A rightful heritage

From Books in Search of Children by Louise Seaman Bechtel, page 21. The following text is from a speech she gave in 1953.

The words of this title are a ringing challenge to all of us gathered here. We come to celebrate the famous book week which draws together readers young and old. We would like to do at least two things in our brief time together - remember and revive and decide to reread some very enjoyable books; and also bite into the edges of the questions raised by the title, such as what books live on and why, and what is a children's classic.

[snip]

. . . A heritage of culture is a complicated matter. The reading child brings to his books a personality of today. Naturally he turns most easily and quickly to things of today and to what his present world has shaped for an atmosphere of interest. His is not yet a world influenced by books and a sense of history: it is molded by today's papers, movies, TV, comics (ninety million comics sold in one month); and, of course, by the school where so much of his waking life centers.

But even when he is very small, in picture books, music, pictures on the wall, songs sung to him and with him, other atmospheres, other aspects of the world can surround him, comfort him, amuse him. Lovely words, words seldom used by journalists or comic writers or writers of informational books, can enchant him. And he can find out very early in life that the world of the inner mind is a far bigger world than the tangible world about him, and that each interprets the other.

The sense of miracle, the moments of revelation, seldom are put into words by a child. Nor can he ask for the book that gives it - he must depend on a variety of books being available. He must wait for some moment in a storytelling at a library, in a parent's reading aloud, or until he is roaming among books not carefully "graded," to find his key to larger worlds. Of course, his sense of miracle may come from facts. What is more wondrous than the blade of grass? As Francis Thompson said,

O little blade, clay caught,
A wind, a flame, a thought -
Inestimably naught -

Or the atom - which has greatly held our modern children's imaginings and fears? It is, however, necessary that children know the world whole, not just today with its atoms, not just the miracles of facts, but parts of the long procession of history and literature - the thoughts of men of the past and their best words, as well as deeds. A rightful heritage is an odd mingling of fact, romance, ideas, things, legends, heroes.

It is ironic to see these so well expressed sentiments and to know that within a decade the mutations of the sixties would infect academia, media and schools and when much of the rightful heritage of "the long procession of history and literature - the thoughts of men of the past and their best words, as well as deeds" would be substantially jettisoned, baby-with-the-bathwater style, in pursuit of greater inclusion and the myth of the equivalence of all cultures. Noble goals, inclusion and respect, but at too high a cost perhaps. We are now seeing the first generation to have come through their education cycle from kindergarten to college anywhere and everywhere materially divorced from their rightful heritage and it is not a pretty picture. The damage is reversible but it is there and it needs tending to.