BACKGROUND The basis for this story is one of the ten commandments: do not covet your neighbours goods. So we are told not to look jealously at what our peers have. The exact original meaning, and the best translations from the ancient sources, are a bit murky. For example, it is said by some analysts that those goods might include slaves, or...

Thought Adventure 42 The perfect friend – thinking about friendship, (perfection and A.I.) This session was put together for teachers asking for sessions for ‘anti-bullying week’ and for PSHE requirements ‘getting on and falling out’. The strategy I took for developing this session was to problematize th...

BACKGROUND This story draws on events in history. The Europeans were not the first to use ‘movable type’, it seems. That happened in China and Korea some centuries earlier, but the Europeans developed moveable type in the 15th century. The main advance was that individual metal letters could be packed next to one another to make p...

Stimulus Adapted from: Spiritual Story by Massud Farzan There was once a man who lived on the edge of a forest near a river. Every morning he saw a fox lying down by the river bank. The fox never got up and walked anywhere. How did it get food, the man wondered… why didn’t it just starve? Then one day, he had only walked a ...

BACKGROUND In Gulliver’s Travels the author Jonathan Swift makes fun of religious and sectarian differences. On the island of Lilliput, there is a deadly dispute between those that crack their boiled eggs on the more pointy end, and those that crack their eggs on the roundy end. The idea is to highlight how random and unimportant the di...

BACKGROUND More than a thousand years ago, Muslims from Africa conquered Spain and Portugal. They created their own country and forced the Christian kings out. Islam became the country’s religion. However, there were still many Jews and Christians living there. (2) They were not treated equally to Muslims, but they were tolerated by the...

Stimulus There were once five students studying together in a famous and important university. They were reading their holy book and came to the point where it says ‘We must thank God for the bad things as well as the good ones’. They were puzzled, and took their question to the Professor. ‘We understand the part about th...

THE PAINTER AND THE WISE OLD LAY 7 SESSIONS MONDAY There was once a painter who lived in a small village deep in the countryside. He spent all day carefully painting beautiful pictures which he would sell in the market. It was a peaceful job and he had plenty of time and silence to think. Sometimes he would have questions about life tha...