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Essay on Aesop's fables vs. Harry Potter Books
My background is in theatre--performing and later producing stage productions. For a number of years I had a children's theatre, directing and producing plays by and for young people, with the objective of helping children understand themselves and preparing them for life. Many former students from my children's theatre are now teachers. A number of them said they were looking for good literature that would teach values without getting into any religious beliefs.
Since I have always loved the Aesop stories, I started writing them from a more updated viewpoint. I added interactive questions, to get the children thinking and allow them to start applying the values to their own lives. Examples of stories in this book, along with their message are "Sarah, the Girl Who Cried Wolf" (Liars are never believed, even when they tell the truth) and "Tyler Turtle and Jack Rabbit" (Never give up your goals and dreams).
Throughout the stories, there are pauses from the action where personal, thought-provoking questions are asked, concerning the story and values. This is similar to the technique a teacher would use in the classroom, reading a story and pausing to ask questions from the students (Kent, 1991).
Aesop’s Fables are timeless classics that teach morals. In fact it led to several cartoon series whose stories always ended “and the moral of the story is”. These stories are still useful today in illustrating cause and effect in the real world, but they are kind enough to use with even the very young. These stories, because of their imaginative structure, also lend themselves quite easily to the unit study and across-the-curriculum approach. Aesop, the author of a collection of stories called fables, was a 6th century BC Greek slave. Though some of the stories in his collection may have more ancient origins, he is the one who made them popular....
