RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you still have a bookstore in your neighborhood, stroll through the children’s section and look for fairy tales, Bible stories, Greek myths or comparable folk tales. Chances are that you’ll have a hard time finding any of these without getting a salesperson’s help because they’re no longer the books of choice for children.   I asked my 5 year old grandson what story he heard at story time in school. Though he didn’t remember the title of the book, he knew that it was about children moving to a new house. It might also have been about divorce, sibling rivalry, the death of a pet, a school bully or any of a dozen other topics that relegate the actual world of children into the realm that used to be primarily reserved for imaginative literature. It’s doubtful that children would forget such titles as Rumplestiltskin, Pinnochio, Aladdin, King Arthur, Prometheus or David and Goliath but when stories are about the quotidian activities of everyday life, they are less memorable because they are in fact less wonder-full.

The old-fashioned tales that comprised western literature for children have been replaced by Star Wars or superheroes, borrowed from comics, movies and television and better appreciated in video games.  Reading material in pre-school and kindergarten is largely geared to normal life and rudimentary lessons for adjusting to a multi-cultural society.

Back in the sixties, criticism was directed at standardized tests such as SAT’s for using vocabulary that would be unfamiliar to minority or lower class children. How could a student understand a verbal analogy that involved a knight’s visor or a croquet mallet if that was not part of their lifestyle?   Before the sixties, the answer would have been obvious – children of immigrants who grew up in underprivileged homes went to libraries and treasured books as their escape into a fantasy world much richer than reality. In those fairy tales, myths and bible stories they encountered words that needed to be explained, looked up in the dictionary and understood in context. Children accepted that princesses, giants, heroes and heroines did not live like ordinary people and didn’t speak like them either. From this they progressed to books about many other unfamiliar subjects and lifestyles which they didn’t share.  Far from confusing them, the language of literature enriched the vocabularies of lower class children and gave them subliminal messages about character, relationships and abstract goals of achievement and success. Today we make children put on costumes of other ethnicities and faiths to help them understand other people;  this empathic exercise was accomplished by wide reading from a school or public library in years gone by.

Sesame Street put puppets in trash cans and brought learning to the level of a city street instead of the Olympus of the Greek Gods or the wonderland of Alice or the Camelot of Arthur and his knights. Singing and dancing accompanied the lessons that Sesame Street taught and pretty soon, rote memorization was discontinued in schools so that as children lost their foundations in what once was the “times table” or the rules of grammar, or the short poems they knew by heart, they were concomitantly absorbing the message that unless learning was entertaining, it was too difficult to pursue. We now have teenagers in high school who are functionally illiterate and whose vocabularies barely go beyond that of third graders. Excluding the most intractable students whose problems are greater than issues of reading comprehension, we have significantly dimmed the perspectives of bright, normal children by robbing them of the richness of canonic children’s literature.

Many years ago, I had the surprising experience of teaching “A Tale of Two Cities” to a class of sophomore high school girls who were largely Hispanic and not good readers. As a young teacher myself, I questioned the wisdom of choosing this book for their syllabus but fortunately, that choice was not mine to make.   It turned out that the teenage girls adored Lucie, admired her devotion to her father and understood enough about the tribulations of Darnay and Carton to be visibly moved at the end. We undersell our students by the assumption that relevancy is either necessary or even desirable in literature as the current popularity of Harry Potter books should prove. What we read and offer to our youngest listeners and readers will affect their imaginations throughout their academic journeys and their lives. Let’s put aside the books about everyday problems and social engineering and give children the taste of magic, the great heroes and heroines of children’s literature who are the classic building blocks of our heritage.