The books that children read — and the books that their parents read to them and give to them to read — are of tremendous importance. Those books will shape the minds and hearts of children as they grow up, will form the kinds of men and women that little boys and little girls grow into, and will, to a great extent, forge their destinies.

In an age of marketplace competition, burdensome overregulation, and increasingly complicated social norms, many parents stuff their children’s heads with facts and figures. Arithmetic and science, engineering and computer coding, tax law and wealth management, these are all fine things and useful skills to have, certainly, but much that today is denigrated as “frivolous” or “fanciful” is ignored, left forgotten on the wayside, and is thus not carried into adulthood. It ought to be.

The celebrated author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis knew this and even wrote of it. In “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” the fifth installment in the “Chronicles of Narnia” series, Lewis introduces the character of “a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” Eustace is raised in a very modern, practical way. His parents are described as “very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes.” Like far too many parents today, they fill young Eustace’s head with a lot of facts and figures. “He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.”

Eustace is contrasted against his better-known cousins, the Pevensies, namely Edmund and Lucy, who once ruled the magical realm of Narnia as kings and queens. When Eustace is himself transported into Narnia, he is immediately reduced to blubbering, refusing to believe that he has, in fact, entered a magical world through a mythical portal. He whines about being put ashore to lodge a complaint with the British embassy and rejects the spiced rum offered him by the Narnians, instead requesting “Plumptree’s Vitaminized Nerve Food and could it be made with distilled water…”

So the Pevensie children are cheery, and Eustace is annoying, what of it? The real significance comes later on. While visiting an island, Eustace wanders off and discovers a cave full of gold and treasure, crowns, and priceless jewels. He also discovers a dragon but soon realizes that it is just a dragon’s corpse. This is where Lewis hints at the difference that reading material can make for a child. Those raised on tales of St. George and King Arthur, whose fathers read to them “Beowulf” or Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” who devoured adventure stories like fine dining and knew the classic Greek and Roman myths and legends almost by heart, would have wasted not a moment in turning around and fleeing the dragon’s lair. While Eustace knew plenty of facts and figures and was no doubt “highly educated,” he had never encountered a dragon before, even in the pages of a book. All of that knowledge was useless to him, for he had no idea what to do with it. Practical knowledge, while certainly practical, will only take one so far in life.

(For those who have not read “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” or who have not read it in some time, I strongly recommend that you set this article aside for the moment and read the “Chronicles of Narnia” books to your children — or at least read “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” — before returning to this piece.)

With a head full of facts and figures, and a heart starved of noble heroes to emulate, Eustace does not do as the Pevensies no doubt would have, but instead begins considering himself rich, stuffing his pockets with jewels and precious metals and shoving golden armbands up his sleeves. If only his mother and father had read him the right bedtime stories, he might have known that he would soon turn into a dragon himself, a lonely, miserable, heartbroken dragon.

Books of information are safe. They nourish the mind. But they often leave the heart hungry. Books about automobile engines or medicines or muscles or marine biology may be interesting, they may even be the basis for a child’s career later in life, but they do not instruct that child in how to live. The simple fact, as Eustace discovered, is that dragons — and monsters and witches and vampires and goblins and trolls and ogres and all the rest — are real. The world is full of these beasts.

Lewis summed up this ideology, characterized in the differences between Eustace and the Pevensies, by writing, “Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” From shattered families and poverty, pornography and sexual abuse, predatory men and women who collect sexual conquests like scalps, gluttonous financial institutions hoarding gold like dragons, rising godlessness and the host of societal cancers following in its wake — gender ideology and sexual confusion, suicidal empathy, drug and alcohol abuse, and even the threat of violent crime — children are more than likely today than they were in Lewis’s age to meet dragons. As another English author and prolific Christian, G.K. Chesterton, similarly observed, “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

Practical skills and a wealth of knowledge can be useful tools, but they are rendered worthless when a child is never taught how to use them. What good is an understanding of human biology when one has not the courage to stand for the truth that men can never be women and women can never be men? What use is an understanding of the basic principles of engineering when one is merely part of an engineering assembly line churning out the same brutalist heaps of steel and slag, with no regard for beauty or the elevation of the human soul? What good is an understanding of healthy living and diet to extend one’s lifespan if one has no real concept of how to make the most of that lifespan, how to live a life of adventure, nobility, and virtue?

In another book, “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis wrote of the importance of forming hearts as well as minds through literature and education. Addressing the crisis of filling young heads with a bunch of nutritious facts and figures and young hearts with nothing but platitudinous warnings about “objectivity” or “empiricism,” he wrote, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

The children who grow up never hearing tales of St. George battling the dreaded dragon or Theseus slaying the Minotaur, those for whom the battle trumpets at Roncevaux or Agincourt ring hollow, those poor little hearts who have never heard of Beowulf or King Arthur, those starved little souls who have been fed nothing but facts and figures, perhaps with a smattering of banal, mindless Marvel movie garbage for dessert — these children will indeed encounter monsters in their lives, just as ravenous for souls as the dragon slain by St. George, just as malicious as the beast Grendel, and just as cunning and deceptive as the sorceress Morgana le Fay. Yet it is not facts and figures which inspire brave knights to wage war on evil, to uphold the good, and to defend the defenseless.

A child raised on such “frivolous” and “fanciful” tales will just as equally, no doubt, find himself beset by foes, preyed upon by the dragons, monsters, and witches of the world. Perhaps he has some facts and figures tucked away in his brain somewhere, perhaps not. It does not really matter much, for upon encountering a dragon, he will readily recall St. George, the Christian knight who killed the dragon centuries upon centuries ago. When faced with monsters, his heart will burn with the passion of the warrior Beowulf, and the sight of witches will inspire him to follow in the footsteps of the knight Percival, who defeats the Nine Witches of Caer Lloyw.

The “facts and figures” child has no such memories, no tale to hearken to about the weak, humble little thing prevailing over insurmountable evil, no image in his mind of light dispelling darkness, no thought of the little tailor who bested giants or the knight who killed the dragon. The child who was raised on stories of flying horses and talking trees, on the other hand, knows in his bones and in his blood that monsters must be slain and have been slain before, by folk much smaller and much more afraid.

Reading to children and giving them books to read is more than a mere pastime, it is a means of arming little knights and equipping little princesses. The world is becoming increasingly worse: dragons are glutted on the souls of children but their appetites yet unsated, monsters are roaming ever more freely and calling themselves friendly, giants still tower over the land with their tyrannical clubs, and witches and sorceresses feed more ravenously than ever on the innocence of children, on the humiliation and subjugation of young men, and on the self-loathing and insecurity of young women. In the war that lies ahead, “facts and figures” will be of no avail. It is the tales of brave knights and noble heroes that young hearts need. Feed them well.