Those English are crazy!

Mad dogs and Englishmen ..., the song goes. Or to (mis)quote Obelix: "Those English are crazy!" Like in political correctness outweighs common sense crazy.


Consider these (possibly unrelated, certainly not causally related) issues:

Fairytales scare English parents

English teachers hesitant to restrain violent nursery school children for fear of being sued

More than 4 000 children aged 2 to 5 expelled fron English schools

Yes, I know that the Scots and Welsh would have me keelhauled for lumping them with the English, but from far-off South Africa all Poms look the same.

Fairytales are the latest victims of politically correct Pom parents. The Mail Online carried this list of the fairytales that English parents found less appealing.


Snow White is not PC, apparently because it is not nice to talk about dwarfs (I thought the dwarfs in Snow White referred to mythical creatures, i.e. knomes). Cinderella does not make it either, I suppose the USSA (Ugly Stepsisters Association) complained. Little Red Riding Hood? Way too scary for sensitive little ears. For the life of me, however, I can't imagine what the problem would be with the Emperor's New Clothes.

Consider that many of the fairytales we know are already heavily sanitized versions of traditional fairytales as captured by the Grimm brothers. Fairytales are typically good stories with good storylines, heroes, villains, tension, the possibility of exploring different outcomes, different storylines and so forth. I've never read one of the new favourite stories, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but I somehow doubt it has these features of a good story.

In considering the role of fairytales in childhood, a starting point can be Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. Be aware though of its Freudian slant.

As a passing shot, please read the origin of the story about British parents' views on fairytales on the TheBabyWebsite.com. Note that their survey showed that only one in four British moms rejected traditional fairytales. Put otherwise, four out of five had no problem with them. Many parents preferred to keep these fairytales for daytime reading and for when toddlers were slightly older. These seem good commonsense measures, but was not always reflected in press reports on the survey. Moral of the story, don't trust the press to get it right, check the evidence.

My blog title should therefore probably have read Some English (and Australians, Americans and South Africans) are crazy! But what the hell, to an Afrikaner of Irish descent, Those English are crazy!, is much more satisfying.