The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the child at the heart of him, and never let it go . . . the child is not meant to die but to be forever fresh born.
—George MacDonald
Ever since an 18th-century bookseller named John Newbery commissioned Oliver Goldsmith to compile the first Mother Goose, and thus launched an industry, the publication of books for children has been, among other things, a way of making money. Lately it has become a way of making a lot of money, and as more of the nation’s effort comes to be invested in educating the young, the publication of books for children promises to become a major aspect of American business. Even more, it promises to become a business of great social and political importance, for it is trafficking in nothing less than the next generation, which is to say our whole future and the future of all our technological, political, and social machinery.
In 1961 some 1,700 new children’s books were published. Total sales of all children’s books, not counting school texts, came to 277,420,000 copies, mainly through some 25,000 toy, department, and novelty stores, five-and-tens, and supermarkets, and to a lesser extent through the 9,000 libraries in America and the 1,804 bookstores. A growing number have also found their way into the schools—through class-room libraries, of which there are now some 25,000—to supplement the dreary and often unreadable textbooks. But schools continue to buy mainly textbooks, which are not a part of this discussion—though much of what is wrong with American textbooks is also wrong with children’s books in general and for the same reasons. Children’s books have increasingly become part of a bureaucratically administered subculture, largely cut off by a dense fog of conventional and irrelevant theory from the best literary and scientific culture of the community at large.
Such isolation is relatively recent. The great children’s books of the past, though they often represented a distinct genre, were simply a department of literature, and they were commonly written by authors who, in contrast to the situation today, were not primarily writers for children. Such figures as Defoe, Swift, Blake, Coleridge, Melville, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Kipling, Doyle, etc., wrote for children either inadvertently or out of a romantic preoccupation with childhood itself. Childhood for them was sacred and superior, in its vitality and powers of perception, to maturity, which was compromised through having accommodated itself too much to the world. In one way or another these writers believed that the recollected vitality of childhood sustained a man, if anything did, throughout his entire life and that, conversely, civilization—Wordsworth’s “prison house”—was deadly. This same belief, in political terms, led Thomas Jefferson to demand a revolution every twenty years as each new generation coming of age asserted itself against the accumulated inhibitions of the generation in being. And one finds it again, less reasonably, in today’s adults who occupy themselves with cowboy heroes and perhaps among the President and his friends playing touch football.
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Before the 18th century there were no children’s books as such, except for the chap-books, though works like Aesop’s Fables and the story of King Arthur in its various forms interested children as well as adults. And, of course, except for the catechisms and grammars, there were no textbooks. There was only the hornbook from which children learned the alphabet and the numbers from one to ten. Lessons were usually read by the teacher and the children learned nearly everything orally and by rote or by observation and imitation (a process which corresponds somewhat to the theory of conditioned reflexes according to which modern teaching machines have been developed; the older method was, however, less passive and more social).
The use of books in the classroom is rather recent and their pedagogic value, in view of the widespread criticisms that have lately been made of them, cannot yet be taken for granted. And if one watches young children growing up, it appears that even the schools themselves tend to inflate the part that they play in educating the young. Like other young animals, children seem to learn more or less directly from their environment and by testing and observing their parents, their playmates, and perhaps their teachers. Bright children, as they grow older, traditionally have found their schools dull and confining, except for the other children they meet there, and the brighter, the more explosive and spontaneous the youngsters are, the more their classes are likely to bore them. It is at least plausible to suggest that the fault may be in the process of formal education itself. Certainly there is something wrong with the programs and books that the children are expected to put up with.
The great body of children’s literature and the really vital branch of it, despite the hundreds of children’s books published last year and the even greater number that will appear this year, remains within the oral tradition—carried on over the centuries by the children themselves. The rhymes and songs, the crucial bits of information, the forms of behavior, the loyalties and friendships, the superstitions and games, the sexual discoveries that children communicate to one another as they grow older have always formed the basis of early education. It is from these that the children learn, far more than they ever do from books or in their classes, the language, its rhythm, and the fundamental principles of ethics: i.e., how to keep out of trouble, the fatal knowledge of which begins the long, painful, and inevitable movement away from childhood. As Iona and Peter Opie remarked in their brilliant study, The Lore and Language of School Children, “The world-wide fraternity of children is the greatest of savage tribes and the only one which shows no signs of dying out.”
But the Opies were optimistic. The savage tribe has suddenly become a market—a big one—and the woods are full of salesmen, typically disguised as missionaries. Education is the new religion and books are among the trinkets with which to lure the children into the civilized world. As Josette Frank, Reading Consultant to the Child Study Association of America has written, “[Today] we have an opportunity to develop better educated, better informed, increasingly cultured citizens and more of them than was ever possible in times past. There is a new public for books, and this public includes children.” And later she adds, “Our role is to be alert to all that goes on in a child’s world, ready to offer a book that further explains a motion picture; or to direct attention to a television program that amplifies a book just read, or to discover how comics may lead on to new avenues for a child to explore.”
The trouble with Miss Frank’s point of view is its assumption that the civilized world as she conceives it is necessarily fit for children to grow up in and that children will unquestionably take part in it on the terms she proposes. “Today,” Miss Frank goes on, “long before [children] are ready for higher education, the arts and sciences are there for the taking, in pictures and stories. Political campaigns are suddenly intelligible to ten years olds. With the turn of a dial or the riffling of a picture magazine, they may have glimpses of scientific researches and of the men and women who are grappling with them. Perhaps they would never have known what an East Indian looked like, but now the United Nations delegate from India appears on their television screen and speaks to them in perfect English. The baseball hero comes to talk to them. So does the President of the United States. The people in the news are real to our boys and girls.”
In other words, it has now become possible to alienate children from childhood in ways that would have made Wordsworth’s head swim. Today’s children, hardly out of their cribs, can be shoved by the children’s book industry and its affiliated bureaucracy of educators, reviewers, specialists, and consultants, straight into the “civilized” world of television, advertising, and the cold war through processes which, when we hear of them in other societies, we call brainwashing.
In America there are some 4,000 experts who, like Miss Frank, concern themselves with children’s reading. Their influence on the kinds of books that are published and bought for children by schools, libraries, and parents is enormous, and their power, until recently, has been enhanced by the scornful indifference with which they have been regarded by the intellectual community at large. Though the experts’ inclinations tend to be widely permissive and pluralistic—having devolved from Dewey’s idea that a child should be encouraged to develop along the lines in which he is strongest into the quite contrary idea that anything goes so long as the children seem interested and the community doesn’t object—their effect is radically inhibiting. Most of these experts work with schools and school boards or in teachers’ colleges. Many have taught school themselves, but have given it up for the more prestigious, less frustrated role of administrators. Some are book reviewers or work as curriculum directors. A number of them have been hired by publishers or are engaged as consultants to the various children’s book clubs. Most of them, to judge by their own writings, have read very little and are indifferent to the rhythm of English prose. Nevertheless, they have as a group managed to encircle the children’s book business to the point where a publisher has to be very fast on his feet, or unusually indifferent to profits, to break through and confront the children with his goods directly.
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In the meantime, though the business flourishes, the children themselves increasingly ignore what the experts recommend. Marie Rankin, an expert herself, has noted that the books chosen for the Newbery Medal—a sort of Pulitzer Prize for juveniles awarded annually by members of the American Library Association—are among those the children read least. And while a few of the earlier selections were of a rather high order, if one examines some of the more recent prize-winners, one’s sympathies tend to be with the children. Of the four winners for 1961, which presumably are typical of what expert opinion finds admirable these days, three are contemptible by even the most relaxed critical standard, and it is almost impossible to imagine from what point of view they may be considered to have any merits at all. With respect to vitality, inventiveness, and style, they are far inferior to the Nancy Drew’s, and Tom Swift’s of an earlier period, which children today continue to read in great quantities though the experts dismiss them now as they did then.
One of the prize-winners, a book called Belling the Tiger by Marie Stolz, pointlessly enlarges on the traditional tale: the mice find that they have inadvertently belled not a cat, but a tiger, an elaboration which requires sixty-four pages to complete and which sells for $2.50. But for this price the reader also gets a moral. As the mice are about to report to their elders on their adventures, they become aware that they will not be believed by the grown-ups who are clearly less intelligent than themselves. So rather than create a disturbance they suppress their interesting news, wrap their tails around each other, and fall asleep.
Another prize-winner, in this case the winner of the Gold Medal itself, is equally without accomplishment, though it represents more explicitly than Belling the Tiger the preoccupation these writers have with the idea that the young had better subdue, for the sake of avoiding a disturbance within the community, whatever tendencies they may have toward rebelliousness and originality. This book, The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare, is a biblical novel written for a somewhat older group of children than Belling the Tiger. It is thickly pious and its factitious historical setting is presented in language so drab and abstract and even, occasionally, illiterate, that it is impossible to adjust one’s ear to it (“Prodded on by weary drivers, the camels swayed slowly.” “The morsels of food had not begun to whet his hunger.”) But the trouble is less with the book’s prose or even with its fake historical and religious paraphernalia than with the smugness of its doctrine. The hero is a young Palestinian Jew at the time of Christ. He is meant to represent a juvenile rebel of the sort who today, with a less specific enemy to confront, has become a problem for the authorities. This young man—his name is Daniel—has joined a band of marauders and with them is determined to drive the Romans from his homeland. It is clear from the start—even to those who may not be familiar with Jewish history—that his rebellion is going to fail. But miraculously, a carpenter with magical powers to heal and persuade arrives in town and prevails upon Daniel to come down out of the mountains, return to his blacksmith shop and acquiesce, like everybody else, in the Roman occupation. Eventually Daniel takes this advice and we are led to believe that he will make a profitable marriage to a pretty girl who comes from a nearby suburb.
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May Hill Arbuthnot, still another expert, has tried to account for the failure of children to become interested in such stories as these by suggesting that superior literature even among adults is often less admired than trash. But if The Bronze Bow is what Miss Arbuthnot means by good literature, then surely there are other reasons to account for this phenomenon. One need only recall the tactics of literature that children have always found interesting to see how far off the mark this sort of product is.
In Gulliver’s Travels, for example, the hero, bored with his wife, sets out on a series of journeys in the course of which the absurdity of human society is variously illustrated; he concludes that horses are preferable to men. Robinson Crusoe discovers that he can live successfully with an absolute minimum of human society and create a satisfactory world of his own. Alice, tired of her book, escapes the everyday world and encounters a parody of it in which the logical categories that adults claim to think in are, if carried a few steps further, seen to be absurd. The children in E. Nesbit’s novels are invariably wiser and enjoy themselves more than their elders, from whom they are forever escaping. Huckleberry Finn’s only friend is an outcast, a fugitive slave, and the world from which they jointly flee is filled with sanctimonious frauds, false friends, and parvenus. Holden Caulfield grows up in a world which proves to be so untrustworthy that clearly he will never take part in it, but in his case there is neither fantasy nor wilderness to which to escape; he will remain “maladjusted.”
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Nor has this theme been limited to children’s literature. That organized society is hostile to growth and freedom and defeats the individual as, in the literature of an earlier epoch, nature used to do, is a dominant idea in the literary tradition, especially for those modern writers who, in the aftermath of Romanticism, have deliberately concerned themselves with questions of rebellion, privacy, and their own authenticity. It is of interest, however, that in those works which have become great children’s literature, the heroes, unlike the protagonists of much modern fiction, manage to survive the environment and even, in such cases as Robinson Crusoe and Doyle’s Professor Challenger, to succeed in transforming it. The affection that children have for stories of this kind seems to confirm the affinity that the Romantic writers felt between themselves and childhood and helps to explain why so much fiction of the 19th century appealed, and still appeals, to the young. For until recently the typical literary hero was himself, so to speak, a child growing up and testing his mettle against the world. And if one thinks of that long line of literary adolescents from Don Quixote and Hamlet to Stephen Daedalus, then the idea of childhood and the problem of growing up will appear to be representative, for many of our great writers at least since Shakespeare and Milton, of the human condition itself. All that happened to Adam when he left Paradise is that he was condemned to grow up and become civilized, to put on clothes, deny his nature, and go to work. Mankind, ever since, has been trying, in one way or another, to find its way out of this dilemma.
In proposing a closer affiliation between childhood and the “civilized world” in which the President addresses ten year olds, then, the experts have undertaken not only to alienate children from their own nature but to turn one of literature’s great and characteristic themes upside down. Given the refractory nature of childhood, it is not surprising that the children increasingly refuse to take part in the world that the experts are trying to sell them. One suspects that they sense the fraudulence and despair of it and that like such writers as Joyce and Faulkner, with whom they share this view, they have retreated, some more than others, to worlds of their own while the juvenile authorities and the Sunday book reviewers irritably wonder what can have gone wrong.
In the case of disturbed children, for whom the world makes no sense and is terrifying, it is important to do nothing that will disturb them further and gradually to convince them that the world is not so hostile after all. And even where healthy children are concerned, the problem for society and their parents is to present them with an environment that they can trust, that is credible in itself and satisfies a child’s growing need for a solid reality out there. What is wrong with prize-winners like The Bronze Bow or with Miss Frank’s picture magazines is that they are deficient in reality, so deficient indeed that it requires an entire educational bureaucracy to talk the children into accepting them. One is encouraged by the extent to which the children are able to resist such persuasion and reject such products; but it is sad that the experts have given so little advice concerning alternatives, especially since so many parents and teachers must themselves be at a loss.
In the absence of viable alternatives, the children—who, as the experts proudly tell us, avidly read—buy more than 300,000,000 comic books a year, and nightly watch men and women die on television. Comics and television have, for the children, the dubious advantage of representing, however badly, their natural aggressiveness toward those elders whom they want both to destroy and become, a function previously fulfilled for them by the Brothers Grimm and by such representatives of adult authority as Mr. MacGregor who put Peter’s father into a pie. But in the new version of Peter Rabbit, “specially edited in vocabulary and style to meet the needs of the young child,” the pie is not mentioned and over Peter’s bed is the sign “Good Bunnies Always Obey.” Beatrix Potter’s little masterpiece, language and all, has fallen apart in the hands of its modern adapter. Compare, for example, the original—
First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes;
and then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley.—with the new version:
In the garden he saw carrots and beans and radishes.
“Mmm,” said Peter to himself, “Carrots, beans and radishes are what I like best.”
He began to eat.
He ate some carrots.
He ate some radishes.
He ate and ate and ate.
Peter ate so much he got sick.
He went to look for some parsley.The value of this inane performance is impossible to grasp. There is nothing old-fashioned or obscure about Miss Potter’s version and there is nothing in the new version to make it clearer or more interesting than the original.1 A little of it is likely to go a long way with even a slow child and none of it is likely to go anywhere at all with parents and teachers who agree with Professor Jerome Bruner of Harvard that, “We might ask as a criterion for any subject taught in primary school whether, when fully developed, it is worth an adult’s knowing and whether having known it as a child makes a person a better adult. If the answer to both questions is negative or ambiguous, then the material is cluttering the curriculum.”
Thanks to the theories of children’s literature which this adaptation exemplifies, the comic book publishers can look forward to even bigger sales and the children will probably never go on to read the sequel in which Peter and his cousin, Benjamin Bunny, who in Miss Potter’s original have no inhibiting signs over their beds, steal some onions and retrieve Peter’s clothes from Mr. MacGregor’s scarecrow. And they are nearly certain to miss The Roly Poly Pudding, which, according to Graham Greene, who has written the only mature essay on Miss Potter’s achievement, is her best work.
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To the extent that the children’s book business is not an adjunct to modern educational theory, it is a branch of the toy industry; and those few enterprising publishers who manage to break out of the encirclement of the experts have found themselves, for better or worse, in the frantic, often insane, world of infantile mass merchandising, along with the producers of breakfast food, plastic rockets, and bubble gum. In this world the product is known for what it is—merchandise—and nearly everything depends upon the package. The merchandise either sells in quantity throughout the country in chain stores and supermarkets, five-and-tens, and department stores, or it is dropped and something new is tried that is more likely to sell in the mass market.
This is not to suggest that all merchandise juveniles are bad, any more than all breakfast food or bird seed is bad. But these books do tend, necessarily, to be pretty uniform. They must strike an average quality which precludes their ever being excellent, eccentric, or bold. The risks in this business are enormous and so are the profits, and until recently there has been little time for the prissy rationalizations of the children’s book experts—except where the right educational endorsement might adapt the product to a school market and thus bring in an extra profit, or where some respectability is required to take advantage of the current nervousness among parents who want their children to be on the right cultural beam. In the world of merchandise juveniles the big factors are the production men who know how to shave a penny here and there, and the salesmen who are chosen for their aggressiveness and their ability to take a $100,000 order from a chain store or a mail-order house before the competitors do.
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The books themselves often reflect the latest television success or the national current worry, whatever it may be; lately it has been science. Sometimes they are historical accounts, and these, since they frequently describe heroic actions in a more or less revolutionary spirit, are often pretty effective. Though they are of doubtful value as history, they do, at their best, represent the kind of courageous and spontaneous action that used to be found in more forthrightly imaginative literature. But in the stores one pile of merchandise looks pretty much like another and the clientele is presumed to be in a hurry and not very discriminating. Except for such rarities as the works of Dr. Seuss, who in his strange way is authentically a genius—a sort of supercharged Edward Lear—and whose books sell in the millions, most juveniles that are sold as merchandise can hardly be considered books at all. This is especially true of those specimens meant for children who are not yet able to read and which represent the bulk of merchandise juveniles. These products are really nursery fixtures made of paper.
Whereas the editors and publishers of books that are meant primarily for schools and libraries tend to be female, their counterparts in the merchandise lines are vigorously male, indistinguishable along Madison Avenue from their colleagues in advertising and TV, where Huckleberry Hound and Cape Canaveral are big business and where everything depends upon the package. And while the line followed by the children’s specialists derives mainly from the intellectual debris of a generation or two ago—the progressivism, the liberalism, the “social consciousness” and uplift of the 30’s survive surprisingly in a stale and mindless parody in the educational journals—the producers of merchandise follow the mass culture on a more day-to-day basis. This does not, however, mean that the books aimed at schools and libraries and those sold in the supermarkets are fundamentally different. Often they are interchangeable, depending only upon adjustments of format. And some of the more enterprising experts have begun to make room for some of the drearier merchandise products in their theories. It is better, they argue, for children to read nearly anything, even if “we” don’t quite approve of it, than for them to read nothing at all—a rationalization which indicates an unlooked for area of agreement between the merchandisers and some of the experts. Both groups want to move the goods.
As the experts come more and more to work for the publishers, this area of agreement grows wider. And as the mass market gradually drifts away from the more obvious vulgarities of a generation ago toward the greater respectability of the new suburbs, and the shopping centers and the elementary schools which they create, it is an improvident merchandiser indeed who will fail to add an expert or two to his staff or to hire one to prepare modern editions of such books as Peter Rabbit.
The most nearly official expert publication intended for general consumption is A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading by Nancy Larrick, Ph.D., former President of the International Reading Association and “well known,” according to the jacket, “as a writer and lecturer on children’s reading.” A wistful attempt on the part of publishers to promote the reading (i.e., the sale) of books, A Parent’s Guide was sponsored by the National Book Committee, Inc. and prepared with the help of advisors from eighteen national organizations including the Adult Education Association, The American Association of University Women, the Campfire Girls, the Child Study Association of America, the Children’s Book Council, The Children’s Services Division of the American Library Association, The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce.
Not surprisingly, the Guide was awarded honorable mention in the competition for the Carey-Thomas Award, annually given (by the same people who offer the Newbery Medal) for the best example of creative publishing in America. We are dealing here with a rather small world. But for all these accolades it is difficult to find words that will describe Dr. Larrick’s book, for it is not, in fact, a book at all but a sales-talk (Shall we read aloud to them? Yes, by all means! They love it!), and a far more aggressive one than Miss Frank’s. The point of Dr. Larrick’s exhortation is, as she says, to surround the children with books, a depressing enough thought given most of the books she has in mind, and especially when one thinks of those children, still in possession of their animal spirits, who may not feel like being surrounded by books or anything else. But books, Dr. Larrick insists—and so presumably do the eighteen national organizations who helped her—can be “fun,” as much “fun,” in fact, as TV or the comics. Yet if one thinks of one’s own childhood experience, the idea that books have to be “fun” seems a little off center. Radio was fun and the comics were great fun and so, most of the time, was playing baseball or walking in the woods or watching the trains go by, but going to the library to read a book was not primarily or even secondarily for fun. It was for the sake of learning something, or more precisely, for the sake of becoming something—something more grown up than one had been before. The impulse to go to the library was of a completely different sort from the one that led to reading the comics or going to the movies, which were, after all, more fun. Going to the library was something one did, as it were, “for real,” and the fantasies one managed to generate there among the books by Howard Pyle and George MacDonald, as one read them over and over, turned out in time to transform the idea of fun entirely. Through such books one acquired, without in the least knowing it at the time, a taste for reality and the holiness of the imagination operating at the far edges of human experience which, in later life, makes it so difficult to confront such performances as Dr. Larrick’s with patience.
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The last forty-five pages of A Parent’s Guide consist of lists of recommended titles, but from these lists “Some Old Favorites, such as Tom Sawyer and Little Women, have been omitted because hardly any parent needs a reminder. The list is largely made up of books published since 1940.” But while Dr. Larrick feels that most parents know all about Mark Twain and such other writers whom she fails to mention as E. Nesbit, John Buchan, and George MacDonald, she apparently doesn’t feel that they know about bookcases, and she therefore devotes two pages to describing what they are and how to build one. (This seems to be a gesture on behalf of an unhappy attempt made some years ago by the publishers when they asked a famous public relations man to suggest ways of improving their business. After some thought the public relations man suggested that householders should be encouraged to build bookshelves which they would then have to fill up.)
One will not find on Dr. Larrick’s forty-five page list books by H. G. Wells or Howard Pyle, Jonathan Swift or Herman Melville, Frances Hodgson Burnett or Jane Austen, and one wonders if perhaps what is implied in her principle of choice may not, after all, have come to pass. Perhaps by now the great tradition is lost to most children. Perhaps only a marginal few can usefully be introduced to such authors and perhaps it is merely old fashioned to care. One wonders if the professor of education who a year or two ago advised the high school in Princeton, New Jersey to get rid of “fossilized classics” like Ivanhoe, is not really marching forward with history while the rest of us have, like the classics themselves, become fossilized in our affection for a dead past.
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But where then do we draw the line? Do we slide all the way down to the new version of Peter Rabbit and those recent abridgements of the Iliad and Odyssey that have sacrificed everything to easy reading and are a waste of time to read, or to those colorful volumes which promise, in a hundred or so pages, to introduce the children to all the sciences known to man? Or do we stop halfway down and replace Ivanhoe, as the high school in Princeton has proposed to do, with The Pearl by John Steinbeck and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, inferior works of their authors, but sexless and bloodless and therefore suitable? And if we set our standards at this level, how, when the children are older and go to college, will they deal with Shakespeare and Proust, and what will they do with a writer like Joyce? Shall we find a way to drag these writers down so that they too can be read on the level of The Old Man and the Sea or perhaps even of the new version of Peter Rabbit? The problem is sad to contemplate and hard, and it includes the danger that the children may not grow up at all but simply grow older. For the appreciation of literature resembles the process of growing up in that they both involve the discovery of distinctions between the self and the world: the aim of both is differentiation, concreteness, and the development of a character of one’s own. This is why literature is exciting and why it is, finally, inseparable from life. Where Nancy Larrick goes wrong is in her assumption that there is no particular need to distinguish oneself from the surrounding environment, that to take part uncritically in the common culture is the proper goal of growing up.
Still, it would be wrong to suggest that the level on which Josette Frank and Nancy Larrick operate necessarily represents the style in which all children’s libraries and school teachers or even most experts themselves function when they are face to face with children; and it would also be wrong to suggest that The Bronze Bow necessarily reflects the real literary preferences of these people. Life, even in the schools, is full of its usual perplexity and it is fair to assume that the stronger teachers consult their own experience and ideals, just as the weaker ones panic and submit, typically, to their own confusion. Though the experts on children’s reading are, like experts everywhere, mistrustful of what they do not understand, a certain tough fiber occasionally appears in their otherwise undistinguished fabric. One of the recent Newbery winners is a book called Frontier Living by Edwin Tunis, which is a valuable and substantial account of daily life on the edge of the American wilderness as it gradually receded toward California. This book is not only full of uncommon information, but it is surprisingly candid. Unlike most books in its category, it neither patronizes nor sentimentalizes the Indians, whose side it takes against the whites where it is necessary to do so. The Kentucky settlers are described as drunken and brutal, while it is revealed that the towns farther west were often bothered by gamblers and prostitutes. The directors of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific are described as thieves and exploiters who cooperated with the California legislature to rob the public, while the United States Senate is shown to have been frequently faithless in its treaties with the Indians. In its attention to detail and the cleanliness of its style, Frontier Living is a considerable achievement—one of those books that is likely to inspire strong feelings of social justice and patriotism in certain young readers by providing them not only with a sense of their uniqueness but with a link to the common welfare.
One is surprised to discover that such a book was chosen by the same group who also chose The Bronze Bow and who are usually so careful not to offend against the standard impostures of American history. But this curious thread appears to run throughout the entire fabric of the children’s book industry: while the formation of natural taste and the spontaneity and explosiveness associated with childhood are largely dampened by irrelevant theory, a certain stubbornness on behalf of real literature somehow prevails. Despite their omission from Nancy Larrick’s list, the standard authors are likely to be available in most public libraries, even if, in some cases, only pro forma and even if the librarians, under pressure from the schools and knowing that their budgets in some cases depend on how many books they can circulate, feature the newer books that are easier to read. Most libraries too will include the handful of modern books like Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle, Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Little House in the Big Woods, and the works of Dr. Seuss—books which even Dr. Larrick finds room for and which, though they represent a sort of mannerist phase of the great tradition, are generally on a very high level. The libraries themselves are frequently stimulating and their collections and personnel are impressive. To visit the Donnell Library on Fifty-third Street in New York or the Children’s Room of the New York Public Library is reassuring. The mindless eclecticism, the idea that children should know less and less about more and more, that characterize the writing of such experts as we have quoted here, are absent. Absent too is the notion that the books should be adjusted to the tempers and interests of the children, which is what is implied by the idea that books “should meet the reading needs of the young child”—an idea that would, if fully carried into practice, reduce the children to idiocy and turn the libraries into madhouses.
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But if the official experts are in practice largely ignored by superior librarians, how are teachers and librarians who may not be as good as those in the Donnell to know what books to make available? It is, after all, no easier to distinguish quality among children’s books than among books in general: the same critical acumen is required in either case and such acumen has never been especially abundant in any society. The criterion generally applied by the experts is: “Is this a book for children?” But the only relevant question—and the one which, to judge by their typical preferences, the experts are incompetent to decide—is: “Is this a book at all?” The question: “Is this a book for children?” can properly be decided only by the children themselves as they fumble and experiment among what is available. And if a child decides, as one sixth-grader whom I know of has, to read the Greek tragedies, then Greek tragedy is, for him, a suitable book. If it bores and confuses him, he will soon enough turn to something that suits him better.
We have been considering not the more or less technical problem of teaching the children to read—which is properly a branch of cognitive psychology and is within the province of qualified experts—but of helping them to find and distinguish, once they have learned how to read, those books through which they can discover themselves as individuals and discern, gradually, the nature of the world in which they must function. “Children read, through inexperience, whatever comes their way,” Lillian Smith, who was a Canadian librarian, has written in her admirable book, The Unreluctant Years, published by the American Library Association. “In a time when children’s books are almost a matter of mass production,” Miss Smith goes on, “it is possible that a child may pass from infancy to maturity without encountering one book that will satisfy him in his search for experience and pleasure; that will offer him reality in the place of a shadow of reality.” But, she adds, “children will defend themselves against encroaching mediocrity if books of genuine quality are put within their reach.”
Thus stated, the task of teachers and librarians and the experts who advise them is simple. It has nothing to do with “being alert to all that goes on within a child’s world,” or with “surrounding him with books,” or with meeting “the reading needs of the young child.” For it is absurd to suppose that the “reading needs” of a child who is able to read by himself are, in principle, different from those of an adult, or that a child will or should submit to being surrounded by walls of books, or that alertness to the private world of childhood is a valuable or even possible desideratum. Proposals like these are useless in themselves and serve only to rationalize and certify the industry begun by John Newbery who, significantly, sold in his shop not only books for children but quack medicines for their parents.
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As the market grows larger and the rate at which new books published for children expands, and as the standards proposed by the bureaucracy of experts increasingly conform to the surrounding mass culture and the commercial requirements of the publishers, the opportunity for children to find “books of genuine quality” will necessarily diminish. In America there are hardly more than a hundred—certainly no more than two hundred—bookstores which are able to select and carry more than a bare minimum of the standard children’s classics or which can by themselves distinguish among the new books published each year those that are of any value. And the number of such stores is decreasing as more and more of them come to depend for their profits on merchandise and as the schools and libraries, in their attempt “to meet the reading needs” of the young child, increasingly make the children unfit for the “fossilized classics.”
Though the children themselves wrote letters strongly rejecting the proposed modification in the curriculum of the Princeton High School when it appeared in the New York Times, the teachers grow weary. Dickens and Scott are, after all, harder to teach than low-grade Hemingway : for many teachers they may by now be impossible; and the community, except for an unimportant fraction, no longer cares very much. Perhaps, as Edgar Z. Friedenberg recently suggested in these pages,2 the teachers have even come to resent the brightness of their students, for as Professor Friedenberg argues, the “free-floating ill temper” so common throughout our society is particularly endemic among those people who, defeated like so many others by the conditions of American life, must nevertheless confront the abounding and as yet uncompromised energies of the young. And so the marvelous world of George MacDonald and Conan Doyle, John Buchan and Frances Hodgson Burnett may soon vanish, except for the happy few. Perhaps, since so much else has gone—and will go—it is pointless to care. Except, of course, that the children are always there to remind us. And one naturally wonders what they will become.
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1 The pedagogical theory that is reflected by the repetition of words in this version of Peter Rabbit is that a child, in learning to read, has to encounter the same few words over and over again until he has mastered them: a perfectly sensible theory except that the modern adapter in this case has misapplied it and her version is so dull that it is hard to imagine that a child would want to read it at all, whereas the original is so lively that one can easily imagine a child's reading it over and over again and encountering, as according to the theory he should, the same set of words repeatedly.
2 “The Gifted Student and His Enemies,” May 1962.
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