This article examines how traditional children’s songs and lyric-narrative poetry function as cultural instruments for moral instruction, emotional formation, and social continuity. Drawing on scholarship on Indonesian dolanan anak songs, Javanese and Balinese local wisdom, character education, pragmatics, folklore, discourse, symbolism, and Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man,” the study develops a comparative framework for understanding how verbal art transmits values across generations. The article is grounded in a qualitative, text-based, interpretive methodology that integrates hermeneutic reading, discourse analysis, symbolic analysis, and comparative literary-cultural interpretation. The central argument is that Indonesian children’s songs and Frost’s rural poetry, though emerging from very different linguistic, historical, and pedagogical environments, perform related ethical work. Both create condensed symbolic worlds through which communities teach belonging, responsibility, tolerance, memory, labor, care, and human limitation. Traditional children’s songs operate through repetition, play, musicality, and culturally embedded imagery, making them especially effective for early moral learning and communal identity formation. Frost’s poetry, particularly “The Death of the Hired Man,” works through dramatic dialogue, ambiguity, and symbolic rural settings to provoke mature ethical reflection on home, work, obligation, forgiveness, and dignity. The study further argues that in an era of accelerating digitalization and rising screen exposure among children and adolescents, these forms of cultural expression acquire renewed importance as humane, dialogic, and memory-bearing alternatives to fragmented media consumption. The findings indicate that symbolic discourse in both traditions is pedagogically dense: it shapes perception not by abstract instruction alone but by emotionally charged, culturally meaningful scenes. The article contributes to comparative literary studies, ethnopedagogy, and moral education research by showing that traditional song and literary poetry should be treated not as separate domains of folklore and high literature, but as parallel systems of value transmission. Their continued revitalization is therefore not merely a matter of preservation, but of educational and civic necessity.
Symbolic Pedagogy and Moral Imagination in Traditional Children’s Songs and Robert Frost’s Poetry: A Comparative Cultural-Discursive Study
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References
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