Lincoln was a voracious reader. He knew Shakespeare. He read Euclid. He read Robinson Crusoe and Edgar Allen Poe. He read poetry by Robert Burns and Lord Byron.

But there was probably no intellectual influence on him stronger than the parables he read and heard as a boy. “He kept the Bible and Aesop’s fables always within reach and read them over and over,” his law partner William Herndon recounted. “These two volumes furnished him with the many figures of speech and parables which he used to such happy effect in his later and public utterances.”

His insights as a politician, as a human being, as a parent, were rooted in the little stories he had heard when he was young. “He argued much from analogy and explained things hard for us to understand by stories—maxims—tales and figures,” Herndon explained. “He would always always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near as that we might instantly see the force and bearing of what he said.”

It’s our job as a parent to furnish and expose our kids to these same stories. Not just once, but over and over again. Tell them the story of Cinncinatus. Tell them the tale of the town mouse and the city mouse. Tell them the story of Washington and the cherry tree. Tell them the parable of the talents.Tell them the fairy tales of the ugly duckling and the emperor’s new clothes.

It’s from these stories that we learn the timeless lessons of the human experience. It’s from these stories that we can give our children an education in the school of life.