This contributed by a friend:
In
addition to helping us to learn the English language, the stories often
imparted a moral lesson. As we read the stories, we also discovered something
about how society expected us to behave.
One
of the most powerful moral lessons is found in the tale of The Little Red Hen. As young children like animals, this story is
set in a barnyard, and the protagonist was a little red hen. One day the little
red hen finds some wheat seeds. She explains to her three barnyard companions
(a lazy dog, a sleepy cat, and a noisy yellow duck) that with the seeds, they
can make bread. She then asks, "Who will help me plant the seeds?"
They all reply, "Not I." She then proceeds to plant the seeds
herself.
When
the wheat is ready for harvesting, she again asks her friends, "Who will help
me reap the wheat?" Once again, they all say, "Not I". At each
step in the process (milling the wheat, making the dough, and baking the
bread), she repeatedly asks if they would help, and they consistently refuse to
offer any assistance.
Finally,
the bread is baked, and the little red hen wearily turns to her friends and
asks, "Who will help me eat the bread?", to which they all
enthusiastically cry, "We will!"
When
my mother and I first read the story together, she closed the book at this
point and asked me what should happen next in the story.
"The
little red hen should eat the bread herself."
"But
what about her friends? They want some of the bread too."
"They
didn't help her make it! They shouldn't get any of it!"
My
response to the story was similar to that of most children and that of the
little red hen, who responds rhetorically to her question, "I will!"
It
is very interesting that, after twelve or more years of education, most people's response to the story's moral message becomes
much more ambiguous. Their indigent, childhood declaration of "You don't
work, you don't eat!" becomes "Well, there is enough bread for
everyone ... right?"
What
in their education has subverted
their earlier moral sense?
The
answer is simply that they have succumbed to an intellectual con game: their
teachers, books, etc. have told them that the lazy dog, sleepy cat, and
noisy yellow duck are merely victims
of circumstances beyond their control; through no fault of their own, they
cannot provide for themselves, and it is the moral obligation of the little red
hens to feed them.
Some
time after I learned to read and before it was time to teach my own children to
read, such books of folk tales largely disappeared. They were replaced by Dr. Seuss, books of gibberish completely
devoid of any moral content, or the Children's Television Workshop, which
taught my kids to ask Santa for a Tickle
Me Elmo.
Is
it at all surprising that children today possess no moral compass? Most busy parents have largely delegated the
teaching of morality to the schools, and the schools have either avoided the
teaching of any moral message out of fear
of offending someone or more often promulgated a philosophy of
self-sacrifice.
In an adult barnyard story (George Orwell's Animal Farm), one of the first acts of
the revolutionaries is to relieve the parents of the burden of their children's
education. Later in the story the parents are horrified to discover what their
children have become.
At a time of frenzied concern about the epidemic of school shootings, maybe it
is time for parents to ask themselves, "Who will help educate my
child?", they need to answer, "I will!
Grant
Merrill
January
29, 2013
(696
word)
