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Essential Conferences for Summer, 2007

Eugene Schwartz Biography

Articles:              -Handwork and Intellectual Development  -----ADHD: A Challenge of Our Time                  -The Cry for Myth -Freedom of Choice or Freedom From Choice?              -Computers in Education            -Helping Your Child's Teacher Communicate

The Cry for Myth / 3

comfortable asking Ruby why she always paused before she went into class. She said, “I’m saying a little prayer. I’m saying, ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” This little girl had access to a religious story and tradition, and it gave her great strength.

  Where are the stories today? The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers won’t do it: If you’re being harassed in the school yard, just karate chop your way out of a jam! So many of the stories that our kids are being told or are watching on television are totally bizarre and otherworldly. They’re made up of creatures that aren’t human; they’re made up of plots that don’t speak to anything that’s tethered to everyday life.[i]

            Perhaps it is not a question as to whether heroes are needed for a child’s healthy development than which heroes are going to be espoused; it is not whether stories will be presented in school, but rather which stories will be heard.  Paradoxical as it may appear, it is those myths which were told in the distant past that best explain the present to a child, and it is those demigods and heroes whose nature is divine who are best able to tether today’s child to everyday life.  The eminent psychoanalyst Rollo May, who wrote the book The Cry for Myth after decades of research into the psychological and social illnesses of our time, explains:

I speak of the Cry for myths because I believe there is an urgency in the need for myth in our day. Many of the problems of our society, including cults and drug addiction, can be traced to the lack of myths which will give us as individuals the inner security we need in order to live adequately in our day. The sharp increase in suicide among young people and the surprising increase in depression among people of all ages are due, as I show in this book, to the confusion and the unavailability of adequate myths in modern society.[ii]

            The insightful film critic David Denby, reviewing the wildly popular movie X-Men – based on the modern mythological figures featured in the Marvel Comics series – described the powerful effect such computer-simulated extravaganzas have on children, his own included:

The X-Men became familiar to some of us when, as parents, we stepped on Wolverine’s claws late at night in our children’s darkened bedrooms. Those figures, Wolverine, Magneto, and the rest, will be back on the floor, and in force. Cast in plastic, the X-Men become relatively ordinary. Onscreen, however, they are overwhelming, and I am left with one doubt: will the movie’s visual rapture prove so strong that it takes over children’s dreams, doing all the work for them, and leaving them with nothing that is quite their own?[iii]

            During the last decade, any number of writers have rediscovered a tenet that has been understood in all religions throughout the ages: stories represent the most economical and therefore powerful way of conveying ideas and moral precepts.  That is to say, all the imprecations and commandments, all the consequences and punishments, all the harsh words and stern warnings in the world cannot modify behavior with the elegance and efficacy of a beautiful and meaningful story.  Contrariwise, a culture whose stories are trivial and negative will in turn inculcate those attitudes into their audiences, above all into the very young. 

            This belief in the power of the story is a pillar of Waldorf education.  Along with the stories specific to the Waldorf curriculum, all of which speak to the transformations undergone by his class in a general way, the teacher also tries to utilize stories which are directed to the specific needs of individual children, or to tendencies arising in the class as a whole, e.g., quarrelsomeness, or negativity, which he would like to see modified or transformed.  This approach by no means offers an instant fix, and in the

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