A parable from the book: Soar With Your Strengths
Imagine there is a meadow. In that meadow there is a duck, a fish, an eagle, an owl, a squirrel, and a rabbit. They decide they want to have a school so they can be smart, just like people.
With the help of some grown-up animals, they come up with a curriculum they believe will make a well-rounded animal: running, swimming, tree climbing, jumping, and flying.
On the first day of school, little rabbit combed his ears, and he went hopping off to his running class.
There he was a star. He ran to the top of the hill and back as fast as he could go, and, oh, did it feel good. He said to himself, “I can’t believe it. At school, I get to do what I do best.”
The instructor said, “Rabbit, you really have talent for running. You have great muscles in your rear legs. With some training, you will get more out of every hop.”
The rabbit said, “I love school. I get to do what I like to do and get to learn to do it better.”
The next class was swimming. When the rabbit smelled the chlorine, he said, “Wait, wait! Rabbits don’t like to swim.”
The instructor said, “Well, you may not like it now, but five years from now you’ll know it was a good thing for you.”
In the tree-climbing class, a tree trunk was set at a 30-degree angle so all the animals had a chance to succeed. The little rabbit tried so hard he hurt his leg.
In jumping class, the rabbit got along just fine; in flying class, he had a problem. So the teacher gave him a test and discovered he belonged in remedial flying.
In remedial flying class, the rabbit had to practice jumping off a cliff. They told him if he’d just work hard enough, he could succeed.
The next morning, he went on to swimming class. The instructor said, “Today we jump in the water.”
“Wait, wait. I talked to my parents about swimming. They didn’t learn to swim. We don’t like to get wet. I’d like to drop this course.” The instructor said, “You can’t drop it. The drop-and-add period is over. At this point you have a choice: Either you jump in or you flunk.”
The rabbit jumped in. He panicked! He went down once. He went down twice. Bubbles came up. The instructor saw he was drowning and pulled him out. The other animals had never seen anything quite as funny as this wet rabbit who looked more like a rat without a tail, and so they chirped, and jumped, and barked, and laughed at the rabbit. The rabbit was more humiliated than he had ever been in his life. He wanted desperately to get out of class that day. He was glad when it was over.
He thought that he would head home, that his parents would understand and help him. When he arrived, he said to his parents, “I don’t like school. I just want to be free.”
If the rabbits are going to get ahead, you have to get a diploma, replied his parents.
The rabbit said, I don’t want a diploma.
The parents said, “You’re going to get a diploma whether you want one or not.”
They argued, and finally the parents made the rabbit go to bed. In the morning the rabbit headed off to school with a slow hop. Then he remembered that the principal had said that any time he had a
problem to remember that the counselor’s door is always open.When he arrived at school, he hopped up in the chair by the counselor and said, “I don’t like school.”
And the counselor said, “Mmmm, tell me about it.”
And the rabbit did.
The counselor said, “Rabbit, I hear you. I hear you saying you don’t like school because you don’t like swimming. I think I have diagnosed that correctly.”
“Rabbit, I tell you what we’ll do. You’re doing just fine in running. I don’t know why you need to work on running. What you need to work on is swimming. I’ll arrange it so you don’t have to go to running anymore, and you can have two periods of swimming.”
When the rabbit heard that, he just threw up!
As the rabbit hopped out of the counselor’s office, he looked up and saw his old friend, the Wise Old Owl, who cocked his head and said, “Rabbit, life doesn’t have to be that way. We could have schools and businesses where people are allowed to concentrate on what they do well.”
Rabbit was inspired. He thought when he graduated, he would start a business where the rabbits would do nothing but run, the squirrels could just climb trees, and the fish could just swim. As he disappeared into the meadow, he sighed softly to himself and said…
“Oh, what a great place that would be.”
4 responses so far ↓
Brenda // June 8, 2007 at 8:01 am |
And the rest of the story……maybe in imagination……..that little Rabbit grew up learning how to be who he created to
be. Then some of the other animals who flunked out of their Society Schools were laying around the forrest feeling
lifeless and depressed. The Wise Old Owl talk them to go
find Rabbit and see why he was so successful and happy.
araboth // June 15, 2007 at 12:06 am |
Swimming and algebra. Poor little rabbit. I feel his pain. Head hung, wanting to throw up from the humiliation of failing algebra 3 times in a row…maybe I’ll just be who God made me to be and forget about trying to swim, or pass algebra. I can’t swim either.
Gordon // July 5, 2007 at 6:23 am |
I heard awhile back a statistic that ALL children are born creative (imagine that!), but by the time they reach 5 years old and start school, the percentage of children who are still creative is about 10%.
The education system our society worships needs to be overhauled, and home or private school isn’t the answer simply because these only push the students even harder to be something they are not. We need ‘open’ school like Rabbit started where students can pursue what they do best. We would produce more Avatars.
Many of the great Achievers dropped out of school because they had a bigger vision and were just bored. Obviously, “If the rabbits are going to get ahead, you have to get a diploma,” is a lie. After all, if we truly are doing what God made us to be, how can we ever fail? Education doesn’t produce success in God’s Kingdom or else there would’ve been no chance for Jesus’s Disciples!
I don’t swim, jump, or run very well either. I almost flunked Gymn class! I made A’s in shop.
Linda Garcia // April 22, 2009 at 11:38 pm |
Even though you may be “made” to be a certain way or have talents in certain areas, I believe that education in all areas is important for many different reasons. For one, educating yourself in only one area or subject matter can foster tunnelvision, that is, you see things from only one perspective. Two, studying different subjects like math or art forces you to think in different ways and the brain processing for each is very different, even at a cellular level. For each mentioned discipline uses a different area of the brain, hence the terms “right-brained” individuals and “left-brained” individuals. The left brain is uses logic and is great for the math and science areas of study. The right brain uses feeling and has spatial perception great for art. Here’s a link to an article that summarizes it nicely: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html.
Furthermore, studying different subjects opens your mind. It opens your mind to see things in different ways which gives you the ability and intelligence to think about different viewpoints, have intelligent educated conversations (whether written or spoken), better problem solving and analytical abilities in all subjects and I could on and on but you get the jist of what I’m saying and hopefully will realize how important it is to be educated in many different subjects.