I would read ‘On Fairy-Stories’.
Generation Z has been particularly deprived of the Classics moreso than any other generation, mainly in the name of science and multiculturalism.
In science, children’s books have always had books about things like dinosaurs and the human body. But the essence and focus has changed. A story about a man driving a car is now replaced by stories about the cars themselves. ‘Fables’ have become more about teaching biology than morals (cf. Aesop with something like ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’; I imagine it’s only become worse). Neither I nor Tolkien had any issue reading ‘technical’ books as a child. There seem to be people who think we need to inject ‘science’ into ‘stories’ to make science palpable to young readers. It serves only to dilute the quality of the science and deprive the child of good story.
I often observed kids who would skip over that Hungry Caterpillar book, popular with teachers but I doubt genuinely popular with anyone else (outside of blind nostalgia). The kids who wanted to learn about caterpillars would choose a more genuine (really honest, and that’s why the kid chooses it) scientific book about caterpillars. The kids who wanted a story about animals would pick Peter Rabbit (fully knowing rabbits don’t act like Peter in Real Life).
Multiculturalism is more obvious, if not worse. At one point there seemed to be a more genuine approach to it, as presenting things like the Chinese and Arabian fairytales or something like the Jungle Book: either classics from other parts of the world or classics about them. Very quickly it was found that this was ‘problematic’ or ‘colonial’ or some other nonsense, and we ended up with a glut of terrible children’s stories written about living as a migrant in the ‘present day’ or some similar situation, and Lord knows kids don’t want to read about some other child being miserable in the same boring institution he himself is currently sitting in, regardless of the skin tones or how many foreign words are present. It might very well be the fastest way to make someone uninterested in reading. Thus we end up with people not only deprived of the Classics, but wholly uninterested in reading them. Not only have they been conditioned to not value them, but they have been conditioned to find the very act of knowing them to be Sisyphian.
Comics, movies, video games, advertising, literally anything that can have ‘lore’ to it, is used to fill the instinctive desire for what Tolkien calls ‘fairy-stories’ and more than just those, but also fables, myths, legends, moral frameworks, religion, just about everything that would matter to someone from the ‘Classical’ era, if not today. Lore adds objective truth and value to something where it is forbidden to add objective truth and value to the world we currently live in, but that’s just one aspect it fulfills. I can go on to argue for many others, but really I think it comes down to the individual as to what it is exactly that makes the lore so appealing. Yet the basis for it is all the same, and is a generation’s fault.
