The Elephant

I was read a wonderful children's book the other day, The Blind Men and the Elephant. This story is a classic, yet I had never heard it before. It has been written and rewritten by many different authors.

The story goes that an emperor aquires an elephant and six blind men decide they want to go "see" the elephant because they have never touched one before. Each blind man touches a different part of the elephant, so each one thinks the elephant is like something different than the others. They begin to fight about it and the emperor intervenes and tells them that they each only know about one part of the elephant, not the whole animal.

Obviously, this book is about not knowing somebody because of one thing about them. We were regarding it in my occupational therapy classes as just because we know someone has a disability does not mean we know everything about that person.

I'm definitely buying this to add to my own children's library.