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 below.) Rogers goes further with the thought process to define and explore the process of “valuing,” which is, the “process” by which a human being finds preference in some things, guided by an internal sense of knowing what will lead to self-actualization and the ability to thrive. Rogers discusses the definitions of three types of values, extracted from the work of American philosopher Charles Morris, a student of George Herbert Mead. The first type of value defined by Morris is operative values, or “the tendency of human beings to show preference, by their actions, for one type of object or objective rather than another” (Rogers, Freedom to Learn, 279). This type of operative value process has been evidenced in an experiment with infants. In the experiment, 20 natural, unflavored foods were placed in front of the infants. The infants were allowed to choose any foods they wished and have as much of the food as they liked. Though the infant may have initially gorged on some foods…
