The list
of books followed in this collection and the suggested ages for
their reading, is taken from the list of Good Books selected
by Dr. John Senior. Dr. Senior was the brilliant professor of
classics and humanities at the University of Kansas who with two
colleagues – Drs. Dennis Quinn and Frank Nelick - taught
the influential Integrated Humanities Program (“IHP”)
for freshmen and sophomores. The IHP produced many teachers, a
few farmers, numerous marriages and friendships, a wave of religious
awakening and conversions, primarily to Catholicism, some of whom
became priests, monks, religious sisters and one bishop.
Mr. Senior
was reluctant to respond to the many requests to prepare a list
of children’s books because there were so many good choices
(a thousand he estimated) that to name a hundred or so could give
the impression that these titles were definitive and superior
to all the rest. In fact, at the top of his original typed list
was the warning in capital letters not to reprint, for private
circulation only. The request was not honored and Senior’s
list of what he called the Good Books (necessary to be
read before reading the greatest and loftiest books, collectively
referred to – in similar lists of great classics -as the
Great Books) was later included in one of his own books
and has become widely available and regarded as helpful in that
it groups the reading levels for these classics according to stages
of growth and development by approximate age, rather than the
more restrictive and mechanical grade levels.
Our list
departs from Dr. Senior’s original, lengthier list by excluding
those selections no longer in print. We have also added C.S. Lewis’
Narnia series and J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of
the Rings trilogy for reasons which are articulated in the
appended article. Due to persistent parental requests we have
added grade level suggestions simply as rough approximations.
To this we
believe it is important for our audience to consider some practical
considerations in approaching reading and a reading schedule for
the Good Books.
Parents who
want to teach their children to read often seek information about
the best way to proceed: phonics or sight-word methods? We recognize
that parents and children have found value in both approaches;
in fact, when asked we always say to parents simply to follow
the way that seems best to achieve literacy for their children.
From an objective,
research-based perspective, however, it does appear that phonics
programs for reading have an edge on improving skills in learning
the sounds of the alphabet and rendering them into words. On the
other hand, sight-readers tend to start reading faster but, it
is said by its opponents, these early readers lack the skills
to learn or “sound out” words outside their controlled
vocabulary. And, there are significant examples on both sides
of the “reading wars” issue of children who have learned
to read successfully with either phonics or with the various whole-word
approaches. As if to add to the confusion, there is another class
of children who simply learn to read without formal phonics or
sight-word methods and neither parents nor teachers nor specialists
are exactly sure how this feat was accomplished. There is one
constant that runs throughout the success of all reading programs:
children who are read to from the earliest years on tend to be
early and good readers.
In general,
however, the research appears to indicate that phonics based programs
are more effective in teaching skills to understand the sounds
of our alphabet and from there to form words. This, in turn, promotes
reading confidence and the ability to sound out new words using
the phonetic skills.
The length
of the classic children’s books ranges from roughly a hundred
to eight hundred pages (e.g., some of Dickens), averaging
about two hundred pages. We suggest what we believe is a reasonable
goal: to read one book every two weeks, thus averaging twenty
pages or so a day, excluding weekends if one chooses. Of course,
it is not possible to keep this schedule with frequent television
viewing or Internet browsing and chat.
We believe
that students can increase their pace of reading by increasing
the movement of their eyes over the words, taking in more of the
sentence, but also slowing down when they begin to lose comprehension.
In this way all students can increase the pace of their reading
at least to some degree; however, this is not necessarily an endorsement
of “speed reading” methods, and the boundaries for
increasing one’s reading pace will always be when the individual
reader begins to lose comprehension, then it is time to stop just
short of that increased pace. The Good Books are excellent
material upon which to conduct these experiments on increasing
reading pace because unlike some of the Great Books they
are not treatises in philosophy, science and theology, being mostly
stories and novels. But a more important reason to read the Good
Books listed here, and to read them preferably when young,
is to prepare the imagination and intellect for the more challenging
ideas of the Great Books. It is not a flippant comment
to say that a person grounded in the rhymes and rhythms of Mother
Goose has also cultivated the senses and the mind for the
reading of Shakespeare.
Since both
Mother Goose and William Shakespeare are among the great
poets, and incidentally were Renaissance contemporaries, they
also remind us that it would be an inexcusable omission not to
give special mention to poetry as part of the collection of children’s
literature.
Poetry or
verse is the unique expression of language that reveals truths
and mysteries of life. By the poet’s ever ranging and focusing
vision on life, when he speaks he celebrates whatever his muse
has drawn him to embrace. It has been said that all poetry is
about love in some way, seeking it, having it, or losing it. A
good deal of the poems of the nursery and early childhood are
about having love, even in the so-called nonsense poetry there
is a light-hearted delight that comes from a loving, and lively,
heart. And, there are poems of loss that appear in the nursery
poems of Mother Goose and Robert Louis Stevenson where
the sad times of childhood prepare us for the heartbreaks of adolescence
and youth. Love, joy, sorrow, even anger, are all suited to the
poet’s voice as he celebrates our moods and emotions and
most of all our wonder at the wonder of being alive.
Clear, lively
prose is what we want for the narrative mode of stories, but compression
and images and precision is the language of poetry, its rhythms
and its rhymes, make the poem’s recreated experience more
memorable, more interior, more ours. The poet’s gaze into
the interior of his subject and diligence and inspiration in finding
just the right words also helps us see the world, ourselves and
others in a new, yet familiar way and above all more thoughtfully.
Though reading
and memorizing poetry is its own reward, to do so in childhood
creates a language-rich foundation that supports not only future
literary appreciation but increases reflective abilities toward
all the subjects of the curriculum. How so? Because becoming familiar
with poetry builds the habit of looking beyond the surface and
seeing connections between what first appeared as dissimilar ideas
or objects. This is the habit of metaphor, that is, the mind beginning
to see similarities between what at first appeared to be dissimilar
objects and ideas. This is why poetry was always a part of the
foundational Trivium, the essential three courses of
the medieval liberal arts curriculum, rooted in the classical
education of ancient Greece and Rome.
Taken together,
the poetry and prose of the best of children’s literature
produce not only superior academic results but a self-satisfying
experience of living closer to the truth of things, of being more
connected with creation and mankind.
Such a claim
that the Good Books are the “best” sometimes
gives rise to the question: why are there no contemporary titles
in your list? What about Harry Potter, for example? Apart
from the controversy surrounding the moral ambiguities of the
Harry Potter series of books, it is doubtful that such material
that depends so heavily on the bizarre and fantastic, with the
absence of a dominant theme of human virtue is enough to provide
the essential quality of a classic: endurance. Characteristically,
“fad” best selling books come and go rather quickly
compared to the staying power of, say, The Wind in the Willows,
Robin Hood, and, The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
that stay in print and are produced in film and stage versions
decade after decade, century and century in some cases. So it
is not an unusual fact, for example, that in 1955, Scuffy
the Tugboat by Gertrude Crampton was a national best selling
children’s book, a title and author not completely, but
virtually forgotten today. It is not easy to say exactly why one
book remains popular regardless of cultural changes while many,
many others perish in the recycling bin. Whatever that special
appeal the classic book possesses, it acts as a universal voice
that speaks to each generation, and each generation and another
and another continues to listen and is pleased.
Yet it cannot
be denied that modern and contemporary children’s literature
has created a large presence in schools, bookstores, libraries
and sometimes in the film industry. Since the 1940s, the books
of Dr. Seuss have remained in print and in use. For a time titles
such as The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham,
and, Hop on Pop were used as substitutes for the standard
early readers and certainly the playful rhymes and rhythms were
a welcome respite from the Dick and Jane type look-say readers.
But the Dr. Seuss phenomenon and the explosion of books for children
that followed this revolution, began to edge out the classics
on book shelves in stores and school libraries; and ideologically
the treasury of books from Mother Goose to The Scarlet
Pimpernel have come to be considered hopelessly old fashioned
and no longer relevant. For these reasons alone the list of books
here does not include contemporary or “popular” fiction
for children. Furthermore, there will always be books that catch
the reading public’s attention, that come and go, and readers
of all ages can always sample these books if they are curious
about their contents. But what if we were to lose the classics
by neglect or deliberate rejection, which convey the roots of
our culture?
Finally,
a reminder: Dr. Senior was the first to say that his list of books
for children was far from definitive, that on another day he might
make a different selection in some cases as he suspected alert
readers would as well.. Also, he said he certainly could be wrong
about the reading age and the selected books for that group; the
parent or teacher should remain experimental allowing the child
to discover their own level of reading challenge and appreciation.
Such was the reasonable spirit that informed all of John Senior’s
life and teaching; it is the same goodwill we wish to impart to
the readers of this book.
CHILDREN’S
LITERATURE INTRODUCTION
The best
of children’s literature is simply good literature that
anyone, child or adult, can enjoy. It is impossible to imagine
that Aesop’s Fables, The Household Tales of
the Brother’s Grimm, or Treasure Island, would
not be found delightful by adults as well as children. The poems
and stories that were once enjoyed in wonder and delight in youth
are now viewed in maturity in their truth and wisdom.
For many
contemporary books marketed for children, this is not the case;
they are often silly and regard the child as a kind of simple
toy, or the stories are laced with special interest, social agendas,
and in some cases the material is inappropriate or simply morally
offensive.
The illustrations
for many contemporary children’s books are gaudy while the
human and animal figures are grossly distorted. This is not to
say there are not authors of children’s literature writing
serious and significant material today – and talented and
traditional illustrators – there are both. But with the
exception of specialty stores that carry children’s books
written and illustrated in the more traditional mode, the classic
books for children occupy a small space on the shelves of the
big book stores.
And yet,
the best of children’s literature is still in print and
can be ordered from booksellers or found in libraries; on the
Internet new and used copies of classics can be purchased usually
for reasonable prices. Perhaps the audience for these good books
for children is smaller now but the poems and stories that nourished
children and pleased adults for centuries refuse to go away; their
appeal remains irresistible and their imaginative experience is
memorable for a lifetime. Why is this so? To ask this question
another way, what makes a book a classic?
Because literature
is an art it can never be understood as if it were a science like
mathematics. In the end, there will always be an element of a
poem’s charm or a story’s success we will not be able
to explain in rational terms as if we were explaining why one
engine works better than another. But, we can say the following
about classic literature: the classic poem or story not only
says something true and ultimately good about the nature of life
and human beings regardless of time or place, race or religion
or circumstances; it says it in a way that is delightful
and memorable. The literary work not only tells a story and
imparts knowledge in a unique way, the art of the tale or the
poem is an aesthetic experience. (Aesthetic
is from a Greek word that has to do with feelings and pleasurable
emotions. When we go to the doctor and receive an anesthetic
we are being made temporarily not to feel so a particular
examination or operation can be performed without feeling pain.)
In this realm
of beauty found in the pleasure derived from what is read, not
all the story’s charm is revealed at the first or second
or even after several readings. As we know, most children beg
to hear the good poems and stories again and again so they can
continue to experience their delight and even their surprise.
At least, that’s one reason why we think children do this
though we must repeat that there is also something mysterious
and unknowable why poems and stories affect us the way they do.
We can profit a great deal by talking about them with friends
and family, but in the end we can never explain why it is exactly
that we continue to admire them. Some teachers of literature are
impatient with students who simply say after reading a story or
poem, “I like it, but I’m not sure why.”
Of course, some discussion of the material is appropriate, but
without our undisturbed, first reactions of pleasure and delight
with literature there can be no further appreciation. We remember
that to analyze means to take apart. But will we be able to put
it together again?
Even though
classics are old, their themes and the delight they give are ever
young. A famous poet once said that poetry is news that stays
news. This is true of all classic literature from Aesop to Shakespeare.
So, these good books contain something true, unchanging and good
about life; and dramatize these truths for us in a pleasing and
memorable way. Before elaborating on the definition of a classic
book let’s look at the historical and cultural environment
that in part undermined the dominant themes of the true and good
found in the Good Books.
The literary,
philosophical and religious climate following World War I was
not friendly to traditional beliefs about the essential goodness
of man. Perhaps this can be understood from a psychological and
sociological perspective given the carnage of modern warfare and
the disruption of nations. The modern era has also seen the exposure
of corporate and political ambition, the corrupt views of teachers
in schools and universities, the scandal displayed by public leaders
and even some clergy are signs of a world’s critical illness
still very much with us in the 21st century.
Literary
themes that emerged from this era tend to be melancholy and dark;
characters are often despairing, violent, or overwhelmed. Frequently,
stories, poems and novels of the modern era lack any objective
moral center of gravity and often end either in ambiguity or tragic
absurdity. These times have also seen an alarming increase in
escapist and fantasy literature that lead the reader further and
further away from reality.
In spite
of the discouraging landscape left by this phenomenon called modernism,
the classic books of childhood and adolescence, the Good Books,
continue to refresh the air of life. This imaginative experience
is more important now than ever, not only for children who are
forming their ideas about the world and their lives, but for adults
who can rediscover and in a way relearn essential truths once
seen clearly in childhood.
To say these
classic books are true and good does not mean they do not contain
evil; the stories of Grimm and Anderson for example would be nothing
without the presence of cruel adults and disobedient children.
Sometimes it appears the evil characters triumph over the good
when we have a sad or tragic ending. But we would never recognize
such characters and endings as sad if it weren’t for the
story’s central sympathy with the good. In fact, it is only
a life centered in the good and the beautiful and the true that
recognizes and mourns the presence of their opposites. In this
way, the presence of cruel stepmothers, witches and ogres, giants
and monsters are true in that they are representative of evil
present in the world. In an early version of Little Red Riding
Hood the little girl, disobeying her mother’s warnings,
dallies on her way to visit her sick grandmother and stops to
chat with a stranger, a barely disguised wolf. The story’s
conclusion is clear: the little girl is devoured by the wolf.
The end!
So one thing
we can say about classic stories is that they arouse our sentiments,
in the case of the Little Red Riding Hood, fear and pity;
but they are not sentimental in the way the Walt Disney versions
are rewritten and presented. . The famous Hollywood rendition
of Pinocchio, for example, presents a mischievous little
puppet who yearns to be a real boy. The original story by Carlo
Collodi reveals a wooden puppet that is cruel and violent between
short-lived lapses into self-pitying remorse. In one of the early
chapters, Pinocchio picks up a large mallet and smashes the Cricket;
nor is he sorry. He continually betrays the love and trust of
Gepetto to the point of nearly breaking the old man’s heart.
The real story of Pinocchio by Collodi is one of conversion, a
replacing of a wooden heart with a human one that has learned
to love. It is this element of virtue, or the alarming lack of
it, that is characteristic of a classic book though the best of
these books never moralize or preach life’s lessons to us.
They show them and we feel with, that is, we
sympathize with them. It is this moral depth of the story, more
mature than the thinned out popular versions, that elevates the
original tale above the realm of mere entertainment and places
it with the great stories that are both true and good.
The second
element of a classic story or poem, that the work is delightful
and pleasing and can be experienced over and over, is not separate
from the fact that it is true and good. A work of art can never
be systematized, analyzed, taken apart, classified and labeled
and put back together again – neither could Humpty Dumpty!
Rather, we say a classic work of art, be it a painting, sculpture,
musical composition, or literature, is experienced as an integrated
whole. It is difficult to say exactly why a piece of literature
possesses the quality of lasting pleasure, but it has something
to do with this unity where the characters, the plot, the dialogue,
beginning, middle and the end, combine in such a way as to proclaim
that the story or the poem could not have been written in any
other way. There is nothing we would change. Just as Goldilocks
found one bowl of porridge “just right” without defining
exactly what that means, so too we know when we finish a good
story such as Goldilocks and the Three Bears or Jack
London’s Call of the Wild, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
Song of Hiawatha, or Louisa May Alcott’s Little
Women, that we experienced a delight in the telling that
we would desire others to experience again and again. This ongoing
popularity of the classics is the long view afforded by the Good
Books. These titles and perhaps a thousand more stay in print
year after year, in some cases century after century, whereas
it is likely the best seller of today will be recycled paper for
tomorrow.
The reason
for the persistent presence of the classics of children’s
literature is not the result of marketing techniques and expensive
advertising campaigns. These books continue to be read because
children and adults discover that what they reveal about our lives
and our world is not just true at a certain period of time or
in a certain location for a particular group of people, but are
always true, everywhere for everyone. Another reason for their
appeal rests on the intuitive knowledge of the true and good everyone
who encounters them share, who discover it is a better and higher
thing to enjoy and be schooled by a work of art than to analyze
it. Since the themes of the stories reveal timeless truths about
the human condition, from the humorous to the tragic, we see that
one of the marks of a classic is its universal appeal. We experience
a sense of unity with nature and human nature when we give ourselves
to the classic stories and poems of the Good Books. There
is a sound reason and one not difficult to discover why Aesop,
Huckleberry Finn, the works of Homer and Shakespeare continue
to be translated into nearly every language in the world.
But we must
admit our modern times have not been encouraging for reading and
conversing about what we have read. Conversing is an aspect of
leisure that naturally accompanies the act of reading that has
been terribly undermined by the visual and to some extent the
audio stimulants of contemporary culture. It has become commonplace
for reading enthusiasts to recognize and blame television for
luring children and their parents away from reading books and
conversing about them, and instead spend their free time staring
into the bright and flashy electronic window of movement and color
accompanied by high fidelity and stereo sound from the TV set
and now the computer screen.
Individual
reactions will vary to television viewing and the varieties of
video experience: computer screens, DVDs, and movies in theaters.
It seems that the less frequent the video experience, children
are able to take or leave the electronic stimulation of the eyes
and continue to cultivate their imagination and intellect through
reading good books. But the more children who watch electronic
images with super sound instead of reading, the more they not
only lose the ability to enjoy stories, histories, and poetry,
but they also lose interest in conversing about much more than
the latest news in the world of popular culture – music,
sports, movie and television stars.
Marie Winn
in her book, The Plug-In Drug, published in 1977, appeals
not only to common sense about the decline in reading in America,
but includes data from controlled studies that reveal what occurs
in the eyes and in the brain of a child watching television. It
amounts to a virtual disconnect with reality. Her thesis was revolutionary
when the book first appeared: she said that arguments over content
on television are irrelevant compared to the real danger. Eye
movement resembles a hypnotic or drugged state and the brain reacts
in some respects as if it were asleep when viewing television.
It was not simply a discussion about the “bad” programs
versus the “good” ones, she said, or the superiority
of so called “educational” commercial-free, clever
children’s shows that appeared on PBS Television. Winn said
that the viewing experience itself was harmful regardless of what
was on the screen. The posture, facial expression and the subdued
brain activity on one hand, and brain agitation on the other,
indicated that television viewing especially for the younger viewer
looked more like a drug induced state than a learning experience
regardless of the quality of the content. Marshall McLuhan warned
of the same danger, summarized in aphorisms such as “The
medium is the message,” and “With telephone
and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is ‘sent’.”
The implications
for social life and reading were obvious. With extensive viewing
healthy family life deteriorated where the children became remote
from the family circle. Deprived of essential real-life experiences
when it came to reading either informational or imaginative material
the child lacked sensory and intellectual memories of reality
to form images and ideas from what they were reading. Winn also
cites studies that strongly suggest links between the video experience
and forms of dyslexia and so-called ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder).
Book publishers
and authors continue to produce more materials for children, but
since the television and video screen revolution many of these
books are written in language far below age level and illustrated
with garish colors and distorted figures (such as those used by
Theodor Geisel a.k.a. Dr. Suess and Maurice Sendak) to compete
with the flashy visual displays on the electronic screen.
This technological
distraction to reading used to be confined to the home where there
was one television set for the family. Now there are often several
sets throughout the house, stereo players, Walkmans, iPods, computers,
telephones and cell phones so that each home has become an electronic
village. At most schools, the video and electronic experience
continues with computers and televisions in the classrooms and
(ironically!) in the library. Every moment spent with these devices
at home or school is lost time the student could have been reading
good books and talking about them with their classmates and
teacher and preparing to write about the book’s themes and
characters.
Students,
parents and teachers sometimes ask what the difference is between
reading books onscreen, such as, Robinson Crusoe, certainly
one of the Good Books, and reading the same story on
the printed page between the covers of a book. The answer requires
that we remind ourselves of who we are: human beings, the philosophical
or religious definition of which states we are a composite of
a body and a soul. That means we react to the world and things
that come our way with both our external senses and or internal
senses. We use our eyes that focus on three dimensional reality,
our ears that receive sounds either heard aloud or in the silence
of our minds, and the sense of touch that feels the heft and surfaces,
edges and width of objects (such as books). Each of these external
senses working together inform our ideas of things: are they pleasant
or unpleasant, bright or dark, warm or cold? Finally, in the mysterious
integration of body and soul a conclusion is reached sometimes
quickly, sometimes after repeated experiences, that a particular
thing, person or place is either good or bad for us. In this way
all our judgments about things become ethical or moral because
value is assigned to life’s experiences based on whether
they are good or bad. But it all begins in the realm of the senses
- all of it.
Consequently,
the sensory experience of reading or listening to a story involves
not only more of the powers of the human being but as a result
engages our sense of moral evaluation more keenly. When the sensory
and mental powers are focused on the content of the Good Books
then our sense of the good, the true and the beautiful are increased
even more since the culture of these stories and poems are saturated
in either the ethical perception of the modern world or the ancient
world or the Judeo-Christian revelation of Western civilization.
The flat surface of a computer screen where text floats, suspended
in cyber space, has the impression of if not actually being close
to non reality, of not quite existing as well as giving rise to
the debate: is such protracted (average of 5+ hours per day) onscreen
reading, as well as television viewing, detrimental to good vision?
To read the
Good Books is to participate in the great tradition of
learning through delight and wonder that leads to wisdom which
is to discover and do the good which is the heart’s deepest
longing, to be united to the good, the true and the beautiful
which is happiness on earth. Without pedantic “teaching
or preaching”, every Aesop Fable is a dramatized
story of the virtues, prudence, justice, courage, and temperance,
often instructing by the defect or excess of the virtue. We really
do not need the “moral lessons” at the end of these
perfect stories – attentive readers see their meaning integrated
within all the elements of the story, not as a simplified afterthought.
The books
read when students are older, for example, those by Louisa May
Alcott, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or Mark Twain, portray characters
memorable for their bravery or cowardice, compassion or bitterness,
prudence or bad judgment, impatience or long suffering. And yet
for all the positive things we can say about the Good Books
as instruments of cultivating the imagination upon truth and forming
the character upon goodness there is another appeal to the reader
that resides in the experience of beauty that is characteristic
of all art, a mysterious dimension of wonder and pleasure that
is impossible rationally to explain. It is real and certain and
draws our attention to itself, but we are at a loss to describe
it. The ancients attributed this allure to the presence of the
Muse, a mysterious source of inspiration for the author and the
reader. The invisible reality of the Muse has continued to be
acknowledged from the classical Greek dramatists to the modern
American poet Robert Frost.
All these
things, delight, wonder, virtue, and inspiration simply are not
present in the majority of the so-called children’s literature
of today. Social themes such as divorce and alternative life styles;
political relevance topics such as concerns over the rain forest,
global warming, and racial and gender equality dominate children’s
literature and are often used in social studies classes. These
may indeed be relevant socially and politically but they have
no Muse, that is, there is nothing to admire and love about the
characters since they appear in the story merely as figures to
act out whatever agenda is being promoted. Furthermore, such stories
will not achieve a universal theme, a victory or failure based
on the unity of all human beings, but whose action and outcome
is confined to one particular circumstance that could or could
not apply to others.
There are
also other modern themes that have entered juvenile fiction: loneliness,
alienation, failed friendships, themes directed toward early adolescent
girls in particular. Popular fiction for adolescent boys is dominated
by fantasy and the fantastic, and violence, exploiting boys’
natural inclination for action and adventure. The stories and
novels for this age group are written and illustrated almost entirely
for visual excitement that creates a state of stimulation much
like the viewing of video games and “action-adventure”
movies. In this literature there is no depth of character upon
which to reflect and very little moral distinction between the
hero’s use of force to win the day and the villain's shear
barbarianism.
Again, it
is very important to repeat that this overview of the current
state of children’s literature is by necessity a generalization
because these features and trends are generally true; however,
there are writers and illustrators of children’s books today
who are innovative and place their stories in modern settings,
yet compose their themes and illustrations within an artistic
and ethical tradition of literature for younger readers.
Even though
reading the Good Books are their own reward, that is,
their worth is found in the delight and knowledge they give, not
in material reward; it is also true that a grounding in this literature
cultivates our emotional and mental life to receive the ideas
and questions presented by the Great Books of Western
civilization that begin with such authors as Homer, Euclid, Plato,
Aeschylus, and Aristotle. In other words, if a child has been
well nourished on Mother Goose and Robert Louis Stevenson,
he or she is ready to read Shakespeare.
A student
thus nourished passes from reading the Good Books to
the first Great Books generally somewhere between the
end of the elementary experience and the beginning college years.
However, firmly assigning a Good or Great Book
to a grade level fails to observe the emotional and mental “ages”
that can vary quite a bit. Flexibility based on the ability of
the student should determine at what time a particular book is
read. Unlike empirical science, teaching the Good Books
is experimental, like an art, where the rational faculty of the
child is not the main focus, but the intuitive, the emotional,
imaginative and the sensory dimensions of his being are brought
into play.
Education
by the Good Books that leads to the Great Books,
enriching the soil of the soul’s higher faculties achieves
something greater than cultivating literate and literary-minded
students – it passes on the best of our culture. And what
has been that culture? It is the best of what man can achieve
for civilized society, it is excellence of character by which
we measure our goodness and our faults, it is the civil of civilization
which requires a life based on principles rather than whim in
relationships in the family, government, economy, labor and leisure,
and religion. It is freedom to enjoy the life of the mind as well
as the good of the body; it is the hope to build society upon
moral principles whose very atmosphere encourages its citizens
to excel as individuals within a community of like minded men
and women regardless of ethnicity, race or cultural differences.
Think of
an education without the traditional nursery poems, A Child’s
Garden of Verses, or Treasure Island, Little
Women, and The Secret Garden, and how much exposure
to humanity in all its variety would be missed. Without the literary
mode that as Aristotle said not only instructs but delights, education
would not be worthy of the name. Note well that all totalitarian
regimes in the past and in our time remove first from education
all books of poetry and fiction, books that portray the breadth
of the human spirit. By reading these books that portray us at
our best and sometimes at our worst, we are united in a common
bond of understanding of what it means to be human and thereby
create in us a sympathy and a tolerance for the foibles of mankind
and an abiding admiration for our ability to be loving, courageous
and kind. In the end, this is education’s purpose, this
maturing of our humanity, and the children’s classics –
the Good Books - are certainly an essential means of
conveying this noble work.
* * *
Copyright
2007. All rights reserved.
May not be copied nor duplicated without prior written permission.
