ABSTRACT
There are many authors who hold that, when the different disciplines of the “education for change” are institutionalised within the general education system, they lose their deep transforming potential in society. This gives us grounds to propose the inclusion within these disciplines of a world-view education, with the aim of reactivating their character as “agents of social change.”
Stories have supported change processes and, as an appropriate methodology for such world-view education, a wide selection of traditional stories from around our planet is proposed, insofar as these stories are, according to important authors, the building blocks of every culture and civilisation. In this way, myths and other traditional stories would come to be ingenious cultural devices, through which world-views are almost unconsciously transmitted within cultures. This, by means of an easily memorisable narrative fiction capable of spreading its content as a computer virus would do nowadays. To transmit this systemic, eco-centric, sustainable, integrative world-view, the selection of myths, legends and folktales attuned to the Earth Charter (an “ethical framework for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society” arises as a need here.
This chapter offers the results of research in which 336 traditional stories from the five continents were collected. These stories were capable of instilling a complex-systems perception of reality. Moreover, in this research, evidences were found that suggest the convenience of studying orality and oral traditions in the effort to create a sustainable civilisation. Finally, two global projects emerging from this research are briefly presented: the Earth Stories Collection and the Global Storytelling Lab.
