The Imagination, Great Stories, and Moral Formation

It has been said that imagination is a powerful thing. But what the imagination is, why is it so powerful, and what part does it play in the education of the young? Author and professor Gene Edward Veith defines the imagination as “our amazing ability to conjure up images in our mind.” He proceeds to distinguish how human beings think not only in abstract thoughts or ideas, but also how we think with our imagination. He continues, “...we think in images, in tangible details that partake of our senses.” This means we can almost taste, smell, and feel the images of memories in our minds as if we are reliving them. Dreams of our future flash before our mind’s eye in vivid pictures and details; we can even imagine things that do not exist, like a purple elephant or a plaid tree! Often, these images influence our thoughts, emotions, and actions. They incite our five senses, inspire our inmost desires, and drive us to make important decisions, whether for good or not. Because of their immense power over us, Dr. William Kilpatrick says, in his work titled, Books that Build Character, that “Imagination is one of the keys to virtue.”   

What is virtue? Virtue is moral excellence, having traits or qualities deemed morally good that guide our actions toward what is right for oneself and others. And what is “morally good” is evident in our nature and apparent to our reason– it is objective, ordered, and knowable. To be virtuous is to have a strength of character that leads to flourishing. Of the virtues, Professor and Author Vigen Guroian says, they are like metaphorical gems or diamonds. No matter what they go through, like being thrown to the bottom of a lake for hundreds of years, they will not diminish in quality or beauty, and you certainly wouldn’t mistake them for common stones. They are among the permanent things; they possess an enduring quality. He continues…   

“The virtues are our path to becoming fully human. They define and constitute character. They are precedent even to the choices we make. We do not invent them; rather, they belong to human nature, and human nature is not whole without them. … The virtues grow into habits that define the will … virtuous character is, therefore, a habitual orientation of the self toward the world that disposes a person to act out of a sense of what is right and to do that which is good in every instance. So, think of the virtues as the powers of habit that enable us to avoid evil and to do what is good and to grow into wholeness and holiness.”  

So, the imagination and virtue are two important, distinctly human faculties we must pay attention to and seek to cultivate. But how do we get from mere imagination to virtue? Couldn’t our imaginations dream up bad things? Who’s to say it will focus on the good? This is where the concept of the moral imagination comes into play.   

For as long as people have told stories, they have captured the minds and hearts of their listeners. Stories have a unique ability to reflect reality and human nature, enabling us to see ourselves and the world as they truly are. As the late Catholic author Stratford Caldecott said, “To be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality.” Stories have a knack for speaking directly into us—inspiring, convicting, forming. They, and the images branded into our minds through them, are powerful. This is why literary critic Russell Kirk once wrote, “Fiction is truer than fact.” Although obviously not a literal statement, it is nonetheless true. Because narrative allows us to see ourselves as we are, Kirk argues that “the end of the great books is ethical—to teach us what it means to be genuinely human.” Thus, these stories ring far truer to us than mere facts about ethics ever could.   

For millennia, educators have recognized the profound impact that stories have on the formation of their pupils. They have understood that human beings think in images and are changed by them, and they have thus made it their duty to cultivate their students’ moral imaginations (even if they didn’t know it by that explicit term). Dr. Daniel Coupland of Hillsdale College, champion of classic children’s literature and classical education, explains, “The moral imagination is a storehouse of images that children have in their minds...so that when they are facing a moral choice in their lives, they draw from this wardrobe, they draw these images...in order to make [that] moral choice.” Each time a child reads one of these great books, she stores in her mind images of the choices the characters make and the outcomes of those choices. The cast of characters embodies the types of moral virtues we want our students to possess. Their adventures paint pictures of what it looks like to choose courage in the face of fear, like when Curdie risks his life to save Irene from the goblins invading the tower in The Princess and the Goblin, or what is looks like to sacrifice for the good of others as Harriet Tubman did for countless enslaved souls, or what it is to be humbled when learning from mistakes, like how King Midas’s greed turned his daughter to a statue of gold. These characters and figures and so many others make goodness attractive and wickedness despicable, and thus, they are often the best teachers of virtue and of truth. Author of the Read Aloud Family, Sarah MacKenzie, confirms this when she writes, “If you want a child to know the truth, tell him the truth. If you want a child to love the truth, tell him a story.” We want our students to love the truth; therefore, to great stories we turn.  

The types of books that children read matter because the ideas within have consequences on their moral formation. Much like food to the body, if you hand children (or adults, for that matter) a steady stream of less-than-excellent material, their minds and hearts will respond accordingly. Nowadays, there is a significant push for students to read realistic fiction, young adult fiction, and nonfiction. For some reason, educators and parents alike are convinced that fairy tales and similar stories are to be relegated to the nursery. They may want children to be given the tools to succeed in a fast-paced, tech world. Or they may desire them to read stories they “relate to or see themselves in.” Or perhaps they don’t want them to only desire living in a fantasy world. On the contrary, the stories we read and promote through Core Virtues (classics, fairy tales, myths, folktales, fables, biographies of great-hearted men and women, and poetry) have a way of making reality more true and allowing us to examine ourselves in ways that other books do not. To illustrate, in On Three Ways of Writing for Children, C.S. Lewis says,  

“Both fairy stories and realistic stories engage in wish fulfillment, but it is actually the realistic stories that are more deadly. Fairy stories do awaken desires in children, but most often it is not a desire for the fairy world itself. Most children don’t really want there to be dragons in modern England. Instead, the desire is for they know not what. This desire for something beyond does not empty the real world but actually gives it new depths. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods. The reading makes all the real woods a little enchanted.” 

Isn’t that beautiful? Why wouldn’t we want this for the children in our care? So, If we want our students—those of the next generation who are going to vote in the future and have their own children and have an effect on their communities and our nation—if we want them to fall in love with virtue and hate vice; if we want them to have a trusted script for dealing with life’s great challenges and moral dilemmas; if we want them to have assurance that metaphorical “dragons can be beaten,” then we need look no further than to the enchanting stories within our tradition. The next time you pick up a book such as A Christmas Carol, Black Beauty, or Pinocchio, know that you are holding within your hands some of life’s greatest teachers, and in time, hopefully, you will come to recognize the powerful impact they have had not only on your students’ moral imagination, but also on that of your own.