The Importance of Stories for Children

“Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.  Hence there is no way to give us understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its dramatic resources.  Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things.  Vico was right and so was Joyce.  And so too is that moral tradition from heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.”  Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue