What do fairytales teach? I have a soft spot for children and beautiful illustrations, so I often imagine that fairytales teach important lessons. My father, however, thinks all fairy tales should end the same way. “Remember kids, don’t go into the woods.” A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer poses questions about education. It answers most of them with claims about the value of fairy tales in teaching critical thinking skills, and wraps these theses in a sci-fi novel.
A different book, The Making of Victorian Values, claims that its own title is an oxymoron. Ben Wilson writes that the Victorians did not have values but virtues. I have never read a work of fiction that so convincingly lays out the difference between virtues and values, or explicates pedagogy so thoroughly. Among a thousand coming of age novels, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer uniquesly poses specific hypotheses about what education is and how it takes effect in context. As a teacher, I find myself rereading it almost every year. In light of ACX’s discussions around education, meritocracy, and talent, I wanted to share this novel as a thinking tool with you all.
A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer pretends to be a story about power beyond our current world, when cryptocurrency renders government optional and nanotechnology does the same for the rest of human needs. The novel seems to be about nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, libertarianism, and epic civilizational conflict. But this novel is not the true novel. A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is actually a story about early childhood education and its consequences. Because I love this story and its intellectual thesis, I am not going to spoil the novel about nanotech. I’d rather write about education and leave the explosions for the reader to discover.
The epic civilizational conflict is a great conceit other writers should steal, as it pits cultures against each other without regard for normal spearations of time and place. Victorian Britain vs. Imperial China is a relatively classic face off, but this is made more interesting by the treatment of contemporary Anglophone working class, globally mobile technocrats, and amalgamation of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau, all inhabiting Shanghai as individual entities struggling for cultural dominance.
The cultural cold war of virtue systems is the background of the education of the young ladies in question. We begin learning the norms of these different cultures from page one as a confucian judge from New York considers the implications of filial piety for his trial of the main character's deadbeat dad. Cycling between POV characters, we learn the other concerns in play and the ways in which airborne nanotechnology and secret supercomputers make aspects of this culture war frighteningly physical.
We meet Nell, the primary protagonist, as a six-year-old girl without a hopeful future. She lives in Shanghai as a Thete,or person with no country. Thetes therefore default to an individualistic culture obsessed with television, videogames, and body modification, a thinly veiled analogy for contemporary anglophone culture, perhaps more specifically of poor population centers throughout the postmodern west. Adolphus Huxley would be proud of the depiction. This value system has a bad effect on Nell through depriving her of attention, touch, and parental figures. However, her brother wants more for her and tries to teach her the things he’s figured out for himself as a young gangster. These are hard but practical lessons which fold smoothly into capturing the Primer, a near magical book of fairy tales, and giving it to Nell as a gift.
The culture war frames the Individual freedom as a cultural value in itself, and a self-destructive one, because it cannot perpetuate anything in particular. This poses a problem for those in charge in Capitalist China and Anglophone Working Class cultures, as they cannot effectively pass on any particular value. This shapes the concerns of the Victorians and the Imperial Chinese and their need to educate effectively. Unfortunately for the Victorians, their wealth and indoctrination program have proved almost too effective, and resulted in a population benefiting from a value system they cannot truly understand without experience outside it, and leaders who think too rigidly to innovate effectively.
This problem has been interrogated on this blog before in a tidy comparison between Chinese and Californian classrooms. Californian culture values entrepreneurs and innovators and educates its children to play a lot and think for themselves, if not always critically. Chinese classrooms are contrasted as valuing discipline, beginning with teaching how to sit very still.
It is not obvious how effective these systems are at producing their desired outcome in isolation, but it is clear they are effective within the bounds of the classroom almost immediately and are likely to be one factor among many explaining differences in individualism, conformity, critical thinking, innovation, and business achievement. These pedagogical differences are partially responsible for American young adults wishing they had the discipline to carry out ideas and Chinese young adults wishing they could attend University in the United States. Clearly both discipline and creative problem solving are necessary to the states educating these children. All of these are pedagogical concerns for the educational systems in question, and those of the novel.
The Victorians take a look at the discipline-innovation slider and solve the paradox with Artificial Intelligence, programming a super powerful educational AI inside of a tablet called the Primer. As every rationalist uncle hopes, any magical book of fairytales given as a sufficiently important gift might teach a love of learning to a child. The Primer’s job is to teach subversiveness.
Subversiveness is an elusive quality. The Primer is programmed to teach it through fairy tales and adventure videogames. Many of these stories are written as interludes to allow the reader to get a sense of the Primer’s developing literary style and the increasing complexity of challenges Nell faces. These begin with very affirming fairy tales about escaping from dark towers and the challenges of the latin alphabet. However, the stories quickly become about the permanency of death and the consequences of trusting strangers. By the middle of the story, she is cracking codes and learning about Turing machines. In the world of A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, these video games and fairy tales are theoretically effective enough to raise a child into a resourceful independent thinker.
How true is this? In our world, educational video games take a very different shape. Most games built around education approach the story as a web connecting individual puzzles and the skills needed to solve them. However the approach of the Primer is more like if Red Dead Redemption intended to teach effective foraging by building in links to Wikipedia. This approach to education is not common. It is perhaps most similar to Never Alone, a videogame partially designed to teach Iñupiat culture through exposure to themes of the worldview. The best videogames can produce powerful feelings of community and more of a sense of guilt or responsibility than other art forms. But very few children tell me that videogames gave them a new skill beyond fine motor coordination or basic math. Much more, children absorb characters, themes, and scraps of music from video games.
However, I often hear that written stories taught lasting lessons. Again, usually this is not a hard skill. Children talk about virtues like hard work, or dreams like heroism. Again, the example of fairy tales seems like a concentrated form of this. A distillation of legends down to their parts, preserving one value at a time. Perhaps a novel’s longer form and focus on character development lends itself to the child analogizing their own character development. Why this never happens in classrooms with a supposedly analogous purpose is beyond me.
Although I could easily be convinced otherwise, it doesn’t seem to me like fairy tales are the missing ingredient of a subversive education. In fact, a normal education in both of the western countries I have taught it involves a lot of almost subversive fairy tales already. The myth of the tech wizard, or the self made man count, I think, as they are usually trickster stories. So too do myths about pioneers, explorers and civil rights leaders, many of whom only receive accolades for their heroism after the conclusion of the action in the tale. Stories like these transmit cultural values of genius, tolerance, and perseverance, which are strong enough to persist through the transition to adulthood in over half my students. Still other stories such as the mythological causes of the 2008 recession bring a little of the Brothers Grimm vibe to these worldviews. Those stories are filled with dark enemies and terrible consequences for good people. During the pandemic,mMany of my students have learned good people die for bad reasons much younger than I remember younger students grappling with this. Still, I wouldn't call the conclusions they reach subversive. I teach many students who want to go on to be university scientists, or mid level accountants. Almost all have fantasies of minor heroism like protesting institutional evil. Almost none have fantasies that represent a deep departure from established roles.
A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer implies that these values and stories are not enough without the practical lessons of a hard and unforgiving life. Nell is a heroine because she can compare these value systems and make a choice for herself, as well as operate within their constraints. As a teenager Nell sees no need to rebel because she already sees herself as above and beyond the constraints of school. This lesson makes intuitive sense to me. I worry, perhaps incorrectly, that insufficient hardship has dulled the basic perceptive instincts of children. However, I observe this to be less true in areas where the children are always outdoors. I love watching children who continue to see everything past the age of eight. It is rare, but children who engage this way are always my favourite, and can reliably think laterally. Perhaps the novel is wrong that this is primarily caused by hardship. Certainly school is often an artificial hardship in and of itself. Perhaps this is caused by a dearth of artificial stimuli more generally, such as environments cultivated to be safe. This would explain why urban poor and rural children may both have wandering, alert eyes.
As the book nears its conclusion, the culture war heats up and it becomes clear that Nell holds more cards than other people when it comes to understanding the core of the conflict. I hope this is based in reality too, as it affirms my beliefs in cross-cultural experiences facilitating problem solving. However, it may be that I love this novel because it is a fairy tale that affirms my values.
A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer hypotheses that one can teach the ability to learn to a child if one starts early. It assumes these differences are cultural rather than genetic. As an educator, I desperately want this to be true, because it gives my job meaning beyond sorting the wheat from the chaff. However, I find marginal analysis a helpful tool in focusing me away from the absolute truth of these propositions and towards actionable goals. Even if only a few children in a population could be made more creative, disciplined, or observant, it would be worth a lot to adopt that pedagogy. A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer suggests that this can be accomplished through fairy tales, simulated practical training, and serious consequences. Though I doubt the role of video games and self-generating fairy tales as transmitters of virtue and skill, the future of AI tutoring may make the Primer a reality sooner than I imagine. I would love to see discussion in the comments about the degree to which education has an impact on critical thinking on the margin. I would love to hear rationalist priors on the role of fairy tales, puzzles, and hardship in cultivating people with discipline, character, and subversiveness.