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The Little Red Hen: Implications for Parenting, Education and Human Existence
The old Russian folktale, The Little Red Hen, is a tale written for children to help teach the values of hard work and self-reliance. In the story, the Little Red Hen finds a seed of wheat, which she decides to plant in order to make bread. The Little Red Hen attempts to enlist the help of other farm animals in the planting, harvesting, threshing, and milling the wheat into flour, and the baking of the bread, but the farm animals refuse. After doing all the work herself, the Little Red Hen then asks who will help her eat the bread, and all the farm animals volunteer. Alas, the Little Red Hen decides to share the bread only with her chicks, realizing that she is the only one who did the work.
The common themes extracted from this folktale are built on teaching children the value of hard work and self-reliance. Yet, upon further investigation, the folktale can teach another valuable lesson, that of “valuing.”
In his book, Freedom to Learn, Carl Rogers outlines three definitions/ types of values, operative values, conceived values and objective values. (The first two types of values, relevant to this article, will be defined…
