I was not much of a reader during my own childhood, I am sorry to say. I grew up with television; and, my parents placed few limits upon what I could watch or how long I could watch it. I do not blame my parents.

Television was new then. Its content appeared rather harmless, and its negative effects were not yet known. I did not develop a taste for reading until my senior year in high school, when for English class I read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. My soul soared through that novel, though I could not have explained then the reason for my rapture. Only in retrospect do I understand that I was communing with truth, and therefore with God.

In undertaking the education of my own children, I knew I wanted them to be better readers than I had been. I wanted the soil of their souls prepared for Christ the way Chesterton's had been, at an earlier age. So the logical conclusion for me was to read, read, read.

There may be areas of our children's education that my husband and I are overlooking. Nevertheless, we are delving into all of the good, and true, and beautiful stories between Dr. Seuss and Dostoyevsky that we can lay our hands on. And we are having a great time of it. Here is another characteristic of good stories: They can be loved by adults as well as by children. In fact, they can be loved even more by adults. I suppose our undertaking is not entirely without self-interest. In a way, it is a return to the nursery and a reliving of childhood. As another homeschooling mother once said to me, "I don't know about the children, but I know what I am doing about my own education."

Permit me an important digression here. When we began reading to the children in earnest, we threw out our television set. This was not a high-minded decision, I want you to know. We moved from a house in the suburbs to a flat in the city, where there was simply no room for our second-hand, console-type set. We had intended to replace the television with a sleeker, updated model. But we never did, because in its absence our lives had mysteriously grown fuller. Huddling the family close together to share a story was ever so much more fulfilling than passively watching a screen. And here is another mark of good stories: when you start imbibing them you do not even miss the television.

Our reading program, so to speak, began with Bible stories, fables, myths and fairy tales. Next we were onto Winnie-the-Pooh and the Legends of King Arthur. Then we came to Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and the Children's Homer. The list could go on and on. Bethlehem Books made its debut about this time, republishing wonderful children's literature that had gone out of print, and we began eagerly reading their titles also. I will say more about them later.

My two older children are boys, now 10 and 12 years old. So I selected material that satisfied their thirst for action and adventure. I must admit I was beginning to worry about where all of this would lead when one afternoon I came across an enormous pile of headless LEGO corpses. But my anxieties were put to rest when I saw the other fruits these stories were bearing in their lives. Let me give you some examples.

In the midst of Treasure Island, I stopped reading for a moment so we could consider the character of Long John Silver. We all could easily recognize his brilliance, his attractiveness, and his ability to lead. But it was also clear that he was a man given over to evil. He could lie, steal and kill without a single pang of conscience. Oh, the mystery of the charismatic personality, of that type of man who, even when thoroughly corrupt, can inspire loyalty and, yes, even love, in others.

"He's just like [mentions a prominent national figure]!" one of my boys exclaimed.

Here through the reading of a truly great book, my children were benefiting from the experience, the hard-earned wisdom of someone else.

They will meet Long John Silvers in their life. And when they do, perhaps they will be alert to the danger because they were introduced to the art of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Consider another example. After my husband finished reading Lord of the Rings to our sons, one of them said, "I wish it were all true."

In this expression of longing, my son revealed that his imagination had been awakened to desires planted in his soul by God Himself. He was, in fact, saying yes to the adventure, to the battle, and to the journey toward eternal happiness that will be his own life.

"It is true," I said. "It will all happen to you." He looked puzzled, but at some level he knew I was right. My daughters are now 4 and 6; and though they have absorbed much of what their brothers have, we are going back to the beginning, in a way, with them. My husband and I are not the least bit bored to be reading the same stuff over again, because another characteristic of a good story is that each subsequent reading digs up new treasures not discovered before. Even our older sons draw near when they see my husband or me reading their sisters a book they have been read already. Some books we have already read together, my sons have gone on to read on their own. One of the finer political philosophers of the last century, Eric Voeglin, read the complete body of plays by Shakespeare every year, and I have no doubt his mind owed some of its greatness to this habit.

My last bit of proof that good stories are good for kids (and good for adults, too, for that matter) is taken from a recent experience with my elder daughter. After an umpteenth reading of the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, titled Ashputtle in our volume, my daughter remarked, "It just goes to show you that we have to be who we really are and not try to be someone else." I was stunned. I myself never drew that lesson from the tale. Virtue put to the test, I saw. But I had not seen my daughter's own insight, that the vanity of the stepsisters was actually a form of self-rejection that lead inexorably to self-mutilation.

If we had relied upon Walt Disney's Cinderella, my daughter would never have drawn this conclusion. The part about the stepsisters cutting their feet down to size in order to fit into Cinderella's shoe is not in the movie. Disney based his film on a version that left that out. He was prudent to do so, because the impact of a thing read is not at all the same as that of a thing seen. The stepsisters' bloody feet would have been too gory to watch, I think. But Disney took other liberties as well, and not only with Cinderella, but also with every story he turned into film.

Take Snow White, for example. In the original story, Snow White does indeed die after eating the poisoned apple; she is not merely asleep awaiting true love's kiss. When the dwarves place her in a glass coffin, it is because by some miracle she is not undergoing decay. In short, she is an incorruptible. Thus a devotion to her, as to a saint, begins, and a prince from a distant land who hears about her must see the wonder for himself. When the prince sees Snow White's undefiled body, he asks the dwarves if he may have her. "For I cannot go on living unless I look at Snow White," he says. "I will honor and cherish her forever."

As the prince's servants carry her coffin away, one stumbles over a tree root, knocking the bit of poison out of Snow White's throat. She comes back to life and asks, "Where am I?"

"With me," the prince answers joyfully. "I love you more than anything in the world; come with me to my father's castle and be my wife."

I need not point out to you how very different this ending is from Disney's. The message is very different as well. The original tale is not about the triumph of romantic love, but the triumph of the human person, body and soul, over sin and death. Snow White represents that purity of heart the psalmist begs for when he prays, "Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow." Her happy ending is that of the Church, who will dwell forever in the King's palace as the bride of his Son.

Walt Disney's successors have taken even greater license with their material, twisting stories so much that their original moral content and eternal perspective can barely be seen. In Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid, the protagonist suffers terribly for her pact with the Sea Witch. First she must endure the pangs of unrequited love. Then she must choose between killing her beloved or dying herself. Heroi-cally, she resists this final temptation and gives up her life. She is rewarded for her sacrifice with immortality, but she must serve time in purgatory before she can enjoy the perfect happiness of the blessed. In the Disney version of the tale, on the other hand, the Little Mermaid gets her man and the worldly happiness for which she had sold herself. We are glad for her, of course, because we have sympathized with her. And our sense of both justice and mercy has been dulled in the process.

Film versions of stories are necessarily more superficial than the originals. All of the film heroines have the kind of beauty coveted by girls today. Their physical beauty is so distracting that their moral character is not their most obvious feature. Of course, the heroines are beautiful in the old stories, too. But so are many of the bad women as well. What sets the heroines, and the heroes for that matter, apart is their goodness, which becomes even more apparent as they are tried with hardships. What then is the message? Physical beauty ought to correspond to virtue, and where it does not something is askew. Our loss of wholeness can result from illness, age, abnormality, or our standing behind the door when the beauty genes were passed out in the family. All of these consequences of the Fall can be remedied in the next life, however, when our bodies will be resurrected. But woe to the man or woman whose ugliness is due to his own wickedness and whose opportunities for repentance have been rejected.

Do we not see in Cinderella, Snow White and The Little Mermaid parables of our own destiny? The heroines represent those who persevere in love through trials and temptations, who allow suffering, loss, and even the consequences of their own sins to sanctify them.

One feature of fairy tales that has been problematic for some Christian parents is their use of magic. The thinker who has helped me most in understanding the role of magic in these stories is the German Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper. In his essay "The Philosophic Act," Pieper described the difference between true religion and false religion. True religion, he wrote, is the search for truth in order to conform oneself to it. False religion, on the other hand, is the attempt to bend reality to fit the will. The old English word for witchcraft, wicca, literally means "to bend".

The evil characters we find in fairy tales employ the black arts in order to satisfy their own cravings for wealth, power or love. They try to impose their will upon nature and upon other human beings in order to achieve their objectives. But there is another kind of magic in these stories, the "good" magic. If we look carefully, we see that this good magic is not wicca at all. Instead it is a metaphor for the miraculous interventions of God.

In the novel The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the word "magic" means that mys-terious combination of nature and grace that can heal both body and soul. Leave it to Warner Brothers to misrepresent this idea in their film version of the book. The nature part they seemed to understand, and they portrayed it lavishly, but the grace part of the equation seems to have escaped them, for they added a creepy scene with the children swinging torches and reciting incantations in order to bring about the return of a runaway father. Though the children's motives are pure, the episode is disturbing because trying to mani-pulate another person through magic is a violation of his dignity. In the Warner Brothers film version of Burnett's novel A Little Princess, the distraught heroine draws a chalk circle around herself, which happens to be the first step in the practice of black magic. This act is certainly not in Burnett's book. So what is the message Warner Brothers is trying to convey by adding it? When all else fails turn to sorcery?

In wise stories, good characters are cautioned against the temptation of using magic in order to resolve their difficulties. And they do not practice magic without suffering grave consequences. A per-fect example of this wisdom is found in Lord of the Rings. There Bilbo's quest is to bear a magic ring in order to destroy it, for the ring has the power to enslave all creation. But the ring's potential is a source of temptation even for the hero Bilbo. He can not use the ring even for good without being corrupted by it.

The hero in a good story might be given a nearly impossible task, and understandably he might seek or even pray for help. But true help comes in un-looked for and surprising ways, like the sudden appearances of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia, or of the wizard Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, or of the fairy godmother in Cinderella. When the good magic, so to speak, is administered by these symbols of divine assistance, it strengthens the protagonist to overcome fear with courage, to obey the commands of a law higher than himself, and to combat evil with good, even at the risk of losing his life. It does not give him license to perform acts contrary to the laws of God and the virtue of true religion.

The topic of magic is considered in great detail in Michael O'Brien's A Landscape with Dragons. The main purpose of the book is to warn parents against the confusing messages about magic and the ambi-guous signals about good and evil that can be found in many of the books and films created for children today. I highly recommend it, if only for the excellent reading list in the back of the book, which brings me to my final point.

Where can parents go for the good, and true and beautiful stories that will form their children's ima-gination in a manner consistent with the revelation of Christ? A Landscape with Dragons and Bethlehem Books I have already mentioned. By poking around at used books stores and garage sales parents can find all kinds of treasures. And of course, there is the public library.