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The Best That Has Been Known and Thought in the World: Selecting Children's Literature
If you have recently browsed through the children's section of your public library or bookstore, you will have noticed the appalling quantity of objectionable children's books. For one thing, many young children's books are downright ugly. Parents tend to believe that children need colorful books with lots of garish pictures, but it is their job to cultivate a child's aesthetic sense with books that are visually appealing. Very young children learn via pictures; therefore, their books should be beautifully decorated by illustrators such as Arthur Rackham, Ernest Shepard, and John Tenniel. Children's eyes should feast on delicate black and white drawings as well as lavish artwork. Children's aesthetic sense is nurtured audibly as well as visually. Young children love rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, so they should be treated to a steady diet of poetry. The rhymes of Mother Goose and the poetry of R.L. Stevenson or A.A. Milne should become the well-loved favorites of childhood.
In addition to the visual and auditory quality of children's books, the words themselves are obviously of vital importance. Classic children's books should not be watered down verbally, so give children unabridged editions. If a child is not mature enough to read Pilgrim's Progress, let him age a little. Do not sit him down to an easy version of Bunyan's allegory and thereby cheat him of the spiritual insights he will gain if he waits until he is ready for the original version, and make sure he reads an edition that is annotated with Bunyan's marginal notes. It is unfortunate that many adults believe, at least subconsciously, that the story's quality is unimportant. On the contrary, children's books should be of high caliber. The best children's books are written by authors who, in the words of C.S. Lewis, "meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals . . . The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man." However, many publishers such as Illustrated Classic Editions or Troll Illustrated Classics offer poorly adapted and poorly illustrated versions of classic children's literature. Books such as these are easy to read and therefore extremely addictive; in fact, in order to accommodate the growing number of illiterates in America, the whole book industry has redoubled its efforts to produce watered down adaptations of every genre from mythology to modern drama.
Even more serious than diluted classics are books that are objectionable on moral grounds. The Harry Potter series is but one of many wretched choices. Well-known, popular authors who write exclusively for children fill their plots with offensive content and language that would make any sensitive adult cringe. The popular Dav Pilkey books, which adopt a cartoon format, are the crudest of the breed; in addition to non-stop vulgarity, Pilkey's books ridicule authority figures and deal in pointless nonsense. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, pseudonym for Daniel Handler, is a best-selling series that describes the sordid adventures of some orphans whose parents die in a house fire. The author explicitly warns the young reader that the lives of these unhappy children, appropriately named Baudelaire, are filled with misery and despair. Another much more disturbing series directly attacks Christianity; this is a fantasy trilogy entitled His Dark Materials by British author Philip Pullman. The author uses his books to rail against the Christian faith; he depicts God as an inept tyrant, and he reverses traditional definitions of good and evil. This is very dangerous fare for young minds.
The list of objectionable children's books grows longer every day, but everyone interested in nurturing young minds should stay informed about children's authors who promote what is true, honest, just, pure, and lovely and those who pervert God's standards. Children should be taught to make moral judgments; such training begins in early childhood. The young learn early what is right and wrong, what is beautiful and what is ugly, and they learn by reading. George MacDonald has good advice for the young: "As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other, you will find what is needful for you in a book." Fairy stories, fantasies, stories about ordinary boys and girls engaged in simple tasks teach children to become virtuous adults who have a clear understanding of God's world and their place in His kingdom. So next time you visit the children's section of your local library or bookstore, ask for more classic titles and tell the manager you agree with Walter de la Mare that "only the rarest kind of best of anything can be good enough for the young."
Copyright 2004. All Rights Reserved. ElizabethMcCallum.com
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