Sometimes a book for kids is just a book for kids. There is no existentialist reason for being hidden within the words. There is no parallel to the White House's poor handling of the economy in a parent denying their child a toy on the trip to the store. There is just a mom and a kid learning that sometimes you can't always get what you want (although, in the immortal words of Jagger, "you just might find, you get what you need" . . . thank you, please, tip your waiters).
Saturday's mocking of New York Times children's book reviewers by Gawker took me straight back to high school. Raised on a back road with few kids for playdates, no TV to watch and a brother who was significantly younger, I was the student English teachers saw coming from a mile away. There wasn't a book in the high school library I hadn't read. The clerk at our local library started turning a blind eye to my forays into the "grown-up" section of the library when I was around nine and fed up with reading the same thing over and over. In short, I wasn't the kid they needed to make reading assignments to in order to ensure I was reading.
That didn't make me any less susceptible to the laissez faire approach most kids take to assigned reading. I blame the teachers (not all of them, there were a few good eggs in the henhouse). Breaking books down to discover the supposed nuance behind every word, ferreting out the hidden psychoses of the authors, they managed to suck every bit of pleasure from books I would otherwise have devoured like a piece of chocolate cake. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was one of my pre-teen favorites, reread on days when I too wished I could hand over my chores to my friends in exchange for some cold hard cash. Hashing and rehashing of Huck Finn a few years later inside a classroom turned me against Mark Twain for good. What could have been a compelling tale of river adventure - to a girl growing up in a river town of her own - was instead an arduous dissection of the importance of money for survival, the dangers of the river and a debate on superstitions.
Valid subjects of high school study, to be sure, but at the cost of losing would-be readers? With me, teachers were fortunate. They might have lost me on Twain, but they'd pick me up again on Orwell or Bronte. Nothing could keep me from a book.
It's the kids who don't walk into a school building with a love of literature who are being hurt by taking books too seriously too early. Who wants to read a book when you're being told you read it wrong? That the princess in your fairy tale is supposed to give your four-year-old a keener eye for determining whether Prince Charles should truly ascend the throne?
How about letting them enjoy the ride so one day they can reap the benefits?
Image: DailyMail
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