An Ethical Approach To The Jungle Books-From The Perspective Of Adolescent Education

Joseph Rudyard Kipling is the first English writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in1907. He gains widespread popularity on account of his appealing short stories and novels, especially The Jungle Books, written in two volumes: The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, which were published in1894and1895respectively. These two books mainly tell the stories of Mowgli, a boy grown up in a wolf family and learned about the Law of the Jungle, animal language and hunting. They belong to a literary genre known as beast fable, which can be traced back to the Middle Ages. A beast fable is a succinct fictional story of anthropomorphized animals, illustrating a moral lesson.’The Law of the Jungle’is at the core in those stories, expressing Kipling’s philosophy of life and his ideal order of the world. The aim of this thesis is to analyze these stories from the perspective of secular education. Influenced by the historical background and political ideas in England at the turn of the twentieth century, the theme of ’The Law of the Jungle’in The Jungle Books is closely connected with imperialism and colonialism. Nevertheless, there is another meaning in the book that is often overlooked by the critics, for Kipling suggests that the world should be governed by certain rules, or by a sense of duty and ethical values. He does tend to moralize the imperialist theory of Pax Britannica, yet the Law he advocates also has some significance for the understanding of human society, especially the moral and ethical values in the education of children. The Jungle Books have gained widespread popularity among the adolescent readers, due to their moral lessons on affection, wisdom, bravery, self-discipline, esprit de corps and faith, all of these are incorporated in the Law of the Jungle. Kipling aims to establish his ideal social order and ideal man, to inspire a whole generation, and to strengthen the social structure of Victorian England. In education, teachers must develop creative methods of teaching acceptable moral values so that students have some basis of reference for the moral decisions that they will make in life. Therefore, I have employed four useful classroom activities as ways of imparting moral values to students. However, how to develop the moral education in English class has been a great challenge for teachers. In this thesis I attempt to design a case study to make students experience pleasure and comprehend the moral values in a way of edutainment. The Jungle Books has an enlightening message for modern education and encourages us to pay more attention to the moral values in children’s literature. Children’s literature uses a pure and vivid language to convey the nature of beauty and touch both our intellect and our emotions. Almost all of them have moral or didactic purposes to express a sheer joy of living and the wonder of the world around us. They also provide opportunities for classroom discussion to improve teaching efficiency and develop children’s positive character traits.