The Power of Story

Where do you get your news from? I get mine from The Lord of the Rings. I know that sounds silly, but it’s true, and that is because of the power of story to convey truth. Allow me to explain.

Every reasonable adult I know agrees that the media is a fray, literally like the end of a rope deteriorating. Nothing comes together in functional union. Even just getting unframed and unpasteurized facts can be a challenge, let alone sifting through the litany of half-truths and untruths. We know that Big Media makes its money off drama. We also know that social media algorithms are crafted to rile you up because people make more impulsive decisions with their money when they are agitated. Not to mention, they carefully curate what you do…and do not…see. Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted caving to pressure from the Biden Administration to censor content. All of this leads to greater polarization.

The result is increasing materialization. The manifest world is a world of division and polarity. That need not be a problem if it is balanced with a stronger spiritual force of universality and truth. However, the adversarial forces to humanity want this materializing polarity because it densifies our thinking and blocks us from continuing on our path evolution. “The Devil” so to speak, wants nothing more than to prevent humanity for spiritualizing itself.

So, what does this have to do with homeschooling, again?

The Power of Story

I mentioned The Lord of the Rings. Story is magic, especially the archetypal stories and myths of the world. The aforementioned is but one, and there are many more. Virtually all the fairy tales, Percival, the Odyssey, and many other stories live in this vein. The power of such stories is that they work through the imagination which is our doorway to the spiritual world, in other words, the realm of truth. Stories give us symbolic consciousness, and we learn to read the world like a sacred text. Who are the heroes and the villains? Who is telling the quiet, persistent truths, and who is spreading lies, even in their subtlest form as half-truths? Where are the hobbits and orcs in society?

When we feed our children and ourselves with epic stories, we develop this symbolic vocabulary, and then the world ceases to be an arbitrarily caused place. Rather, it becomes the stage upon which these great tales of humanity play themselves out. Then, when we watch “the news” we will not be fooled by appearances. We will see beyond the pretty talking heads to sniff out which forces/players are trying to impede humanity and which are trying to help.

The Future of Humanity

Everything I do as a teacher is for the future of the world. My goal, like Rudolf Steiner’s, is to raise resilient, self-directed human beings with a robust immunity to the world’s evil. I wish to raise students who will be in the fray but not of it, who will rise above it in their consciousness and see the larger mythos playing out upon our earthen stage. Children, as such, really shouldn’t be tuning into the news. Teenagers can start to do current events-type of things. Yet, think of how much more empowered and hopeful they will be as adults if we have filled their souls with the archetypal images of our species, of the St. George’s conquering the dragons of the world? They, themselves, will become that.