stories are.

The damage that teaching only stories with a Deeper Meaning does is immeasurable and has likely contributed to the decline in people reading for joy today. If people aren’t shown that books can be read simply for pleasure—and to hell with Literary Fiction’s infamous Deeper Meaning—they’ll only ever see books as homework and papers and grades, and they’ll never pick one up outside a classroom. For me, this point alone is enough of a reason to include if not necessarily genre fiction, at least book assignments based on cultivating a joy of reading—rather than just using reading as a tool—in a classroom setting.

This isn’t to say it’s bad to stretch the mind through reading or that Literary Fiction and its Deeper Meaning are evil, either. Obviously for some people (looking at you, big man in the high castle), Literary Fiction is and perhaps has always been the spitting image of reading for pleasure. I, too, love stories with a Deeper Meaning, but I was fortunate enough to grow up reading with my parents, who taught me first that books are to be read at my own pace, for enjoyment. Others only know what schools have shown them about books: that they’re work.

If I had to choose between the two types of reading, I’d pick joy overwork every time and would learn more in the long run. There is obviously something deeper to learn from books than the infamous Deeper Meaning.

I began writing for joy, like most people, out of reading for joy. It wasn’t after reading Fitzgerald or Elliot that I wanted to be a writer, but after reading Tolkien and Gaiman and Rothfuss, all fantasy authors, all stories meant to be enjoyed, that I wanted to write stories that gave this feeling to others. Conversely, it’s writers like Woolf, Wilde, and Wallace who showed me writing could be anything. But it all really took off for me with Tolkien, the godfather of modern fantasy.

That Guy Tolkien

There’s no better reason we should teach fantasy than this guy, right?

I’ve been thinking about which Tolkien story would fit into my British Literature class best, and I think I’ve got it. A lot of the historical literature classes I’ve taken focus on the early signs of a shift in storytelling. We’ve read Beowulf and covered Chaucer to Virginia Woolf. I even had to read some Shakespeare.

The earliest, best example of Tolkien I can think of for Tolkien is Farmer Giles of Ham, a fantasy short story about a town banding together to defeat a dragon. It’s a wonderful showcase of what inspired Tolkien, and it holds the early shapes of significant elements of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. When it was written, the point of this book was to explore a new form of fantasy for a somewhat new author. Now, it holds the early signs of what would redefine a genre.

Although this story is the precursor of incredibly influential books, it remains relatively unknown. It’s also one of the main inspirations for my upcoming story, The Dragon Captor.

He has some phenomenal lines in here, especially for younger audiences, For instance, “He came round a shoulder of the mountain like a ton of thunderbolts, with a noise like a gale and a gust of red lightning.” (Tolkien).

I found a copy of this story in the back of my car one day, probably left there by a friend or family member, no clue, but it’s mine now. Since I read The Hobbit in middle school, I’ve loved Tolkien, so reading this a few years ago was incredibly inspiring.

This story is a piece of literary history. Without it, there would be no The Lord of the Rings, and thousands of stories (probably including even some Literary Fiction ones) would not exist today.

Yet I’d be crazy to not acknowledge that Granddaddy Tolkien didn’t inspire a lot of crap stories to be written. Listen, it’s not his fault. Everybody started taking acid after The Beatles sang about it, and I bet we’ve had some bad songs come out of that, too.

In either case, the elves aren’t the problem here. Even I can’t say that I haven’t written some LOTR fan-fic before (and no, not that kind). With Tolkien at least, the issue of poorly inspired stories has been coined as Medievalism.

Lit Fic fans from across the globe will be enthralled to hear that avid fantasy reader Irina Ruppo Malone, who coined the term Medievalism, views these fantasy stories as “obscurely corrupt or embarrassing” (Malone). In this, she’s in part referring to the idea that the other is likely the antagonist in many fantasy stories. It could be argued that this stems from the racism of the 1900s when Tolkien wrote his works.

However, whether this aspect of a story contributes or hurts the topic it discusses relies on what the story has to say about it. Even with a cliché such as the antagonist being the opposite of the protagonist, whether this helps or hurts a story depends only on how mindfully it’s done and why it’s in the story to begin with.

The same goes for any cliché in fantasy or any type of story (even Lit Fic). It seems obvious to me, but what’s most important part of any story is not what is done, but how well everything is done.

Looking at the tropes within a fantasy story can be very telling of its quality. If a magic system has no consistency and breaks the reader’s expectations of it, then it’s likely the characters may break expectations in the same way. The quality of tropes is reflective of the quality of the writing, and a story isn’t bad simply for having them, just as much as one isn’t good simply for omitting them.

The themes seen in Tolkien’s works are present because of the inspiration he took from his work as a medieval scholar. This also extends to the antagonists in his stories.

Just a quick aside: just this one facet, delving into the inspiration of Tolkien as well as modern interpretations of his work, offers entire essays to be written by students who don’t want to read Animal Farm for a third time.

But let’s get off Grandaddy’s back for a minute and get back to fantasy as a whole.

Fantasy’s Dark Age (Why People Think We Shouldn’t Teach Fantasy)

While it’s true that fantasy has come a long way since Tolkien wrote the word Hobbit on someone’s homework, I feel it wouldn’t be fair to omit the (in my subjective, limited opinion) dark ages of fantasy.

So, when something new sprouts up and becomes radically popular, what usually seems to happen is that thousands of other things obviously inspired by that first thing sprout up behind it. Whether this is done out of inspiration or to make money doesn’t ultimately matter as far as the general shape of things goes. These stories contribute to the overall trend, and it’s a hard spot, for a genre especially, to get out of.

Anyway, Tolkien writes his books, changes a genre, I don’t learn this in my British Lit class, etc. Then a bunch of worse stories come along, written in the spirit of Tolkien. Then, it gets better, right?

Sadly, no, not yet.

Fantasy’s decades of relative stagnation could be attributed to its exemption from schools as well as households (for religious reasons as well as popularity in general). I’m referring specifically to the panic regarding the fantasy game, Dungeons and Dragons, in the 1980s. During this time, religious groups began to condemn the game as well as fantasy in general after claiming numerous deaths to be the cause of D&D. Though these cases had almost no connection to the game, these groups continued to use D&D as a scapegoat, and as a result, many people were directed away from it and fantasy in general. Until some British lady wrote a story about a good little boy who wanted to learn magic, but his step-parents didn’t want him to.

Either way, that stagnation’s there. I’m not going to try to hide it, but I have to say that this is again ultimately just my opinion as a reader who came in after the genre evolved past this point.

Modern Fantasy

Though modern fantasy is heavily inspired by a handful of people, the genre is continuously reaching new heights, as authors approach it in more nuanced ways. . . .

If you’re a teacher looking to incorporate fantasy into your classroom, I’d recommend Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Ursula LeGuin, Mervyn Peake, and obviously Tolkien. But if I was being honest with you, I’d tell you to let your students pick a book of their own for once. The best memories I have of reading in school are ones where I had the smallest thread of choice and initiative in what I did, and the more of this I got, the more I got out of what I was learning.

As someone who’s had multiple jobs teaching children, I know this can be a scary prospect for teachers. I also am not familiar with the bureaucracy of the American school system or of any other school system, really, and I know the agency teachers have is more limited than it should be.

However, it’s important to give readers a space where they can try new things.

In an article for the New York Times, Lev Grossman writes about his struggle in realizing that his true calling as a writer is fantasy, not Literary Fiction. He says that this mistake “had its origins” in being raised by English professors who created an environment that guided him toward Literary Fiction.

Grossman goes into how he designed his first fantasy story by bringing elements of fantasy he loved to the reality he was experiencing, mostly in the form of creating a character. It’s an incredible read.

The key piece of this article is that his parents allowed him to read fantasy during his own time. Without this opportunity, he may never have found the genre he thrives best in as a writer. Some people don’t get this opportunity from home and need to rely on other areas of their life to fulfill this.

Fable, Myth, and Folklore

We should teach fantasy for the same reason we study history, anthropology, philosophy, and mythology. These are reflections of the self, just like literature. Most fantasy is rooted in mythology and folklore, and often the line blurs between the three. For instance, the word fable comes from the French/English fabliaux, written folktales from hundreds of years ago. Folklore also has an offshoot called Fakelore, in which people intentionally wrote folklore-esque stories and characters like Paul Bunyan to be shared with the world. Fantasy is just a modern take on these well-established and researched areas of study.

Imagination & Education

So, because this is a college paper, I had to include some sources with specific criteria, but I found one article while scrolling through my school library that I couldn’t ignore, basically for this quote alone.

For some perspective, this is coming from 1949, in volume 49 of The Elementary School Journal:

“In general it may be said that a teacher’s first and primary concern is not with the fantasy content of children’s minds.”

At the time, this journal was asking some vital questions that would shape education for decades to come. They wanted to know if the childhood imagination (or fantasies, in their lingo) was worth studying and incorporating into the education system.

The article claims that the goal for teachers of the time (which again was 1949) was to “bring fantasy more in line with reality so that fantasy is less distorted, less bizarre”. I mean, if to some extent that doesn’t sound like squishing imagination, I don’t know what does.

I’m simply putting this here as an installment of what was going on in 1949, like before the 50s, when we were tuning into radio stations for fun. It looked at the nature of education during its time, at how educators did not “wish to understand” the fantasies of children, and it encouraged that they should.

It also goes on to say that “there is not a sharp dividing line between fantasy and reality in the play of little children, in which the children are striving to bring their fantasies into line with reality.”.

In my eyes, this is exactly what Literary Fiction and some stories of genre fiction are doing. Ultimately, it’s what any story, fiction or non-fiction, is trying to do.

Closing

The job of the writer is to make the reader believe.

This is why the best fantasy feels like a world that could actually exist, no matter how different from our world it is. Tolkien’s basis of mythology connected to stories deeply rooted into humanity, and like any good author, he did not break the spell of belief he established.

It’s the same reason the worst fiction that isn’t set on an alternate planet feels like it doesn’t represent our world (or a period of our history) at all. It inflates some issues and ignores others. It paints a city wrong, etc.

Ultimately, writing is all about making the reader believe. To believe demands imagination, from both the writer and reader. If we do not encourage this in classroom settings, then we are letting it dwindle instead of helping it grow. This isn’t only bad for fantasy or genre fiction or. It’s bad for stories as a whole.

The ability to believe in a story translates not only to the stories on pages, but to the ones people tell us about their lives, to the ones we hear on the news, to the ones we see with our own eyes every day.

We should teach fantasy for the same reason we should teach imagination and the same reason we should encourage exploration. It teaches us who we are.