Children and Complexity: Do We Dare Repair the Universe?
2004; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chq.0.1636
ISSN1553-1201
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoChildren and Complexity:Do We Dare Repair the Universe? Richard Flynn The two most interesting critical books on children and literature I've recently read are not scholarly tomes, but trade books. The first is Sam Swope's I Am a Pencil: A Teacher, His Kids, and Their World of Stories. It's about children becoming truly engaged writers-given a dedicated teacher with enough pedagogical leeway. Swope worked with the same group of students at an elementary school in Queens for three years, as they moved from the third through the fifth grade. Their resistance to his writing instruction is a large part of the story. What struck me as I was finishing this wise and moving book was Swope's remark about a "genius" teacher, Mrs. Duncan, in whose class he first worked. In the Epilogue, which takes the form of a letter to his students, Swope notes that this masterful teacher is taking early retirement because of the "new curriculum mandated by the city": The new curriculum requires teachers in underperforming schools to follow a regimen—exactly this many minutes for group reading, exactly this many minutes for responses, and so on. She said it took the joy and creativity out of teaching for her. (She also said a program like mine wouldn't be possible in the school today; there just wouldn't be time.) (296) The second book, Julius Lester's memoir, On Writing for Children and Other People, offers an equally poignant warning about the state of literature, education and schools. Each chapter begins with a photograph and an epigraph. I was pleased to find a quotation from "The Speed of Darkness" by one of my favorite poets, Muriel Rukeyser: "The universe is made of stories not of atoms!" At one point, Lester discusses the three things that prepared him to be a writer: reading widely and studying art and music. These are the very things being pushed out of our schools. While I am too old to have read Lester's books as a child, I do remember hearing as a young child his original songs and blues and spirituals from his brief career as a folk-singer. I listened night after night to him and my other beloved folk-singers on Dick Cerri's Music Americana on WAVA radio in Washington, DC—precisely the kind of radio that no longer exists, for the most part, in this country. Lester speaks eloquently about writing being a sacred trust and invokes the Judaic concept of tikkun haolam : "repair of the universe." "We relate to children as 'Its,'" Lester writes, "when we forget what it was like to be a child. Childhood is a time of extraordinary complexity. . ."(103). [End Page 291] Now, children's literature scholars have long rejected the more simplistic manifestations of the Romantic idealization of "the child," and we have also rejected the Cassandra-like warnings about "the disappearance of childhood" by the late Neil Postman and others as overly simplistic and far too universalizing. But let us not forget that Cassandra predicted the truth—it's just that nobody listened. Frankly, I'm alarmed by the Trojan Horse of educational "standards" that threatens to sell the arts and meaningful literacy down the Lethe. Books like Swope's and Lester's provide us with a kind of alethiometer. In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Lyra, you'll recall, uses her alethiometer intuitively as a child, to negotiate an ideological nightmare—her world is controlled by a severely repressive institution, and she has seriously flawed parents to boot. But by the end of The Amber Spyglass she arrives at a complex understanding of what it means to become an adult. She learns that truth isn't simple; sometimes it's hard to distinguish the good guys from the evildoers. Collectively, the essays in this issue often describe the ways in which powerful ideologies and institutions attempt to force children into standardized and socially approved modes of being in the world. But they also imply that these approved modes work precisely to limit or even deny the complexity of childhood, just as they work to limit or deny children's agency. Megan...
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