No solution but some worthwhile observations

Nancy Schnog had an article in the August 24, 2008, Washington Post, We're Teaching Books That Don't Stack Up.

As a teacher herself (of juniors and seniors in high school) she has some reality based observations. I don't agree completely with the implications of some of her analysis, but it is well worth reading. At the core of her article, she obliquely identifies the issue - the challenge of matching a child to the books that she might love so that interest fuels passion for reading rather than that academic exercise smothers the fire.

It is not easily done at all, and especially in these days of ever broadening social norms, inflated expectations of (mental and social) maturity, and attempts at standardization of education. I am not against rigorous performance measurement of children and schools but do recognize that that presents some very legitimate challenges that have not yet been effectively addressed.

Neurology of learning

From an e! Science News article, September 25, 2008, From 12 years onward you learn differently.

Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently.

It is a short article and worth reading in its entirety.

Adam Gopnik on Babar

From Adam Gopnik's article in the September 22, 2008 New Yorker, Freeing the Elephants. A reflective article with some interesting observations. I particularly enjoyed his concluding paragraph.

Far more than an allegory of colonialism, the “Babar” books are a fable of the difficulties of a bourgeois life. “Truly it is not easy to bring up a family,” Babar sighs at one point, and it is true. The city lives on the edge of a desert, and animals wander in and out at will, and then wander out again to make cities of their own. The civilizing principle is energetic but essentially comical, solid-looking on the outside but fragile in its foundations, reducible to rubble by rhinoceroses. Even the elephants, for all their learning and sailor suits, can be turned into slaves through a bad twist of fate. The unruliness of natural life is countered by the beautiful symmetries of classical style and the absurd orderliness of domestic life—but we are kidding ourselves if we imagine that we are ever really safe. Death is a rifle shot and a poisoned mushroom away. The only security, the de Brunhoff books propose, lies in our commitment to those graceful winged elephants that, in Babar’s dream, at the end of “Babar the King,” chase away misfortune. Love and Happiness, who are at the heart of the American vision, are, in Babar’s dream, mere tiny camp followers. The larger winged elephants, which are at the forefront of this French vision of civilized life, are instead Intelligence, Patience, Learning, and Courage. “Let’s work hard and cheerfully and we’ll continue to be happy,” the Old Lady tells the elephants, and, though we know that the hunter is still in the woods, it is hard to know what more to add.

Insight without illumination

I often am exasperated by the large community of well intended readers (most often out of academia) who spend so much time harping about the purported disguised messages (and thereby corrupting dangers) hidden in classics of children's literature, usually with the resulting advocacy that children should not be exposed to these books. My exasperation is threefold. First, that the critiques leveled at the books (usually race, class, and gender or some combination) are so extended that they would encompass virtually all well written books and thereby leave us without reading material. Second, that the messages are often so hidden that they are only discernible to an adult rather than to a child; and an adult, at that, with plenty of time on their hand for reflection. In addition, that which is being criticised is open to multiple equally legitimate interpretations - i.e. the criticism is speculative rather than fact based. Third, that the critique is so completely divorced from any sense of proportion or perspective. Proportion in that the element being criticized may only be a small part of the story. Perspective in that a parent needs all the help they can get to find an engaging story quickly and doesn't have time to read/comprehend a forty page explication about the inherent class bias exhibited in Lassie or the dangers posed by the disguised misogyny of the Hardy Boys. They just need a good story - Now!

All that being said, sometimes these cogitations do turn up some interesting points. It is rather as if these deeply knowledgeable critics entered a darkened room with a laser pointer. They can point out all sorts of interesting little features of the room in a strange red light but can give no overall illumination of the nature of the room. The parent gains more understanding of the room with a one second flip of the light switch than three hours of a laser pointer tour.

All this is brought to mind because of an article by Adam Gopnik in the September 22, 2008 New Yorker, Freeing the Elephants. Gopnik addresses a central charge leveled at Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books for the last two or three decades; namely that they are purveyors of an imperialist mind set and are therefore dismissive of the non-European world.

It is an interesting article for pointing out different ways of understanding the context in which the Babar books were written and ways of interpreting the stories. Gopnik is as deeply knowledgeable as the critics but takes a more tolerant and encompassing view of the stories.

If you are short on time though - just read the Babar stories. They are still great after all these years and will almost certainly hold your child's interest.

Insight without illumination

I often am exasperated by the large community of well intended readers (most often out of academia) who spend so much time harping about the purported disguised messages (and thereby corrupting dangers) hidden in classics of children's literature, usually with the resulting advocacy that children should not be exposed to these books. My exasperation is threefold. First, that the critiques leveled at the books (usually race, class, and gender or some combination) are so extended that they would encompass virtually all well written books and thereby leave us without reading material. Second, that the messages are often so hidden that they are only discernible to an adult rather than to a child; and an adult, at that, with plenty of time on their hand for reflection. In addition, that which is being criticised is open to multiple equally legitimate interpretations - i.e. the criticism is speculative rather than fact based. Third, that the critique is so completely divorced from any sense of proportion or perspective. Proportion in that the element being criticized may only be a small part of the story. Perspective in that a parent needs all the help they can get to find an engaging story quickly and doesn't have time to read/comprehend a forty page explication about the inherent class bias exhibited in Lassie or the dangers posed by the disguised misogyny of the Hardy Boys. They just need a good story - Now!

All that being said, sometimes these cogitations do turn up some interesting points. It is rather as if these deeply knowledgeable critics entered a darkened room with a laser pointer. They can point out all sorts of interesting little features of the room in a strange red light but can give no overall illumination of the nature of the room. The parent gains more understanding of the room with a one second flip of the light switch than three hours of a laser pointer tour.

All this is brought to mind because of an article by Adam Gopnik in the September 22, 2008 New Yorker, Freeing the Elephants. Gopnik addresses a central charge leveled at Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books for the last two or three decades; namely that they are purveyors of an imperialist mind set and are therefore dismissive of the non-European world.

It is an interesting article for pointing out different ways of understanding the context in which the Babar books were written and ways of interpreting the stories. Gopnik is as deeply knowledgeable as the critics but takes a more tolerant and encompassing view of the stories.

If you are short on time though - just read the Babar stories. They are still great after all these years and will almost certainly hold your child's interest.

Books as catalysts

I have completed Nicholas A. Basbanes' wonderful Every Book Its Reader. He is eminently quotable and I will be posting a number of items here shortly.

Let's start with this simple observation:

That literature is fundamental to our cultural heritage and our shared patrimony is a given. The Greeks have their Iliad and Odyssey, the Chinese their Tao te Ching, the Indians their Mahabharata, the Italians their Divine Comedy, the Spanish their Don Quixote, and each of these works is a literary masterpiece that is transcendent, every one an epic in the most fundamental sense of the word. Even among cultures that have not survived to our time, great works that helped define who these people were live on - the Mesopotamians with their Gilgamesh, the Persians with their Shahnameh, the Anglo-Saxons with their Beowulf, the Romans with their Aeneid, the Maya with their Popol Vuh, to cite just a few examples. But books not only define lives, civilizations, and collective identities, they also have the power to shape events and nudge the course of history, and they do it in countless ways. Some of them are profoundly obvious, as in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the 1852 novel that, some believe, moved Abraham Lincoln to remark, "caused this great war," or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, an eloquent condemnation of the pesticide DDT issued in 1962 that questioned the sureness of technological progress and ushered in the environmental protection movement.

Anne Frank and library books

From Anne Frank's diary. A Dutch friend, Miep Gies, helped shelter Anne and her family and retrieved her diary after she and the others were arrested. One of his contributions was to bring five books from the library each week.

We always long for Saturdays when our books come. Just like little children receiving a present. Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here.

Later she records:

I can hardly wait for the day that I shall be able to comb through the books in the public library.

Thomas a Kemp - "I have sought for rest everywhere, but I have found it nowhere except in a corner with a book"

How many books does the average child read in a year?

We know from the Census Bureau and Commerce Department that the average household spends about $35 per year on books.

I have often wondered how many books an average household contains but have yet to come across any sort of information that might answer that question.

The other day it occurred to me that I don't know how many books an average child reads each year. The question came to me while following a list serv discussion where the majority of the participants were advocating limiting access to books that, while popular for many decades, run counter to current social sensitivities. My initial thought was - We alredy have a hard enough time getting many kids to read much at all, why keep cutting back on books that are known to attract them?

Which then led me to the question: just how many books do kids read? It is not an easy one to answer and if anyone has better information I would be very interested in hearing about it. The best I could come up with is some calculations from raw data released in a report this year by Renaissance Learning, What Kids Are Reading. In it they report the number of books children read per year by grade. They then also provide the same information for the readers performing in the top decile of reading proficency.

There are obvious issues with this source of information. It is a structured reading program: presumably school districts that can afford such a program may already have a higher than average reading population. It is unclear that the results capture summer reading volumes. The results are self-reported by students (though they are subsequently quizzed on content) which might lead to higher than accurate reported reading. It should also be noted that the decline in number of books read, makes some sense as children move from 32 page picture books to 80 page intermediate readers, to 150 page young adult books.

The average child starts school reading 39 books per year. This goes up a little their first couple of years in school and then declines steadily. In their high school years, they are reading about 6 books a year. This latter number is consistent with surveys that are conducted periodically in which adults are asked some variation on the question of how many books did you read in the past year and in which the results typically vary between four and ten books as an answer.

The interesting aspect is that Renaissance also reported the results for the best readers. They start first grade already reading at nearly twice the volume of their peers, i.e. 74 books per year versus 39. They also exhibit a decline in number of books read per year till by high school they are reading 25 books per year. However, this represents more than a four-fold multiple of number books they are reading over that of their peers (25 books versus 6 books).

It would appear that the culture of reading is already established by high school years and that it represents a pretty wide variance between the top readers and everyone else. Mathematically, the implication is also that 76% of all books read, are read by only 10% of the population, again a number consistent with other data. I see this concentration of reading little remarked upon in the various articles and research I come across.

While these numbers are provisional, I suspect that they are in the ball park (potentially too high) and probably directionally correct. So on average, each househlod spends about $35 on books each year and the average child reads around forty picture books per year in their young years (1st through 3rd grade), about fifteen books per year in their independent reader grades (4th through 8th grade) and six books per year in their young adult years. Those are soberingly small numbers when you think about which books you would prefer that they read at each of those grade levels.

Reader Testimonials

The stories of readers' interactions with books seem evergreen to me. Here are some stories from the Vancouver Sun, Tuesday September 23, 2008. I particularly enjoyed those of Rae Ellingham and Elsie Wollaston.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

This is a new one to me. This is such a sad, wistful, regretful poem about silent strength. I especially like the lines

For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!

The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"
The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace;"
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
"And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease."

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,
No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o'er the sea -- that desert desolate --
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.

Anathema maranatha! was the cry
That rang from town to town, from street to street;
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the world where'er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.

For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.

And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.

Literacy and language stability

From E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy.

If you drive in the French Riviera and stop at the town of Menton, you can find small children speaking rapidly in excellent French. Their easy mastery of French grammar and pronunciation will seem charming and enviable. If you then drive east from Menton for just a few minutes and pass over a line painted across the road, you will come to the town of Ventimiglia. There you can find small children speaking charming, enviable Italian. To the children on both sides of the painted line, and perhaps to you, it all seems quite normal: the easy mastery of French or Italian, the arbitrariness of the border, and the fact that the painted line determines which language the children speak. We have come to accept such arrangements as being natural, but from a linguistic point of view they are not. French and Italian, as well as English and all the other national languages, were just as consciously and politically constructed as the national borders that separate them. These standardized national languages were fixed in essentially their present forms by seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and (in some countries) nineteenth-century language normalizers who made their decisions, more often than not, at the direction of a central national government. National languages and national borders are codependent artifices. Taken together they have generated one of the most important features of the modern world - the huge, linguistically homogeneous populations of the industrial nations.

That small children should speak Hungarian inside the borders of Hungary (or Polish inside the borders of Poland), and that the language spoken in one place in Hungary should be the same as that spoken in another, is a situation that can exist with such precision only because it is carefully sustained by the Hungarian system of education. Inside a national border, education helps to keep the national languages stable by holding it to standards that are set forth in national dictionaries, spelling books, pronunciation guides, and grammars. In the modern world we therefore find linguistic diversity among the nations but, with a few exceptions, linguistic uniformity inside the nations. This pattern did not arise by chance; it is a self-conscious political and educational arrangement.

Consider the languages of Europe in their natural earlier state, before they were standardized into national literary languages. In the Middle Ages it often happened that only closely neighboring dialects were dependably intelligible to one another. If you traveled four villages away instead of three you might not be able to understand what people were saying. A dialect map for the fourteenth century would show isoglosses marking off domains of mutual unintelligibility between speakers. No linguistic lines were painted across the road; the shifting linguistic borders could be drawn differently, depending on which dialect was used as a base. What's more, these languages changed radically over time. A fourteenth-century Rip Van Winkle waking form a sleep of a hundred - rather than twenty - years might find it hard to understand the speech of his children's grandchildren. The natural law of oral languages is constant change, but that law has been amended by the development of national written languages sustained by national systems of education.

A little more than a hundred years ago, in the 1870's, Henry Sweet, the distinguished linguist who was the model for Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, predicted that in a hundred years the English, Australians, and Americans would be speaking mutually incomprehensible languages because of their great distance and isolation from each other. Sweet was one of the most knowledgeable linguists of his day, and his prediction was one that other scholars of the time would have agreed with. Up to Sweet's time, languages had followed the universal law of constant change. Whenever people who spoke the same oral dialect divided from each other geographically, their languages also came to diverge. That is why, judging by previous linguistic history, Sweet's prediction seemed sound. Before the spread of literacy in the nineteenth century, speakers had neither an external standard nor an internal gyroscope to keep their languages stable. Thus, in the eighteenth century Alexander Pope wrote:

Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.

But Pope and Sweet were wrong. We not only understand the British and Australians today and they us, but we are able to read Pope and Dryden, and most American schoolchildren can read Gulliver's Travels by Pope's contemporary Jonathan Swift. The modern English language has turned out to be far more stable than anyone in those days could have predicted. The same has been true of other European languages.

What is special about reading?

Further to Peter Carey's Pure Pleasure, Carey's list of the most pleasurable books to read. In his introduction, Carey has some interesting things to say in, Why Read? A Polemical Introduction

What is special, oddly enough, is the result of an imperfection in the medium books use by comparison with the medium of film or television. Pictures of the sort relayed by film or television are an almost perfect medium, because they look like what they represent. Printed words do not. They are just black marks on paper. Before they can represent anything, they have to be deciphered by a skilled practitioner. Although accustomed readers do it instantaneously, translating printed words into mental images is an amazingly complex operation. It involves a kind of imaginative power different from anything required by other mental processes. If reading dies out, this power will disappear - and the results are incalculable. For reading and civilization have grown together, and we do not know whether one can survive without the other. The imaginative power reading uniquely demands is clearly linked, psychologically, with a capacity for individual judgement and with the ability to empathize with other people. Without reading, these faculties may atrophy. The translation of print into mental images also makes reading more creative than contact with other media, for no book or page is quite the same for any two readers. I do not mean by this that the reader is really the "author" of the text - as it used to be fashionable for critical theorists to pretend - any more than a pianist playing Chopin is Chopin. But a reader, like a pianist, is engaged in an intense creative operation. If you are used to it, you will notice the effort it takes only when you leave off. Put your book aside and switch on the television and the sense of relaxation is instant. That is because a large part of your mind has stopped working. The pictures beam straight into your brain. No input from you is needed. What this means is that a democracy composed largely of television-watchers is mindless compared to a democracy composed largely of readers. Ours changed from the latter to the former in the second half of the twentieth century.

Reading and crowding

Peter Carey is an Oxford professor and British novelist. Among his works is Pure Pleasure, Carey's list of the most pleasurable books to read. In addition to his topic, Carey has some interesting things to say in the introduction, Why Read? A Polemical Introduction

Given the possible scenarios - nuclear war, plague, famine - that can be expected before that point is reached, it may seem footling to speculate about the effect of population explosion on reading habits. But it is clear that, whatever the external disasters, people's attitudes to privacy and solitude are going to change - and that, of course, is where books come in. Reading admits you to an inner space which, though virtually boundless, is inaccessible to the multitudes milling around. This is likely to make it more precious and sought after as ordinary terrestrial space gets used up. At present the gap between people who read books and people who do not is the greatest of all cultural divisions, cutting across age, class and gender. Neither side understands the other. To non-readers, readers seem toffee-nosed. To readers, the puzzle is what non-readers fill their minds with. If in tomorrow's densely packed world reading becomes a lifeline to sanity for almost everyone, this gap will close - which will be a good thing for people as well as for books.