The child and the schoolmaster
The child and the schoolmaster (French: L'Enfant et le Maître d'école ) is the 19th fable in the first book of the collection of fables by Jean de La Fontaine . Not all of his fables are about animals. As in this one, there are also children sometimes.
In Enfant et le maître d'école , a child who fell into the river asks a passing schoolmaster for help. But the teacher, presented as a “certain fool”, initially protests self-importantly against the boy's pleading. He regrets his stupidity and expresses his compassion for those who have to look after such children before he can finally get the child to safety.
Contrary to the educational methods of his time, La Fontaine took the side of the children, he did not condemn the carelessness of the child but the ridiculous pedantry of the adult. La Fontaine makes it clear, however, that schoolmasters are not the only target of his satire here, but that this anecdote is a general criticism of more people than one might think for their self-righteous and self-glorifying verbosity, for those who speak the most are not necessarily those worth listening to. Similarly, in his fable L'Alouette et ses petits, avec le maitre d'un champ , the poet contrasts the irritated voice of the farmer with the rational, calming voice of the mother bird.
Individual evidence
- ^ Jean de La Fontaine (translated by Ernst Dohm ): Lafontaine's fables. Pp. 43–44 , accessed on July 4, 2020 .
- ↑ Penelope E. Brown: A Critical History of French Children's Literature: Volume One: 1600-1830 . Routledge, 2008, ISBN 978-1-135-87201-4 , pp. 61 ( google.de [accessed on July 4, 2020]).