The Wolf Who Cried "Boy!"

All due to a lack of tolerance.

The American curriculum I teach my Chinese students surprised me last week by being almost sensible. The text was a retelling of Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” A useful bit of cultural context, and of course an important life lesson. The ending was sadly fudged: instead of having the wolf eat the sheep, they just ran off in fear, and were recovered the next day. No harm done. A typical bit of bowdlerization that weakened the interest of the story as narrative, and seriously weakened the moral. But at least the basic tale was still recognizable.

But it turns out that was only the setup for this week’s story. Which now told the fable from the wolf’s point of view: the “real” story. Herr Wolf, it turns out, ate only vegetables from his garden. (Everyone in these stories has a garden.) He thought to snatch a goat only because he was now too old and weak to weed his crop. But in the end, after striking a bargain with the shepherd boy, he found that the goat could weed his garden for him. So they both lived happily ever after.

The shepherd boy no doubt still learned somewhere in there that it was not a good idea to lie. That moral was more than a little clouded by the fact that, in this retelling, he was not lying. There really was a wolf present, although not visible to him. But the larger moral now seemed to be: never think badly of another, don’t be prejudiced against someone just because he is a wolf, and always try to make some agreement to accommodate their demands.

A lesson in tolerance, I suppose. The problem is that it denies the existence of real wolves. Real wolves are not vegetarians, do not reason very well, and any shepherd boy who approached one trying to seek an accommodation would simply be savaged.

A large part of the original point of having talking animals as the characters in fables is to avoid prejudice. Animals operate on instinct, and so their behavior is predictable. It is simply not prejudice to assume that wolves will eat sheep if given a chance.

Of course, in the real world, the same is true of some people. It is not prejudice to realize that there are bad people in the world. It is prejudice only if you associate this with their skin colour, national origin, sex, or some other unrelated characteristic. People are not animals, and do not work by inborn instinct. Using an animal example prevents this association from being formed.

Whereas the original fable, like many fables, was forearming and, if you like, “street-proofing” the child for the risks of life, the rewrites are always setting them up to be easily victimized by the first predator.

I fear this suggests that our current texts and curriculum are written by the predators.