After reading this articles I believe that storytelling might be the most important “way of knowing”. This is because we as humans have learned to save all the important information as stories in our head.
Storytelling is how we know most of what we know—or think we know. The stories we are told, the stories we believe, and the stories we tell—both to ourselves and to each other—shape our view of reality; our ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, normal and strange; our most basic beliefs about what is true, and what is false.
Humans are the only animals that tell stories.
I found this really interesting because it is all true, there is a story behind everything. We create stories in our head about what we should or want to do. Just as the ones that we learned when we where little. And those stories are the same only more complex. A perfect example is in TV and I’m not talking only about the movies but the commercials and the news. Advertising has become a short story of why that product is the best you can get. Or in politics they sell the story of what they envision to accomplish. But the most interesting part is that we are sold in all this stories.
If students do not become adept readers of stories, how can they ever hope to analyse and respond to the stories that will be thrown at them all their lives by politicians, by governments, by marketers—not to mention friends, family members, and perfect strangers? Everything we think, everything we believe, everything we know takes the form of a story. If we hope to understand ourselves and others, we must understand stories.
I think that this is really important, because in our lives we are going to get million of stories thrown at us and if we are not able to understand them correctly we are going to end up gathering the wrong ideas. They say history is big story meant for us to understand the errors of the past to prevent repeating them in the future. But to do so we need more than the story, we need to be able to understand and analyze it in a proper way. And that is why storytelling is the most important way of knowing.