ONCE UPON A TIME Changing the World through Storytelling

Changing the World through Storytelling Jack Zipes A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. --Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1891) "Once upon a time," the formula for beginning a fable or fairy tale, is a signal to the listener that what is said will be significant--that it will be worth both the listener's time and the teller's. There is nothing more valuable in the world than sharing an old story or a story about old times. Experience is not given linguistic form, reformed, and repeated if it is not thought to pass valuable knowledge down to listeners in the future. Although the knowledge involved may seem fantastic, it has emanated from some human experience, and, whatever the experience may have been before it was imaginatively appropriated by tellers, who have given it structure and sense, we may be sure that the experience, as human, is of significance to our lives. 22:2 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-3464961 © 2016 by Duke University Press I would like to argue here--against the grain of the bureaucracies that are destroying education with their positivist, instrumentalized, and commodified programs in the service of nothing better than positivism, instrumentalization, and commodification--that storytelling be reintroduced into schools at all levels and in all languages: reintroduced, however, with a difference. No matter how original our life stories may seem to us, we rarely are able to break away from a master narrative that sets the frame in which our personal stories are received, shaped, and interpreted. The master narrative makes itself felt in the language and structure of the education system and its curriculum. The language that educators use is, more and more, that of the...