9 The Stories We Tell in School

Stories are told for a purpose; sometimes the purpose is as simple as sharing an occurrence, or for entertainment. More often, stories have a learning component attached to them; from fairy tales to myths to fables to curriculum documents, the stories we tell are usually purposeful.

A grounded example of how one story is told in a specific but inaccurate way is Herbert Kohl’s (1991) article The politics of children’s literature: The story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. After reading this article, identify the story that is generally taught in schools about Rosa Parks, versus what Kohl outlines as the truer story.

In schools, stories are often told explicitly (the formal curriculum), or may be told at a more general societal level (think about the stories being told when we tell children to use “indoor voices” or to behave in particular kinds of ways). Or, school stories may be told by educators to themselves or to one another; for example, some teachers will argue that they ought to be allowed to teach the novel To kill a mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960) because “it’s history, it’s a factual account of how people spoke/thought/behaved back then, it doesn’t do any harm today to read those words/attitudes, because they’re long gone”. Of course, this is not at all the case; these words and attitudes do still cause harm today, and the attitudes and beliefs that underlie them are not history, but still with us in 2022.

Working in small groups (or this can be an individual writing assignment), and drawing on your own memories and experiences of school, identify one curriculum story, one societal story, and one teacher story you encountered/were taught. The task here is to learn to recognize stories as just that – stories that are told for a purpose. Once you have identified your examples, analyze them for the varying effects each story had/has/could have on different groups of children.