1. Is truth Important?

Since I was little I lived in a bubble created by my parents, a fantasy world. I guess there is still a part of that world that lives in me today – what I keep questioning is: is that necessarily a bad thing? In TOK we constantly learn the importance of knowing the truth, of questioning things and I believe that for High School students it’s extremely important. However, I was talking to my niece who is in 5th grade and her view on the world seems much more realistic and in a way even more cynical than me at that age, maybe because of the media, friends and possibly even school. It seems as if kids are no longer allowed to enjoy their childhood. In my conversation with my niece she told me her and her friends believe that the idea of fairy tales is as she says “dumb” and when I ask kids in 3rd and 4th grade they seem to agree with my niece. I always believed that being a kid means dreaming that everything is possible. For me that meant reading fairy tales, fairy tales with a Princess or a Prince Charming, believing that good always triumphs over evil and in other things, that although are not always the truth, we're an idealistic way of looking at the world. If kids are not going to be idealistic, then who is? I believe that Fairy Tales are a way to maintain children’s innocence and allow them to live in this “fantasy world”. Now looking at this from a different perspective, as we have learned in TOK, we/I have realized that there are groups of people that think that Fairy Tales have a negative impact on children. An example is the princess within these stories being a negative stereotype for beauty or being morally misguided. A Newsweek article talks about how fairy tales are just a way to convince girls that they should spend as much money as they possibly can in their wedding. “Princess” is Disney-speak—a sort of noun-adjective you’d hear in a sentence such as”Your hair is, like, so princess today!”—for its plan to market Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Belle and the girls to world domination.” To even going as far as to say that the main goal of fairy tales is to convince girls that “the quest for financial security, class mobility and, in our divorce-ridden, war-pocked world, a few moments of life lived happily ever after.”

But, isn't it true that Fairy Tales have always been a way to manipulates kids? Aren't Fairy Tales moral lesson? Aren't these moral lessons being ignored? The idea that class distinction should never matter as in Cinderella or Aladdin, or that appearances should not be an important consideration as in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and most importantly believing in true love. Fairy Tales still inspire and support the idea of maintaining a kid’s childhoods which has become uncommon in the world nowadays. Looking at the number of articles criticizing Fairy Tales, it seems like people are asking the wrong questions, seeing that the number of movies that have violence and sexual references has increase drastically in the past few years. Isn’t this what causes kids to lose their innocence and childhood? Is it beneficial for our society to have children that are so realistic and cynical?