A structural analysis according to narrative rules and common content elements was made of stories on an identical theme in three different foreign language texts. The purpose of the analysis was to highlight some of the elements by which an educational institution influences its students through the world view it espouses. The three texts chosen were: (1) a German text used in secondary schools in French-speaking Switzerland; (2) a text used to teach French in East Germany; and (3) a text published in Singapore, and used in secondary school English classes in Malaysia. The texts were chosen purposely in order to compare material used in three different social systems, capitalist, socialist, and Third World. The comparative analysis considered four aspects of the syntactic and semantic structure of the texts: (1) the syntactic support of the narrative development, (2) some of the semantic values invested in the protagonists, (3) the relationship between the form and content, and (4) the problem of the institution which produced the text and the effect on the pupil who receives it. (AMH)