The Sword In The Stone Analysis

T.H. White’s book, The Sword In The Stone, tells the story about how Merlyn the wizard taught Wart, the future King Arthur, leadership and heroic qualities. In the article “Are Heros Born, Or Can They Be Made?”, by Jonah Lehrer, it discusses Phil Zimbardo, a psychologist, and his approach to teaching leadership and heroic qualities. Merlyn and Phil Zimbardo’s approaches to teacher their pupils have similarities and differences. To teach Wart, Merlyn sends him to different leaderships, transformed as an animal, where Wart examines the leader, their type of ruling, and the subjects under that leader’s rule. After each transformation, Wart takes away a different lesson. Mr. Zimbardo though, however, created the Heroic Imagination Project to teach kids to be heros. Throughout the project, each lesson has a new quality that the future heros pick up. For example, both Merlyn and Mr.

Zimbardo teaches his students to not blame the victim, to not think that they deserve it. This is similar to how Merlyn sends Wart to T. Natrix the snake to learn about being kind to everybody, even if they have a bad reputation. Phil Zimbardo tells his students that one reason people are reluctant to help others because they think that person deserved it. So, Mr. Zimbardo teaches them to not blame the victim. Merlyn turns Wart into a snake, and meets T. Natrix. T Natrix tells Wart a old story about the dinosaurs. There were two types of dinosaurs, a bloodthirsty carnivorous dinosaur and a peaceful herbivore. The carnivorous dinosaurs eventually went extinct after losing a war with the herbivores, and eating themselves because of starvation and their bloodthirsty needs. Eventually, there was one herbivore left. Man came across this dinosaur, and killed it, because he recognized all dinosaurs as killers. From this story Wart learned to be kind to everybody, even if they have a bad reputation. So, Merlyn and Phil Zimbardo were teaching their pupils a similar