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CHILDREN & SOCIETY (1995) 9:4. PP.80-93 Careful The Tale You Tell Fairy tales, drama and moral education Joe Winston, Institute of Education, University of Warwick ‘Careful the tale you tell That is the spell Children will listen.’ (Sondheim and Lapine, 1989) SUMMARY In this article, I examine theories which argue both for and against the educational potential of fairy tales, with special attention to the field of moral learning. I conclude that, in the contemporary world, stories have aparticular importance for such learning but that the hidden moral values conveyed by many traditional tales may well be disquieting for a teacher. I propose that educational drama offers an appropriate pedagogy for exploring such values with children and describe in some detail a case study, in which I used a version of a traditional Hindu tale for these purposes. I offer a brief analysis on how the strategies employed by drama teachers can be harnessed for moral educational purposes and suggest that drama can offer children much needed opportunities to actively and creatively engage with stories and their values in a communal framework. In one of Saki’s short stories, The Story Teller, a beleagured aunt on a train journey attempts to quieten her unruly charges by telling them a story in which a virtuous girl is saved from an enraged bull by neigh- bours, who run to her aid because they admire her goodness so much. The tale is not a success; the children listen to it reluctantly and criticise it when the aunt has finished. A man sharing the compartment then relates the tale of a girl called Bertha who was ‘horribly good’, so good that she was awarded medals for her goodness and invited to walk in the king’s garden as a special reward. While there, however, she encountered a vicious wolf. Running to the safety of some nearby bushes she hid and almost escaped; but her trembling caused her medals to clink one against the other, betraying her presence to the wolf who promptly ate her. The 80

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CHILDREN & SOCIETY (1995) 9:4. PP.80-93

Careful The Tale You Tell Fairy tales, drama and moral

education

Joe Winston, Institute of Education, University of Warwick

‘Careful the tale you tell That is the spell

Children will listen.’ (Sondheim and Lapine, 1989)

SUMMARY In this article, I examine theories which argue both for and against the educational potential of fairy tales, with special attention to the field of moral learning. I conclude that, in the contemporary world, stories have aparticular importance for such learning but that the hidden moral

values conveyed by many traditional tales may well be disquieting for a teacher. I propose that educational drama offers an appropriate pedagogy for exploring such values with children and describe in some detail a case

study, in which I used a version of a traditional Hindu tale for these purposes. I offer a brief analysis on how the strategies employed by drama teachers can be harnessed for moral educational purposes and suggest that

drama can offer children much needed opportunities to actively and creatively engage with stories and their values in a communal framework.

In one of Saki’s short stories, The Story Teller, a beleagured aunt on a train journey attempts to quieten her unruly charges by telling them a story in which a virtuous girl is saved from an enraged bull by neigh- bours, who run to her aid because they admire her goodness so much. The tale is not a success; the children listen to it reluctantly and criticise it when the aunt has finished. A man sharing the compartment then relates the tale of a girl called Bertha who was ‘horribly good’, so good that she was awarded medals for her goodness and invited to walk in the king’s garden as a special reward. While there, however, she encountered a vicious wolf. Running to the safety of some nearby bushes she hid and almost escaped; but her trembling caused her medals to clink one against the other, betraying her presence to the wolf who promptly ate her. The

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aunt is outraged, condemning the story as ‘improper’; the children, on the other hand, love it. ‘That’s the most beautiful story I have ever heard!’ proclaims the eldest daughter, wistfully.

The story is witty, cynical and very entertaining. Whereas the reward of virtue in the aunt’s tale is salvation, in the storyteller’s tale, it is a horrible death. Written at the turn of the century, i t at once satirises and parodies a tendency within much Victorian children’s literature, particu- larly in its fairy stories for facile moralising, pious representation of the conventional virtues and an almost sadistic use of violence (see Tatar, 1992). As a n ex-headteacher from a PrimaryMiddle School background I can recall using the story with children, knowing full well that, like the unfortunate aunt, I too, was guilty of misusing stories for morally didactic purposes. This, of course, was at Assembly time when, harassed and short of ideas I could always find some suitably bland tale with a moral appendage in volumes entitled Stories for the Middle School Assembly, Volume 3 or even Stories to Inspire’. Like the children in The Story Teller my pupils would often react with inattention and boredom, rejecting the overt moralising tone and the facile story lines. Indeed, their experience of such overtly didactic, oppressive tales ensured that the Saki story, with its liberating tonic of ridicule and laughter, was always a success; and it is for much the same reasons that the tales of Roald Dahl are so loved by young children today.

However, before we deny the educational potential of the fairy story, particularly in the moral field, we should take account of the thinking of some eminent philosophers and psychologists. Walter Benjamin, for example, saw it as: ‘the first tutor of children as it was once the first tutor of mankind’ (Benjamin, 1992, p101) and the moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre is in no doubt about its importance:

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them anxious stutterers in their actions and in their words. (MacIntyre, 1981, p216)

MacIntyre’s moral perspective is Aristotelian and, as such, he sees the stock of a society’s stories a s its major resource for providing exemplary answers to what was, for Aristotle, the prime moral question: ‘What sort of person am I to become?’.

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Bruno Bettelheim, coming from a very different direction, also sees the moral value of fairy tales in terms of their potential to provide children with answers to what he calls ‘the eternal questions’.

What is the world really like? How am I to live my life in it? How can I truly be myself? (Bettelheim, 1976, p45)

He brings an orthodox Freudian perspective to bear on the tales, believing that they are an essential part of children’s moral education due to the beneficial effects they have on their pre-concious and subcon- cious understandings. He argues that it is through the symbolism of the tales that these understandings are conveyed; the ogres and witches rep- resent the forces of evil, the heroes and princesses the forces of good. Children project themselves into the good characters and identify sym- bolically with the triumph of good over evil. The examples of violence in the tales should also be seen as symbolic. He cites the examples of a young boy who enjoyed the story Jack the Giant Killer because, in his subconcious, he saw the giants as symbolising grown-ups. Rather than this leading to a desire to commit violence, it purged him of his frustra- tions and the rages that the adults, as agents of social control, caused within him. The story thus had a cathartic and empowering effect on the child; it purged him of anti-social feelings and presented a role model he could subconciously admire.

Although MacIntyre and Bettelheim have very different perspectives on the moral value of fairy tales, both shun a simplistic view of them as vehicles for straightforward didactic lessons. Rather do they advocate them as a vital imaginative resource to help children learn about the nature of the moral life as it is lived. ‘Literature’, writes Goldberg, ‘does its moral thinking in the particulars it imagines’ (1993, pxv). It is through their imaginative engagement with the symbolisms and the nar- rative art of the tales that children become involved, both emotionally and cognitively, with the moral issues they raise within the context of the actions of particular individuals.

Such advocacy of the tales is not without its critics, however, and Bettelheim’s ideas, in particular, have been strongly challenged for their naive propagation of orthodox Freudianism and for their unwitting sexism and ethnocentrism. Two of his strongest critics are Jack Zipes and Maria Tatar. Tatar (1992) objects to the values embodied in literary fairy tales, to the negative female images they often present and to their cruel images of violence, perpetrated in particular on children and on women. Like Jack Zipes (1979, 1983, 1986) she brings a post-struc- turalist perspective to bear, critically deconstructing their values and

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analysing their moral assumptions. Both theorists believe that new ver- sions are needed to challenge and undermine the outmoded social and moral values that typify the traditional tales. Zipes, in fact, has edited and prefaced a volume of alternative fairy stories, written from a femi- nist perspective (Zipes, 1986). Both Tatar and Zipes take a moral stand- point, recognising the power of the stories to enchant and encapture children through their symbolisms and strong narrative structures. They understand their appeal and wish to subvert what they see as the inap- propriate moral values they propogate by re-working the genre, not abandoning it. They believe that different moral values, more suited to the needs of today’s children should shape these new or reworked fairy tales.

Contemporary society - whether we choose to define it as postmodern or not - has witnessed a collapse of the dominant structures of morality, seen by the cultural theorist Fred Inglis as: ‘the inevitable product of a global culture made up of dozens of maps of local knowledge’ (1993, p212).

In these circumstances, [he postulates] a moral education composed of rela- tively secure precepts and maxims will not serve .... The guide [the] indi- vidual needs is the canon of the world’s stories .... The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are not just a help to moral education; they com- prise the only education which can gain purchase on the modern world. (ibid., p213 and p214)

For teachers, therefore, the fairy stories of the world are a major resource for the moral education of the children in their charge. But the caveats raised by post-structuralists and their concerns about the peda- gogy of fear contained in the violence of fairy tale imagery should not be ignored. What is needed is a way to use the stories with children which allows for an engagement with their symbolisms and narrative drive. Such a way, I propose, can be found through educational drama.

Recently I worked with a class of Year 3 and Year 4 children from an inner city primary school situated in an area of substantial social depri- vation, where crime rates are high amongst the young. Regarding, as Inglis suggests we should, the stories of the world as my resource, I chose a little known Indian fairy story to work with, to form a short unit of moral education through story and drama. Below, I present it as a case study, a simple example of how such an approach can work. It is organ- ised as follows:

0 a summary and deconstructive analysis of the story;

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0 a narrative summary of the lesson; a rationale for the educational relevance of the drama; an analysis of the sense the children made of the story’s moral values; a brief explanation of some specific ways in which drama pedagogy can be seen to have acted as a pedagogy for moral education.

Case study

The story: The Brahmin, the Thief and the Ogre

This story tells of a Brahmin who, though poor, always remained good, honest and humble and who regularly prayed to the Gods. Because of this, Lord Vishu decided to reward him and a kindly farmer made him the gift of two calves which he proceeded to take great care of. However, a thief saw the calves and decided to steal them. That night, on his journey to the Brahmin’s cottage, he was accosted by an ogre who, on learning of the thief s purpose, decided to accompany him in order to eat the Brahmin. Once in the cottage, however, they began to argue over whether the thief should steal the calves first or the ogre eat the Brahmin first. Their argument awoke the Brahmin who prayed to the Gods and they promptly responded by getting rid of the ogre; whereupon the Brahmin reached for his stick and put the thief to flight by clubbing him over the head.

I found this English language version of the tale in a volume More stories from the Panchatantra (see Thomas, in References)’. Although the original, some two thousand years old, was a fable, this retelling, by one Vernon Thomas, reads like a nineteenth century fairy tale, the kind satirised by Saki in The Story Teller. The original fable was intended for an audience of adults and children and concluded with the moral: ‘Even enemies may be useful when they fall out with each other.’3 With the chil- dren’s version, however, many didactic moral values have been intro- jected. The Brahmin’s good fortune is portrayed as a reward for his virtue, described as follows:

Once upon a time, there lived a Brahmin who was so poor that he went about in rags, and had hardly anything to eat. But though he faced so much hardship, the Brahmin was always good and honest. Daily he would pray, and accept without grumbling whatever fate had in store for him.

Goodness is, therefore, portrayed in terms of meekness, passivity, hon- esty and religious piety - model behaviour for a child reared on Victorian values, in fact, a model which Bertha herself would recognize and one

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whose residue still persists in many primary school classrooms today. That t he child should identify with this model of goodness is reinforced by the description of the Brahmin’s attitude to the calves he is given:

He began to take great care of the calves. Daily he saw to it that they had enough grass to eat and water to drink.

He is kind to animals and they are described as his pets. In the original fable, the calves are already fattened when the Brahmin receives them. The children’s version ignores their religious and economic symbolism and replaces i t with a cross-cultural image of cuddly baby animals, one that is readily accessible to any child reared in a culture where the lib- eral western tradition of childhood is dominant (including the Indian urban middle classes, a t whom this version is aimed).

The Brahmin’s violence a t the end of the story provides an ethical jolt in the narrative. When he clubs the thief it is not to protect the calves from harm but his property from theft. The implied moral messages at this point seem to be that violence is justifiable when defending one’s property and that thieves will be punished for their crimes. As with the Victorian fairy tale, the level of violence reinforces the lesson; just as Mr Miacca will chop your leg off if you disobey your parents, you will be beaten with a stick if you steal.’ Nevertheless the Brahmin’s use of vio- lence sits uneasily alongside the model of passive goodness that he previ- ously appeared to embody.

Here we have an example, therefore, of how, with the literary reading of fairy stories, we get different and often contradictory values layered into the fabric of their narratives, creating moral anomalies which are difficult to resolve. Paradoxically, this makes them interesting for moral educational purposes. In deconstructing the contradictory values within the story, children can begin to reconstruct communally what they judge to be a suitable morality. Indeed, the issues raised unintentionally by the story are very relevant for a child in contemporary British society:

a re children influenced by their exposure to violence in fiction‘? is violence justifiable when defending one’s property and, if so, what level of violence? can one be good and violent?

The characters in this story, as in many fairy stories are archetypal and two-dimensional. They are not psychologically complex and have no personal histories. However, through drama, the absence of psychology can be turned to advantage for moral educational purposes by inventing histories, additional characters and creating motivation and other psy-

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chological factors. It is this flexibility inherent to the genre that has, in fact, led to Vernon Thomas’s interventions in these areas; but whereas his are subliminal and conventionally didactic, educational drama pro- vides a methodology which allows for communal investigation and con- cious interrogation of the issues. It also provides the flexibility for the issues to be made socially relevant for a particular group at a particular time. In this way we can begin to realise the value inherent in fairy tales, as defined by Zipes:

Their value depends on how we actively produce and receive them in forms of social interaction which lead toward the creation of greater individual autonomy. (Zipes, 1979, p177)

The lessons in summary

I began briefly by setting the story in its geographical context but incor- porated explanations of religious and cultural aspects into its narrative, which I related orally and dramatically, taking on the characteristics of the characters (including the calves!) and allowing them to speak directly wherever possible. Children then speculated as to what the moral might be and I then asked them for examples of what they saw as good ethical and bad ethical conduct in the tale.6 The class volunteered that the Brahmin’s hitting the thief over the head was an example of bad ethics and decided that, as it was a children’s story, the ending ought to be changed. Possible new endings were explored dramatically via forum the- atre.6

In the following session we invented a new story as a sequal to the first, leaving the violent ending intact. We did this through drama. My pedagogy was very simple and largely centred upon a use of both chil- dren and teacher in role. I cast the children as local villagers and nar- rated a new section of the story, entering in role as a poor neighbour, recently moved into the village, the mother of three children. I told them how I was worried about my husband who had returned home late the night before, with his head bleeding, muttering something about going back to sort something out with a certain Brahmin. Under questioning, it emerged that my husband had been a thief, stealing food, gifts for me and toys for the children. He had been caught, however, and had subse- quently made a promise to me to stop thieving. We had moved to this vil- lage to try to start a new life where he would not be known as a thief. But he had found it hard; the land was arid, he couldn’t plough it without an ox and he had become depressed as we sank more deeply into poverty. The children soon told me that they knew what my husband had

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meant, inventing ways how they as villagers had found out about his attempt to steal the calves. They agreed to help me prevent him from committing more mischief and also promised to ensure that he should come to no further harm. They set off through the woods and hid near the Brahmin’s cottage. I approached as the thief, they surrounded me and sat me down to interrogate me but the answers I provided surprised them.

I was on my way not to rob or hurt the Brahmin but to ask him to give me one of his calves; he was supposed to be a good man, the calves had been a gift, he ought to share his good fortune with a poor man whose family needed help. They listened to the thief s case and agreed to go and put it to the Brahmin. I changed roles and they tried to convince me, as the Brahmin, to do what the thief was asking. I voiced many objections, however. Wouldn’t this be seen as a reward for a failed robbery? What had he done to deserve such generosity? In the end, as teacher, I asked them t o create a simple dramatic image to show how they felt the story ought to conclude, which they presented in small groups.

Making the tale relevant: how educational purpose determined the dramatic focus

O’Toole (1993) has defined focussing in educational drama as: ‘trans- lating purposes into dramatic action’ ( ~ 1 0 3 ) and any dramatic focus needs to be understandable and relevant to the children involved if it is to have any moral meaning for them. My choice of focus was intended to provide a platform for the exploration of a current debate, one that con- tinues to have, wide coverage in the press and media, namely crimes of burgulary and related social and moral issues. To counter the way a com- plex moral agenda can be reduced to simplistic headlines and political soundbites, my intention was to treat the story as a metaphor for these issues. I wanted a more ambitious and hence more naturalistic view of stealing than that offered by the story, however. By creating a believable social background for the thief, I created a moral dilemma that I did not have any answers to myself. My sympathies were split between the two characters and this was essential for the drama to be both honest and effective.

The children’s perceptions of the values in the original story

In our initial lesson, I offered the children a number of possibilities as to the intended moral of the story, including the moral of the original fable: Even your enemies can be of use to you if they quarrel with one another.

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Overwhelmingly they chose morals which would support my previous analysis of the values implicit to the tale: for example, if you are kind and good, you will be rewarded; no matter how poor you are, you must not steal; i f you pray, God will look after you. The children offered a wide variety of examples of both good and bad ethical action as portrayed in the story. Examples of good ethics included: the farmer gave the Brahmin the calves; the Brahmin looked after the calves; the Gods saved the Brahmin’s life. The list of bad ethics included: the thief tried to steal the calves; two teamed up against one; the Brahmin hit the thief on the head. They were evidently capable of recognising a wide variety of good and bad ethical behaviour within the context of this one, simple story. If the first of these exercises enabled the children to deconstruct the values embedded in the narrative, this latter exercise allowed them to begin to reconstruct the morality of the story in the light of the ethical sense they made of the characters’ actions.

Drama Pedagogy as a pedagogy for moral education

1. From archetype to brotherhood

Archetypal characters are pre-eminent in fairy stories and their function is to harness a child’s understanding by establishing clear connections between the particular and the universal. In this story, the characters of the thief and the Brahmin are both archetypal but they are used to carry morally simplistic meanings. Dorothy Heathcote has developed a dif- ferent, dramatic concept for establishing such connections within fic- tional characters but one which is morally expansive rather than reductive. This is the concept of the ‘brotherhood code’, the function of which is defined by Wagner as follows:

The new situation on the outside might look far removed from the chil- dren’s own experience. Yet because the people in that situation are in the same brotherhood as those who are familiar, the child can focus on the common element long enough to identify. (Wagner, 1979, p52)

So, within this drama, archetype was transformed and deepened by the brotherhood code. The Brahmin came to belong to the brotherhood of all those who are envied for their good fortune; who face personal danger through this envy; who use violence to defend their property; who are forced to reconsider whether they are living up to their principles. The thief came to belong to the brotherhood of all those who resort to crime due, in large measure, to social circumstances; who try to reform their

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moral actions but fail; who suffer as a consequence of their misdeeds; who come to believe in the social justice of wealth redistribution. In this way, the culturally distant figures of the Brahmin and the thief carried a multiplicity of moral meanings which rendered their conflict comprehen- sible to the chidren.

2. The moral force of the dramatic image

When telling the story dramatically in the initial session, I deliberately ended it with a physical representation of the thief cowering and pro- tecting his head from the blows of the stick; later, in the drama, when I entered as the thief, I was holding a blood-stained bandage to my fore- head. I was thus consciously signalling that he was, in a sense, a victim and this deepened the dilemma for the children, who had already seen the Brahmin portrayed as a smiling, kindly person. Noddings has empha- sised the importance of visual signals, especially for women, when making moral decisions:

Faced with a hypothetical moral dilemma, women often ask for more infor- mation. Ideally we need to talk to the participants, to see their eyes and facial expression, to receive what they are feeling. (Noddings, 1984, p2)

Visual signs evoke the human sympathies of care and compassion and also allow processes apart from the linguistic to become engaged in the moral reasoning task, thus allowing children with greater visual, spatial or kinaesthetic intelligence to interpret and convey moral meanings suc- cessfully. For example, in one of the final images created by two boys, the thief suddenly dropped from his hand the stick he was brandishing and offered the same hand in friendship to the Brahmin. However blurred the distinction between their work in role and as two classmates, this image was a strongly defined moral metaphor which rejected violence while celebrating reconciliation and friendship.

3. Moral discussion i n the form of dramatic dialogue

When the children argued the thief’s case with me in role as the Brahmin, they did so with passion, their logic being driven by their desire for the Brahmin to take into consideration the feelings of the thief and his wife. ‘He wants to be your friend’, ‘He wants to start a new life’, ‘He’s got three children and he can’t get a job and he needs food’. The situation here was morally ambiguous, my responses as the Brahmin being argued with equal passion, a factor which heightened the tension and challenged the children to argue their case with greater strength.

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This harnessing of emotion to feeling, what Aristotle described as pas- sionate reasoning, is difficult to achieve within the classroom other than through the fictional context of drama.

4. Dramatic play and the practice of virtue Many of the children in this class experience behavioural problems and social difficulties. The school works very hard a t providing a caring and tolerant atmosphere and at fostering good, communal relationships among the children. Within this drama, in their role as villagers, these difficult children listened with sympathy to a distressed woman; dis- armed a thief, whom they thought was about to commit a violent act; offered gfts for his children; acted as mediators of a conflict; and pleaded for justice to be done to someone other than themselves. When in role as the thief and the Brahmin, in pairs, they patched up a quarrel; apolo- gised for past wrongdoing; and gave and accepted gifts graciously. Aristotle argued that the virtues have to be learned through practice, just as a musician has to practice in order to learn how to play the lute. Here the children were practising the virutes of considerateness, unselfishness, sympathy, benevolence, kindness, generosity and charity, all defined by Carr (1991) as ‘the virtues of attachment’ (~2001, where an emotion or feeling or passion is not engaged in a struggle with reason but is joined in alliance with it. Again, the fusion of thought with feeling, reason with care, can be seen to lie at the heart of both the moral and the dramatic process.

5. Happy ever after? The moral reasonance of endings

In real life moral dilemmas, there are no pat answers but there are better and worse ways of living, a moral concept which MacIntyre detects at the heart of tragic drama.

There may be better or worse ways for individuals to live through the tragic confrontation of good with good. And...to know what the good life for man is may require knowing what are the better and what are the worse ways of living through such situations. (MacIntyre, 1981, p224)

The confrontation between the Brahmin and the thief was, of course, not a tragic one but it did bring opposing viewpoints of what constituted good action into conflict. Through the drama both Brahmin and thief, and hence the children, could learn that there were better and worse ways of living through this particular conflict. It would have disturbed the chil- dren’s sense of story and hence their way of making moral sense of the world to have left the problem unresolved. Nevertheless, this resolution

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did not lead the children to see the problem as any less complex. Their writing after the drama showed that most retained a full appreciation of the sympathies both men inspired; and in response to my question, ‘If you were Lord Vishnu, what advice would you now offer the Brahmin andor the thief?’, one child wrote:

If I were Lord Vishnu I would say to the Brahmin, ‘Think about what the thief did and why he did it’.

The simplicity of this statement belies its wisdom. This nine-year-old child appears to understand that the moral meanings in stories are not simple and didactic; that we appreciate them through reflection and must find them within ourselves.

Conclusion What I have attempted here is to show that there is a case for using tra- ditional stories in partnership with drama for the purposes of moral edu- cation. The story chosen may have been unknown and set in a culture outside the children’s experience but its archetypes and narrative struc- ture were comprehensible and its moral values accessible for exploration. Here, the pedagogical function of drama worked to interrogate these values and I have presented a brief analysis of how I believe the process of educational drama brought about a process of moral education.

Some issues remain problematic, of course. It can be argued that the alternative endings created by the children were utopian and unbeliev- able. If the morality of art is dependent upon providing a truthful depic- tion of how people do and would, under certain circumstances, behave, then these endings could be seen as false to that central moral purpose. Did these endings constitute ‘bad art’ and is bad art incompatible with good morality? I am not sure, but it raises questions about the social function of drama and its intended audiences. The prime purpose of this drama was to explore a moral dilemma suggested by the story, with the children being devisers, performers and audience. The question might be more precisely phrased as: in what sense was it meant to be good art and who was it meant to be good for? Fairy tales are, in a way, defined by the utopian ‘happy ever after’ of their endings. In this sense, I think it is fair to see the children’s own happy endings as true to the genre and to a particular vision of social justice.

In our postmodern society, children face a saturation of stories in all kinds of genres and no one, dominant cultural source can be said to pro- vide them. This confusion can only be exacerbated by the fact that Tv; video and audio cassettes, comics, computers, magazines and books do not provide any opportunities for children to engage in active discourse

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with their meanings and hence their values. As such, rather than being instructive, they are potentially so many ‘invitations to incoherence’, a phrase applied by Gergen (1991) to the postmodern technologies of social saturation ( ~ 1 7 3 ) . In contrast, Kirin Narayan (1991) has written of a Hindu Swamiji who teaches through stories, choosing them for their rel- evance to particular audiences at particular times. ‘The text,’ she com- ments, ‘like all folk narratives, is malleable to the teller’s concerns and perceptions of his audience’ ( ~ 1 2 1 ) . Through working with drama and story together, the values children are learning to live their lives by in the present can be informed, clarified or guided by the stories we share from the past. And in the communality of the process, we are practising what Gergen sees as ‘the basis for a postmodern, relational view of morality, in which moral decisions are viewed not as products of indi- vidual minds, but as the outcome of interchange among persons’ (ibid., ~168) .

Notes

1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

This is the genuine title of a book I inherited from a previous head- teacher. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I can no longer trace the author or publisher, Published by Hemkunt Press (see Thomas, in References), a Sikh owned institution which packages as children’s literature the stories from the entire variety of India’s culture and religious background. The residual British Imperial influence is very much in evidence in the tone and values of this particular tale. See p123 of The Panchatuntru published by Orient paperbacks, 1965. See English Fairy Tales by John Jacobs, Everyman’s Library Children’s Classics, published by David Campbell, 1993. This is an approach developed by Elizabeth Baird Saenger. See Exploring Ethics through Children’s Literature, 1993, Critical Thinking Press, Pacific Grove, California. Forum Theatre is a particular technique to involve an audience directly in the decision making, the action and the outcome of a drama. See Theatre ofthe Oppressed, 1992, by Bod, A, Pluto Press.

References

Sources Saki ‘The Story Teller’ from The Complete Saki (1986). Penguin Thomas, V ‘The Brahmin, the Thief and the Ogre’ from More Stories

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from the Panchatantru (1992). New Delhi: Hemkunt

Communications Group Sondheim, S and Lapine, J (1989) Into The Woods. Theatre

Theoretical texts

Benjamin, W (1992) ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations. Fontana Bettelheim, B (1976) The Uses of Enchantment. Penguin Carr, D (1991) Educating the Virtues. Routledge Gergen, J (1991) The Saturated Selc Dilemmas of Identity in

Goldberg, S (1993) Agents and Lives. Cambridge University Press Inglis, F (1993) Cultural Studies. Basil Blackwell MacIntyre, A (1981) After Virtue. Duckworth Narayan, K ‘According to their feelings’ in Noddings, N and Witherall, C

eds (1991) Stories Lives Tell. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University

Contemporary Life. USA Basic Books

Noddings, N (1984) Caring. USA: University of California Press O’Toole (1993) The Process of Drama. Routledge Tatar, M (1992) Off with their heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of

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