Kids today are offered many invitations to be shallow. Everywhere they are bombarded with proclamations that reality is self-defined, appetites are sacred, and that self-control is self-defacement.
If you examine the children’s books on the shelves of your local bookstore you find that girls are afflicted with books like Teenage-ness: the Teenage years, Glitter Edition (Now with Sex!).
And boys are offered versions of Want Some Angst With Those Jokes? Gross-out Pranks From an Orphaned Underachiever Who Is Really Quite Special.
Those actual titles don’t exist … yet, but books like that judge their success on how closely they are able to repeat the appetites and solipsism of the youth market. Through the advocacy of self-regard, these books pluck only the low hanging fruit of ego. They promise to spiral the outside world in toward the reader. But the ability to spiral inward is limited, whereas the ability to spiral outward is unlimited.
One way to display a higher opinion of children than the popular fashion is to address them as members of the human family and not as a special class of self-worshipping mirror-gazers.
Older writers did this. There is no reason we can’t.
Consider this contemplative poem meant for a young audience by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Rain
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The rain is falling all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.
—– —– —–
I love how Stevenson ties a child to the romance of the sea by the common experience of rain.
The poem refuses to pander. Instead of organizing the world around the child, this poem uses rain as a universal binder and inserts the child into it. The rain falls on the field and tree of the country, the umbrellas of the town (where the child lives), and the ships at sea. The world is bigger than the child, and the child has a place in it.
The way to habituate a child to shallow thinking is to present a world that needs to bend itself to the child in order to obtain significance. However, some literature (much of it older) allows a child to see the grandeur of the world outside themselves and perceive a higher order in which they might have a place.
What are your favorite books/poems that treat children as people?
You can find more of his work online at zachfranzen.com and on Instagram @zachfranzen.
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I love this mucho very. As is often the case, I need this nearly as badly as my kids. This SHOULD be a thing that marks the difference between childhood (immaturity) and adulthood (maturity), but it doesn’t seem to be a distinction of our era. At least that’s the appearance.
As you say, it’s sort of “in the air,” and therefore hard to contest. But it feels like much of this immaturity-fostering worldview traffics on the highway of the imagination.
A worthy place to make a stand.
Thanks Sam.
Just one point to add. I think the pandering instinct is actually more destructive for girls. The type of attention boys receive from publishing is half-hearted. It’s not very earnest. This poses it’s own problems, but it’s not the same as the truckloads of earnest books written for girls in order to train them in the arts of envy and self-love.
C.S. Lewis wrote that there are two types of longing. One carves out a space for the appreciation of spiritual things. He calls the other type “a disease.”
He says, “The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes–things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had a fair chance.”
He is describing dozens of series that target girl readers–novelizations of Us Weekly or People Magazine.
That is worth exploring. Thanks! It feels like the road has never been very easy for girls, but that the innovative ideologies of modernity have been particularly abusive –especially so given the promises made and the reality produced. It’s both sad and infuriating.
As is the assault-by-totally-factoring-out taking place regarding boys.
This is wonderful. The first book that springs to mind is _The Wheel on the School_. We’ve been reading it aloud and love the teacher who respects and encourages his students’ ideas, and the project that starts with the school children and ends up involving the whole community.
I think books like Henry and Ribsy, Farmer Boy, The Middle Moffat, Homer Price etc. manage to be both sympathetic to children and connect them to the wider world.
But I am very eager to read The Wheel on the School. I went to the wikipedia entry and found this in its second paragraph: “Fred Inglis, in his book The Promise of Happiness: Value and Meaning in Children’s Fiction, writes that the book invokes the ancient pieties and the values of the old world and makes them ‘imaginable in the new.'” Though the “new” in this case is 1957, I’m still eager to read such a book.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Sounds like your kind of book, Zach.
Zach – This is so, so good.
I just finished reading “Understood Betsy” by Dorothy Canfield Fisher with my daughter – probably my favorite read-aloud with her to date. The dignity and personhood of the child is handled beautifully. Highly recommended.
Well said!
Thank you Julie. I’m excited to read it.
Understood Betsy is too one of our favorites ever! Julie, I could not have described so eloquently, but you are right on the mark.
I was wondering about this same thing recently: http://wp.me/p149dz-1lD Our place (all of us, as children) will most rightly be found – our truest identity – when we begin to perceive the world outside ourselves. The lies we tell children are ones we also tell ourselves.
I somehow managed to miss this post until now. I’m so glad It’s beautiful. I love the way you explicate Stevenson’s poem and your drawing–it evokes a wonderful longing for childhood days of splashing in puddles 🙂
(That C.S. Lewis quote you included in one of your comments is powerful. And disturbing in its prescience.)
Awesome content, the picture of rain falling on the umbrella and the sea is romantic and brings with it a sense of desire. Could you give us one or two of your favorite “old books” that did this for you?