Teaching Stories for Sociology: The Fables of James Thurber

Abstract

E very teacher is a storyteller. Teaching sociology is telling (so we believe) true stories about life in human society. We tell different stories about social life-social change stories and deviance stories, for example-and different versions of these stories -functional and conflict versions of the social change story, anomie and labeling versions of the deviance story, and so on. These are the big teaching stories we all tell. There are smaller stories, however, which we use to help teach a particular, limited idea, or to underline a point, or to get a laugh-stories which are not big enough to teach an entire topic. Some of these smaller teaching stories which I use in my sociology courses are the subject of this essay. From a teacher's point of view, the best of these teaching stories are those which teach an important lesson, and which teach it in an interesting way. If the story if good, students will remember it and the lesson it teaches. My students tell me that of the stories I use, they like best the fables of James Thurber. They remember his stories and, remembering them, are also likely to remember the lessons those stories help to teach. The fables, I believe, teach valid lessons about social life, lessons which students should get from courses in sociology. Thurber's fables, Fables for Our Time (1943) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956), are in the classic tradition of Aesop and La Fontaine. As his predecessors did, Thurber uses animal