I know, I know. People who believe in fairy tales are naive and impractical and unrealistic while death is just so … heavy. 

Can we start with something else?

No. Well, we could, but then we probably wouldn’t be talking about fairy tales. Dead parents at the start of fairy tales are incredibly common, they signal a major transition which positions the story’s hero at the start of their quest.

For our purposes, the death of the miller marks the end of Industry’s ability to keep us all moving forward. It’s particularly telling that our education style can be considered run-of-the-mill.  Our education system has been streamlined to prepare urban children for factory work and to accommodate rural children who are needed on their family farms during the summer. 

Yet family farms have all but disappeared along with factory jobs. Meanwhile the school system hasn’t changed - apart from additional bureaucratic red tape that doesn’t go to the heart of the problem - which means our education system is a time machine where we spend years being prepared to live in a world that no longer exists. We have been trained to be cogs in a machine that’s missing integral components. 

Perrault begins the story of Master Cat by telling us the miller had but three worldly possessions; his mill, his donkey, and his cat. Each in turn are left to one of his three sons, and the divvying itself has something to say.

1. The eldest son gets the mill because in those days your firstborn was your primary investment. You taught them your trade or - if you had the money - you provided them with an education that would get them a rung or two higher on the social ladder than you. Your firstborn was who you were referring to whenever you talked about your prosperity, your successfully played part as a cog in the machine helping to keep society running smoothly.
   
2. The second son gets the donkey. The cultural image of the middle child is that of an individual fighting to be seen, to be as integral to their parent’s posterity as the eldest while having to let the baby be the baby. The donkey is just that, integral, because a miller wouldn’t own a donkey unless that was how they powered their mill (millers have a choice of wind, water, and livestock depending on where and how they build), but the donkey has a limited lifespan while the mill is likely to stand for years to come.
3. The youngest son gets the cat which - back then - would have been used to keep mice and other such pests from gobbling up the flour and creating an infestation. Younger children were cherished until they stopped being cute and made to find work away from home, yet that early cherishing typically encouraged them to be lighter of heart. Like the cat in the mill, they seemed to chase away small annoyances.

It would seem the miller has designated a place in society’s clockwork for each of his sons, a way to keep them all together. However, something was clearly missing from their upbringing because, while the two elder brothers go into business together, the third brother is left to his own devices. 

Do the elder brothers not realize they need the cat? Are they cutting corners in their business by leaving their brother and his cat out of the equation? Are they replacing their younger brother’s cat with mousetraps because they see other people using them and don’t realize what they lose by making the switch?

Looking at the miller as representative of the education we have received, we see the elder brothers as those parts of ourselves which - after so many years of reciting facts and copying figures and following in others’ footsteps - only know what to do when everything is running as smoothly as finely crafted clockwork. 

Meanwhile, the youngest brother and the cat are two sides of the same coin.