Telling tales of heroes

A few weeks ago I gave my students “All About Me” posters with one section titled, “My Hero.” This proved most difficult for the kids to fill out. With my head swimming with my own heroes—Ernest Shackleton, Teddy Roosevelt, Madeleine L’Engle, Frederick Buechner—I asked, “Don’t you guys have any heroes?” Not one child said yes.

That explains a lot, though. If there is one word to describe the average middle schooler, it’s “apathetic.” Or, worse, apathy on steroids—“cynicism.” I am reminded of the Maurice Sendak book Pierre, whose main character responds to everything with, “I don’t care.” No amount of love, threats, or enticements move him until he spits out his knee-jerk reply one too many times and finds himself in a lion’s digestive tract.

What, then, do we teachers and parents do with children like Pierre who don’t care about anything? Will warning them that despair is one of the Seven Deadly Sins divert them from careening toward nihilism? Will beating them over their stubborn heads with didactic lectures about the depression and purposelessness that accompanies a life lived only for oneself—a life informed not by noble acts, selfless courage, or personal sacrifice—do any good?

I think not.

What I do think, where I see a light coming on and clearing my student’s glazed-over eyes is in the telling of stories of heroes. When they hear of Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaying Huwawa and the Bull of Heaven, they stop fidgeting in their seats. They blurt out guesses as to what is going to happen next. They huddle in suspense when Gilgamesh travels 12 leagues in utter darkness and nearly jump out of their chairs when he ties rocks to his ankles to find the Plant of Life at the bottom of the sea. Uninspired, pop culture–deadened, what’s-the-point-of-this-anyway boys brighten in a way they never would to a dry textbook lesson on Sumerian history. “A hero,” writes Anthony Esolen, author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, “… is like a pack of dynamite, ready to blow any mountain of heaped-up conformity and dullness sky high.”

Let’s hope so.

As I read to my students stories of Achilles, Leif the Lucky, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I hope, as a priest at my son’s school said the other night, to “cultivate the inner incentive” toward virtue and nobility and the transcendent in these children.

Among so many other wonderful things, I hope through reading about heroes, they learn, as poor Pierre finally does, to care.