A Tortoise, a Hare, and a College Seminar

What Aesop was really teaching us.

The Crow and the Pitcher by Milo Winter

I’m sitting in a literature seminar talking about…a crow. A crow dropping pebbles into a jar. Someone else brings up a fox. Someone mentions an ant. At some point a tortoise shows up. Which is slightly strange, because the world these animals belong to feels far more juvenile than the college literature seminar we’re sitting in. A tortoise and a hare. A crow with a jar. The kinds of stories most of us had read to us before the age of ten. When most people think about what is discussed in a college literature seminar, they think of Homer or Shakespeare. But instead, we are sitting in a circle discussing Aesop’s Fables.

It feels like our intellectual journeys have progressed backwards. We’ve somehow taken a wrong turn in the syllabus and ended up back in elementary school. Why are we reading “children’s literature”? Perhaps because these stories were never just children’s stories to begin with.

None of these stories are new. We already know how “the tortoise and the hare” ends. I don’t remember the first time I heard it, or who told it to me. It just feels known. Almost too obvious to think about. Certainly explaining it felt like a ridiculous proposition. But that might be the point: they feel so obvious that we never stop to question them.

There’s a reason that these seemingly-simple stories persisted over centuries. Historically, fables were part of how people learned to read and write. They were taught, recited, and memorized. Not in a formal, “this is what learning looks like” way, but as part of the learning process. Similarly, for a lot of us, they were some of the first stories that actually stuck—that we internalized.

Why are these stories so uniquely compelling? Because they don’t just tell you what the moral is. They show you what it looks like in practice. Who gets rewarded. Who gets punished. What feels fair. What doesn’t. The fables are teaching you to be a good citizen in a world where the power structure was established, and continues to be manipulated, by some higher authority.

The people who succeed in the fables aren’t always the ones who are the most obedient. Nor are they the ones who have the most authority and control. They are the ones who learn something. They see something that the other characters in the story don’t see. They adapt to the situation. The smaller, meeker animals don’t try to overpower the stronger characters; they find work-arounds. These fables, as Professor Lerer points out, are often tales about overcoming obstacles through ingenuity, not strength.

These might be stories primarily for children, but the lesson of them isn’t “know your place.” Fables encourage their readers to figure out how the system works so that they will not be trapped by it. Indeed, many feature characters who outsmart the authorities. They are tales of rebellion. Not of a guillotine or throwing tea in the ocean kind, but of a rebellion of the mind. In this way, fables grapple with major themes, questions which adults must wrestle with: how much are you supposed to comply with the system, and how much are you supposed to work against it?

The voice that narrates these stories struggled with such questions himself. Aesop is said to have been an outsider, a slave with no power or authority. And yet, he subverted the system by exerting influence through his storytelling—stories not merely with messages of how to follow, how to break free, or how to exist under someone’s rule, but how to recognize that you have a voice within it, even when you were not supposed to have one at all.

Professor Lerer explained that we are living in incredibly fraught times. Many of us are trying to find our place in a world where the authorities around us don’t feel legitimate. Fables are a guide for what to do when you don’t have control over the situation. When you have to work with what’s in front of you. Like the crow, you don’t break the jar. You figure out how to use it.

Professor Lerer is not trying to re-teach us the morals we learned in youth. Rather, he wants us to see that we were never merely learning morals in the first place. We are learning how to read situations, understand power, and respond when we don’t have it.

And sitting there, talking about a crow dropping pebbles into a jar, I think we’re finally seeing what the story was doing all along.