Deep inside a mountain in a cave that had been their winter home for generations this small family group was drawing protection from the thousands of tons of rocks that encased them. As the environment outside plunged into a bitter winter they sealed, as best they could, the entrance to the cave and drew on the essential warmth that was stored in the heart of the mountain. Living off stores of dried meat and grain that were collected during the warmer months they were challenged with the task of passing the long dark months of winter. Some time was spent on practical tasks of course but much time was left to devote to art of story telling.

Skip forward several tens of thousands of years and the situation has not changed that much. The accommodation has improved so that now there are constructed dwellings that, for warmth, domesticated animals share with their human masters. The tradition of story telling remains essentially the same. Long nights are passed with the elder members of the group passing on the oral history of their community to the younger members of the group. The stories told had a number of roles, entertainment of course but also education, development of imagination and the passing of cohesive information about the group. Stories convey modes of acceptable behaviour and social mores to the younger members of the group. In this safe environment they had the opportunity to consider how they would handle themselves if they found themselves in the situation in the story.

A mere century or two later and the whole situation had changed. Story telling had been taken out of the context of the dwelling, indeed it had been taken out of the context of the local community as a whole. It is substantially removed even from our own culture. We vest the responsibility for story telling in large American conglomerates whose responsibility is primarily to their shareholders. If you wish to take the view that story telling has no greater purpose than entertainment then you may view this as an essentially harmless eventuality. If on the other hand you take story telling as a crucial vehicle through which children and adolescents establish and role-play their approach to dealing with others in their community then possibly there is room for some concern. Movies promote a monoculture, the colourful kaleidoscope that was world culture is being homogenised into a sort of muddy brown version of American culture.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the movies; I am one of those people who doesn’t pick up the small inconsistencies. I can easily suspend disbelief and become engrossed in the story. In spite of this I fear that the richness of childhood fantasy has been fundamentally eroded. That children’s ability to embrace the spoken word and to use their imaginations to fill in the pictures is only a shadow of what it was. But most of all I fear that our children’s ideals and ambitions are those that a group of corporate executives in Hollywood deem to be the most fiscally appropriate.

If you have a child or adolescent ask them to tell you a story and, most importantly, tell them some of yours.