How to Grow Forbidden Fruit

My dad likes to tell a story about when my brother was just a toddler and started messing with something my parents didn't want him handling.

"Billy, if you touch that, you're going to get a spanking," my dad warned.

Billy reached out his little hand, stopping just short of the forbidden object. My father swears that he could see the wheels turning in his son's mind: "I know if I touch this, I'm going to get a spanking, but it might be worth a spanking if I could just touch it ONE MORE TIME!"

How many of us have had this same experience? As soon as someone tells us no, we're immediately inspired with a craving for the forbidden fruit. To quote my father, a man who knows a great deal about human nature, once more: "Everyone wants what they think they can't have."

It's worth remembering that this wisdom holds true for books. For an excellent example, read Judy Blume's introductory essay to Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers.

Children's Media: Books vs. Movies

On July 4, I wrote about parents' attempts to limit their children's reading as "loving censorship," but in my first post, I mentioned the importance of finding age-appropriate books for young readers. I want to clarify this seeming contradiction. Sometimes parental direction is both beneficial and necessary, particularly when a popular children's book is adapted to a film that "everyone" is going to see. Not only will the movie be marketed to a much broader age group than the original book was intended for, but there's an essential difference between text and images.

As communications theorist Neil Postman explains in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, written language is a complex system that requires skillful interpretation; thus it functions as a kind of self-authorizing code. If the child is old enough to understand complex sentences, sophisticated vocabulary, and abstract thought, she is probably mature enough to handle the content of the text. Thus it's relatively easy to protect children from "adult" information encoded in books.

Film, on the other hand, presents information in images, which do not require (much) decoding and are fairly easy to understand. Therefore, movies and television have no built-in safeguards to protect children from receiving information they're not intellectually or emotionally ready to receive. I will never forget my shock at seeing six- and seven-year-olds racing up and down the theater aisles at a showing of Jurassic Park. Parents who thought dinosaurs + Spielberg + McDonald's tie-in = children's movie were outraged by the violent images in the film, but they would never have handed Michael Crichton's book to their children (nor would the kids have gotten through more than a paragraph or two).

Adults as well as children enjoy Harry Potter precisely because the series contains so many intellectual challenges: e.g., sophisticated vocabulary (including British slang), complex characterization, subtle foreshadowing, and detailed plotting, not to mention the daunting length (the fifth book, Order of the Phoenix, is 870 pages long). Understanding the movies does not require the same skill and intellectual maturity, however, and there's nothing but a parent's "no" to protect young viewers from frightening images. I would recommend telling kids that they can see the movie only if they read the book first. Readers who are too young for Harry Potter's dark tone and occasionally violent episodes are likely to give up on the book as "too hard" long before they become upset, unless an adult is reading and interpreting the book for them. And this leads me to my final point.

Allowing children the freedom to make their own reading choices means letting them decide when to put a book down. Young readers are capable of figuring out on their own that a book is too hard or scary or "weird" (i.e., out of sync with their beliefs and worldview) for them, and they will put it down without having to be rescued.

Freedom to Read

It turns out that the American Library Association (ALA) has issued a Freedom to Read Statement. It was first adopted in 1953 and was amended in 1972, 1991, 2000, and 2004. Here are some highlights:

Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad. We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe.

Every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of our society and leaves it the less able to deal with controversy and difference.

Creative thought is by definition new, and what is new is different. The bearer of every new thought is a rebel until that idea is refined and tested.

The power of a democratic system to adapt to change is vastly strengthened by the freedom of its citizens to choose widely from among conflicting opinions offered freely to them. To stifle every nonconformist idea at birth would mark the end of the democratic process.

Furthermore, only through the constant activity of weighing and selecting can the democratic mind attain the strength demanded by times like these. We need to know not only what we believe but why we believe it.

Link

The Most Important Freedom

I have a friend whose father used to control her leisure reading so strictly that he actually used a magic marker to black out any objectionable words or passages. At the bookstore and the library, I frequently see children negotiating with their parents for the privilege of reading a particular book: "Please, please, please!" In running my book group, I've met several parent-child pairs who read together, and I've often thought what a wonderful experience that would be, but reading in tandem also opens the door to many opportunities for loving censorship: "I don't think we should continue with this book" or "Let's stop reading this book for now, and we'll come back to it when you're older."

My own childhood reading benefited from a kind of benign, or perhaps benevolent, neglect. My parents gave me books, many of them, which certainly directed my reading, but they also encouraged me to make use of my school and community libraries, where I always had the freedom to make my own choices. I don't remember ever having to plead for the right to read Judy Blume or Norma Klein or Zilpha Keatley Snyder (the closest thing my generation had to J. K. Rowling). My parents may have kept a watchful eye on what I was reading (and my mother assures me that they did), but I was unaware of it. For my part, I never tried to hide what I was reading from my parents. The thought never crossed my mind.

Today, the Fourth of July, we celebrate our many cherished freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. Underlying all these is the most important right of all--freedom of thought. Children should not be denied this most important freedom merely because they are children and therefore legal minors. Intellectual independence is not a privilege to be earned but a birthright. Children should and must be free to develop their own thoughts, and this means observing, questioning, and entering into conversation with a wide range of other thinkers. What better way to do this than to read?

Why We Should Take Children's Lit Seriously

As a graduate student, I never took a course in children's literature. In fact, I don't remember even being offered the opportunity. I do remember hearing one professor speak disparagingly of "kiddie lit," which I now realize is a controversial but widely-used term, but I had no idea that this was a field of legitimate study (and indeed, some scholars argue that it isn't). Children's/YA lit has gained grudging acceptance in the academy and I've read some truly outstanding scholarship on the subject, but I've learned most of what I know about this field from much younger experts.

Birth of a Book Group
Two years ago, I was asked to put together a fantasy/science fiction book group for readers between the ages of 10 and 15. I figured I could draw on some of my old favorites--A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland--but I wasn't up on any current fiction except Harry Potter, so I went to my public library to do some research. I casually asked a librarian if she could recommend a few books and was overwhelmed by her response--Pat led me all over the junior and teen sections, showered me with lists of award-winning books, and fired authors and titles at me until I begged for mercy. We sat down at a table as I feverishly took notes, stumbling over the spelling of unfamiliar names like Sabriel and Abarat. I wish I could remember which title Pat was talking about when a young woman playing a computer game nearby suddenly turned around and said fervently, "That is SUCH a great book!" That's how I met Julia.

Julia joined us at the table and started rattling off all the books I absolutely had to read. After a while, her sister, Katherine, wandered over to see what we were doing, and soon both girls were darting into the stacks and bringing back armfuls of their favorite books, breathlessly providing plot summaries and arguing over which were the best. I've spent my life among books and people who love them, but it had been a long time since I had heard anyone talk about reading with such passion and urgency. I knew I had to get this book group up and running. Julia and Katherine became the first two members.

Next month the Gryffindors will celebrate our two-year anniversary (yes, I live in fear of being sued for copyright infringement, but we love the name). In addition to facilitating the meetings, I publish two newsletters, The Denton Runes and Dragonbites, to recommend books and advertise special events at the Denton Public Library and at the Barnes & Noble store where the group meets.

Here are some of the things I've learned over the past two years:

1. We are living in a second Golden Age of children's/YA literature, fueled by but certainly not limited to the Harry Potter phenomenon. (The first Golden Age was in the 19th century--more about that later.) There's just a lot of good stuff out there right now, including a number of books with very strong female heroes. I plan to talk about many of these books in more detail in future posts, but let me just list, in no particular order, some of the most impressive authors I've read: Shannon Hale, Scott Westerfeld, Jonathan Stroud, Philip Pullman, Patricia Wrede, Maiya Williams, Louis Sachar, Carl Hiaasen, Justine Larbalestier, Terry Pratchett, J. K. Rowling, Orson Scott Card, Gail Carson Levine, Rick Riordan, Vivian Vande Velde, and Gabrielle Zevin.

2. "Children's literature" covers a lot of territory, everything from soft-cover picture books for infants to racy teen reads like the Gossip Girl series (think Sex and the City for the Clearasil crowd and you've got the idea). This tendency to lump everything together under one umbrella term leads to confusion about what is age-appropriate. Harry Potter and Eragon may be extremely popular, but they're NOT for six-year-olds.

3. Children's/YA lit has a much larger audience than you might think. The Gryffindors was intended for tweens and young teens, but we had so many adults attend the first few meetings that I changed the description to "readers of all ages." Some are parents who come with their children; some are aspiring children's authors or fans of a particular book; others are college-age readers who find that YA books are more thought-provoking and original than adult fiction.

4. They may be writing for young readers, but these authors aren't kidding around (sorry, I couldn't resist that one). They're taking on serious issues and creating real art.

• Cornelia Funke's Inkheart raises the issue of an author's moral responsibility for his or her creation.
• Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind confront the moral complexities of war.
• Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is a rewriting of Milton's Paradise Lost by way of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."

In her study Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America, Beverly Lyon Clark asserts that the study of children's lit raises some fascinating questions about canonicity, commodification, and censorship, but she gives us an even more important reason to take children's lit seriously: "The term kiddie lit captures our culture's ambivalence toward children and children's literature: dismissive? self-mocking? pejorative? ironical?" (2).

Our regard for children's lit has a lot to do with our regard for children, period.