Word: aesop
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...instilled in her a strict work ethic, Collins allows no time for apathy, or mischief, at Westside. Class runs nonstop until noon. Math is taught, but reading and writing take precedence. Collins divides her pupils into three reading groups of varying ability, launching the five-year-olds with Aesop's Fables and assigning myths, novels and legends to the more advanced students. She draws up her own comprehension questions based on the classics ("Mount Olympus is the home of the Norse gods. True or false?") and has her pupils-who include her own eight-year-old daughter-memorize poems...
...they what it's all about? After all, by the time the opinion polls diagnosed the concept of alienation, some people were already cocktail-party-familiar with a selfish version of it, trotting out their justification for narcissism and political apathy with the self-righteousness of that fox in Aesop's fable who gets his tail sliced off in a trap and spends ages trying to convince his fellows that, really, it is exceedingly convenient to be rid of such an appendage...
...chants relate many familiar tales, including the Semitic creation story and Aesop's fables," Fell says. "They also clarify a good dcal of pre-Columbian American history, such as the events surrounding the collapse of the ancient Hohokam Empire...
...send him off to school. The schools were not, by and large, free. Nor were they compulsory in the sense that every child in a certain area had to attend them. Some fortunate boys were educated in grammar schools with college in mind: they studied the Bible, Erasmus, Aesop, Ovid, Cicero, Vergil, Homer, Hesiod; Latin and Greek. Above all, there was what might be called a strongly moral education. Such an education for the colonists was by definition religious-God's will made known to the child...
...Memoirs of a Survivor is not so much a novel as a fable. Obviously our own world is not so badly disintegrated few of us fear that our pets or those we love will be made into someone else's dinner. But Aesop's fables make sense to us even though we don't have many talking ravens around, and Lessing's setting is no more distracting. It serves to emphasize her moral, if it can be called that--her statement about the need for love, a collective need to protect one another in a world which is ultimately inhospitable...