FABLES AND JUAN BOBO: TO BE ASTUTE DOES NOT REQUIRE DISHONESTY OR DOES IT

The children’s literature class taught in Spanish covered the study of fables, from the well known pre-Christian ones written by Aesop to the 17-18th corpus, by La Fontaine and Samaniego, as foundations to contemporary Latin American stories. One of the question posed by the content of the course had to do with the approach to dishonesty and “astucia”, to be astute, and nothing better than fables to explore these two moral and intellectual qualities and values. Using several literary critiques and related research as guides, the students had to choose which fables and contemporary tales -all of the pieces read included characters and scenes where both of these qualities were part of the narrative- dealt with dishonesty as a negative or positive value and how it interacted with being astute. According to Bruno Bettelheim’s ideas, children at a certain age like stories where goodness is prized and evil is punished. After reviewing some of my old notes from that class, it is quite interesting to see once more that some students -for a variety of reasons- preferred the fables where dishonesty was prized. Poor Juan Bobo, the well known Puerto Rican children's literature character, not matter what he did, he ended up losing, even among young adults studying to become teachers.