Please tell me tales of deception!
A colleague of mine told me that according to an african friend (from which part of West Africa?), many african tales for little children feature as a hero a thief-crook, whose tricks are glorified and who wins in the end. I'm looking for corroboration of this information, if possible sample such tales, with metadata about the context in which these tales are told.
Surely in Europe, the raping, pillaging and enslaving Goths and Vikings used to have a pantheon of bandit gods, and beloved bad guy heroes such as Till Eulenspiegel, Niels Olgerson, Peer Gynt, etc. But their descendants have since grown out of glorifying these evil characters; if they still exist, the insistance is now on their fall or redemption rather than on the greatness of their mischiefs. Traditional western stories may tell of bad guys, but a morality of universal mutual respect is restored in the end.
In other news, children of muslim culture, and particularly palestinian children, learn early on and with great insistance to hate jews and worship martyrdom through suicide attacks that kill as many jews or other enemies of Islam as possible. What is remarkable is how the forces of life innate in most people and implicit in the real world are enough to counter this culture of death, so that quite few of the hundred million brainwashed masses actually indulge in this inculcated pattern of behaviour.
In any case, the morality taught to children does have an impact on how they behave as adults, or what behaviour they accept or expect from other people, and tells a lot of how advanced or barbarian is the resulting culture. Of course, what is told is sometimes in opposition to what is shown by example. Or sometimes not. In the long run, it isn't, for tales adapt to behaviour, or behaviour adapts to tales. Which is why the overwhelming communist propaganda in France is alarming.