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Some Looney Tunes Cartoons Are Not So Loony

Civitas, 5 January 2010

Schools Secretary Ed Balls recently announced that, under the rubric of the new Personal, Social, Health and Economic curriculum to be introduced from September 2011, children as young as five will be given lessons on how to save.

Editorial columns have greeted the announcement with derision, rightly commenting on the irony involved.

For, as Gordon Brown’s former economic policy adviser when Brown was at the Treasury, it is Balls more than practically anyone else who has been responsible for this government having clocked up historically unprecedented levels of public debt.

In itself, it is no bad thing for even such young children to be taught the value of deferring gratification by consumption which is what saving is in essence. The trouble with the present government’s proposals as to how to teach it is that they show no awareness of how such valuable moral lessons need to be imparted to very young children.

From the announcement by Balls, it seems they are to start with being taught how to save using a piggy bank.  Such an approach, however, is liable to prove ineffective unless it can convey the value of saving, and no amount of showing children piggy banks and how to drop coins into them can convey to them that value, unless it can teach them why they should, if indeed they should at such an early age be given any money at all above what they need to spend.

When I read of the announcement, I was put in mind of the astute observation the Cambridge philosopher C.D.Broad once made about the value of studying ethics as a branch of philosophy.  He observed:

‘We can no more learn to act rightly by appealing to the ethical theory of right action than we can play golf well by appealing to the mathematical theory of the golf ball. The interest in ethics is thus almost wholly theoretical, as is the interest of the mathematical theory of golf or billiards.’

How, then, can and should the value of deferring consumption be conveyed to young children, if it cannot be done discursively or even by showing them how to deposit a coin in a piggy bank?

The answer is — by means of that genre of imaginative literature known as fairly tales. Nothing can better convey to young children the value of deferring gratification than does the tale of ‘The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf’.

Indeed, the Looney Tunes cartoon, ‘Pigs in a Polka’ can  do the job in just eight minutes of classroom time, also throwing in a valuable lesson in classical music at the same time, being animated as it was to the 5th of Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dances. Young children, of course, will want to see, read and be told the tale over and over again.

The way in which fairy tales can convey important moral insights to young children was very well explained by Bruno Bettelheim in his book the Uses of Enchantment.

Actually, rightly used, this particular version of fairy tale, in its cartoon version, can also be used to convey a very useful lesson in citizenship, politics, and history, not only for older children, but for the present government – especially, the present schools secretary.

Made in 1943 on the eve of America’s entry into the Second World War, the cartoon can be seen as offering a metaphor of then current world politics. The Axis powers are represented by the big bad wolf (that having been Hitler’s nick-name for himself). Europe and the Soviet Union were represented by the two profligate pigs who play (consume) rather than work (and save) to build sturdy abodes that can withstand the wolf’s depredations. The United States is represented by the third pig who works rather than plays to build a sturdy house of bricks able to withstand the assaults of the wolf and eventually defeat him.

So understood, the cartoon is conveying the rightful message that, because of its subscription to the capitalist work ethic, rather than the profligacy of socialistically-driven welfare-state spending policies, America can and will be able to withstand Nazism in a way Europe and the Soviet Union has not been able to.

I was put in mind of this interpretation of the cartoon by reading press reports yesterday that Britain has been forced to run down its navy to find the money to pay for domestic welfare spending.

Maybe, viewing that cartoon should be made compulsory viewing for the present government come the revolution.

That’s all for now, folks!

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