Why Storytelling is Important

I think we are our stories, so I think Storytelling: The Key to All Education has important things to say and you may gind it time well spent reading the whole thing:

Storytelling is not something that should be relegated to “people who want to have fun in the arts.” It’s a vital part of how we learn EVERYTHING as human beings.

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 Storytelling is also our prime method of understanding empathy. One of the best ways to “walk around in someone else’s shoes for a while.” But what happens when we start taking storytelling out of education? In every form? What happens when statistics, not empathy, are the sole focus of most educational courses. You can memorize what happened during the Napoleonic wars…but it’s only when you connect it to a story that you feel empathy for the people involved – and think about how their story connects to your own. For too long we’ve stopped at “Who, What, When, and Where” and forgotten the “Why” and “How.”

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 One of the reasons, perhaps, that there’s not the overall respect for the arts we feel there should be is because storytelling, the essence of human culture and communication since time immemorial, is no longer being valued by our society. Long gone are the days of sitting around a campfire and singing songs of great legends, or telling stories, now we frequently aren’t even watching the same shows as a family to talk about them later.

Back during the Great Recession, I call reading how the banks took on bad debt because they looked no further than their spreadsheets. I remember Jerry Fallwell and the Moral Majority attacking secular humanism. Is not an attack on the humanities an attack on humanity and why our culture denigrates the telling of stories?

sch 5/14/22