Classical Writing

To finish my thoughts on story.

Story is what life is made of, in hindsight. We all have stories to tell of our lives. There isn’t a person who doesn’t have a life story with unique details, details that shape who he or she is.

Stories is also the vehicle by which we transmit values. Folk tales, myths, and legends, what we in Classical Writing call traditional tales, uphold the values that a culture wants to preserve and debase values that the culture does not want to keep, or perhaps that it actively wants to dispel with.

Almost all cultures tell stories, and in particular every culture tells stories to its children. In America that would be George Washington and the fabled cherry tree that he supposedly chopped down with his axe. It upholds the value of telling the truth and it honors George Washington for that quality. Other tales, like the parables Jesus told, speak of how God loves us, or of us loving our neighbors. The tales themselves do not wag fingers at us and tell us to go do likewise. That is the beauty of stories, they tell, we listen, and the values are absorbed with out the didactic wagging finger.

Do not get me wrong, there is a time to wag a finger at a child and let him know that what he did was wrong, and he had better not do it again (including consequences). Such incidents are part of parenting and part of managing a class room.

But day to day instructions in values should not (in my opinion) be finger wagging or even didactic (this constant, you should do this, you should not do that, urging). Rather, values should be shown via stories, via our own examples of how we live and how we do things.

Stories are wonderful vehicles of truth. In my own life, I remember books such as the Litte House on the Prairie series as well as Enid Blyton’s Five (perhaps not quality literature in the highest sense, but books I loved as a kid, and books with a fairly strong value system), and I think they shaped much of my early value system of being honest, working hard, belief in God, and so forth. That was particularly true for me since I grew up in an atheist household, where belief did not figure at all.

Folk tales, myths, and legends also include the warmth of human interactions (some of them do). D’Aulaire’s Book of Trolls, for example, has wonderful tales about the stupid ways that trolls act and think. It is a great way to laugh because you are not laughing at or belittling a real flesh and blood human being who has feelings, but fantasy creatures who cannot get offended, and who figure only as creatures that you read about. When you ponder their lack of qualities you may learn to deal with flesh and blood humans in your own life who sometimes resemble those trolls.

The truth found in myths is often profound, complex, and difficult to discern. That is why myth appeals to adults and children alike. Myths, rather than moralizing stories, tell of complex circumstances, dilemmas, and out and out impossible scenaria that people have to go through to survive, or to prove themselves, or to save a loved one. These scenaria allow you and your students to discuss options, choices, how to respond, not with the aim of always giving one clear answer to your students, but with the aim of helping students see that our world can be complex and that people’s circumstances can be impossible.

Not all stories are excellent stories, however. When I was in my early stages of homeschooling I used to ‘like’ McGuffey’s Readers because they were a series of readers that brought the student from early reading all the way through to difficult level material in high school. I still like aspects of the reader structure in McGuffey, but as I have pondered the stories, I find them too moralizing. Often, they do not leave the student free to discuss and come to his own conclusions. Rather they hammer home the point at the end with a bit of finger wagging.

One example I remember was from an old McGuffey book from the 1800s (modern reprints may not have kept this story). The story was about a boy of about 9 or so, who was left by his father on a houseboat. His father had to go to town to get something, and he implored the boy to please stay on the boat and under no circumstances was he to leave the boat. Well, circumstances were such that the boat caught on fire, and because the boy was obedient, he stayed on the boat and perished on the boat. The moral at the end of the story was to admire the boy’s obedience–that he was obedient to the point of perishing in the fire rather than disobey his father.

Now, we would not consider that admirable today, as much as we would consider it tragic that he took a command to that extent. Obviously, we do not want our children to perish in obedience to us. So for stories of that nature, McGuffey seems to be slightly outside a modern value system, or at least a bit more extreme that a modern value system would allow for, but more to my point, many McGuffey stories end with “… and therefore children, you should ________”. Where I would maintain that a story should not end with moralizing, but with the child’s own interest causing him to reflect on the story as he responds to the issues in the story with his own moral compass.

Stories should be pleasurable and they hopefully will engage students in their narratives for their own sakes. If that function of story holds, students will form excellent value systems from excellent stories, not because they were preached to, but because the stories gave the students pause to reflect. A good guided discussion by a teacher will aid the comprehension of the story. Stories work so well for this because students are receptive and willing to listen. They are not caught with their hands in the cookiejar and therefore defensive and uptight. Story time is relaxed and fun, and in that mental state, students are more likely to reflect honestly and carefully on the value choices presented to them.

Story is a concept that mankind seems to have employed from the beginnings of his communications. Story tells of what is, what was, what might be, and sometimes it tells of what never was, but perhaps what could have been, or what ought to have been.

Every culture has story at its core. We tell of our founding fathers — not just Americans who revel in the honesty of a George Washington who cannot tell a lie or a young Benjamin Franklin who walks down the streets of Philadelphia shamelessly munching on a loaf of bread, but all cultures have stories of their forebearers of how noble they were, of what wonderful things they did, and of the debt we, their descendants, owe to them for the wonderful lives we have today because of the sacrifices they boldly made on our behalf.

It is appropriate to speak of story, particularly today, the day after Veterans’ Day, where we, in America, have said our thanks to those who served in our military to preserve our freedoms.

Story, as I mentioned above, can be completely realistic, or wildly fantastic and imaginary. Story communicates truth, but not always realism.

Let me give an example. Yesterday my younger son at the Naval Academy emailed me with an article he had to summarize for his English class. It was an article that basically ‘debunked’ the story of Oedipus Rex, saying that the way Sophocles reported the story the time line did not work.

Just to review the myth, Oedipus was fated to slay his father and marry his mother. In order to avoid that, his biological parents decided to leave him exposed to die on a mountain side, but a shepherd found him, and gave him to another couple. As Oedipus hears of his fate, he decides to leave the people he thinks to be his parents. He ends up where his biological parents live, and does everything the prophecy says he will do.

Now, the author of the article basically says that the timeline does not work, so the realism of the work is called into question. Because the realism of the work is called into question, this author more or less dismisses the work.

But that treatment of the work is a modern treatment, a treatment that says, let’s look at the facts like a scientist or a court of law would look at the facts. Why did the messenger report the murder so late? Or was the throne at Thebes empty when Laius had just left? Or the sphinx according to the time line had only been there two days, but if the sphinx had plagued the kingdom enough for people to offer the kingdom to the person who could solve the riddle, it must have been a plague for a long time, … etc.

Those are fine questions for courtroom battles or modern mysteries or scientific investigations, but those were not the questions the ancients would have asked, nor are those questions the point of Story, per se.

Take Jesus, for example, and his telling of parables. In the story of the good Samaritan, are we to go to the roads between Jerusalem and Jericho and investigate whether the road was wide enough that if a wounded man lay on one side of the road, it would be possible for a man to avoid him and go on the other side of the road. Are we to make sure that two denarii is enough pay for the inkeeper to keep the wounded man for several days? No, the point of the story is that one man was a real neighbor to a stranger he found on the road. The man was in need and the Samaritan found him, cared for him, and even provided for him for several days. In contrast, other people who could have helped chose to look the other way. Perhaps they were busy, perhaps they had helped in the past and been swindled, perhaps they were afraid to get involved. We do not know, but what we do know is that this Samaritan, according to the story, helped.

If this parable was told today by Jesus, perhaps instead of a Samaritan, he would have told us Christians that it was a devout Muslim man — just to make the point that our humanity does not stem from our culture or our specific convictions, but from the goodness and compassion that overflows from our hearts, I don’t know. The point to the Jews was that a Samaritan, a person the Jews despised because of his culture, was the person who had the compassion to help a man who would otherwise have been left at the side of the road to die.

Are we to ask Jesus if there really WAS a Samaritan, or if there really WAS a man who got mugged and left for dead? No, we don’t need to, because these things happen in human society all the time. People get hurt, some don’t care, others help.

Back to Oedipus Rex: This complex story does have some issues in its time line (the writer had a point there), but those are issues that are not essential to the story. The story is about how people try to avoid their fate and end up fulfilling it. It is about how we human beings are so blind to who we really are, while we see the flaws of others so clearly. It is about the pain of discovering who we really are, and about one man’s attempts to cope with the reality of what he is, versus what he thought he was. It is a story wrought with honesty and pain. And that happens to us all, if we have the courage to pursue the truth.

Now onto Story as I wrap up this part of Story. We tell stories to our students, or we read stories that others have told or written to them to convey truth about life, truth about our culture, truth about what it means to be a human being. Story does not preach… OK, I take that back some stories do. — Let me put it this way, a good story does not need to wag fingers or preach. It SHOWS (just like a good essay should do). Nobody likes to be preached at, not adults, not children. The genius of persons like Jesus telling parables, is that the moral of the story comes out to the listener without him feeling attacked or preached at. He hears, his mind makes the connections on its own, and because he is making his own connections he is more receptive to the message of the story, than if he had been preached at.

Story doesn’t just tell little morals about how we ought to be and what we need to not do, if that was all it did (even if it did it indirectly, story would indirectly preach). Story leaves us to marvel at the world, it opens up to us the wonder of what is out there, the creatures, the vastness, the beauty, the wonderful acts that we can engage in, as well as the horrible deeds mankind has committed over time. Story has the power to engulf us and let us experience those acts. It then also has the power to leave us alone to ponder the acts and forge our own actions in our own lives in reponse to what story gently instructed us about.

More about Story and its power in education in the next blog.