In a Manhattan preschool last year, my daughter’s class read The Pigeon HAS to Go to School! by Mo Willems, a book that has now spent 66 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list for children’s picture books.
Anxious about school, the eponymous pigeon states, “What if I learn too much!?! My head might pop off.” (The book itself poses no such risk.) The pigeon’s solution, after many pages of exclamation — he screeches “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!” when he sees the school bus, for example — is to articulate the actual activities he will do at school and to realize that school isn’t some amorphous bogeyman.
This is classic cognitive behavioral therapy — it’s decatastrophizing, performed on a pigeon. To be fair, this can be a useful technique for anxiety management. But why is it almost all that this book has to offer? There’s no vocabulary my daughter, at age 3, doesn’t know; there’s no syntax she doesn’t already utilize. The book eschews conventional written dialogue for speech bubbles — there’s not even a “the pigeon screeched” following his “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!”
We see much of the same in other current best sellers, and in the young-reader books favored by many schools as the new academic year gets underway. The language is colloquial to an extreme. In Dragons Like Tacos (483 weeks on the Times list), a book that was also read at my daughter’s school, the narrator states, “Hey dragon, why do you guys like tacos so much?” In On the First Day of Kindergarten (two weeks on the list), we hear, “On the first day of kindergarten, I thought it was so cool riding the school bus to my school!” In The Smart Cookie (29 weeks on the list), which often reads like a therapist’s version of a child’s inner monologue, the titular cookie states, “I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up or sharing my ideas. I didn’t feel like a smart cookie.”
A few of these titles attempt a poeticism that falls short. “You did this job in your very own way. We needed a tough little truck today,” we read in Time for School, Little Blue Truck (44 weeks on the list). In the Magical Yet (7 weeks on the list), a story about a child attempting to learn a variety of new skills like bike riding (its cadences apparently and notably adopted from Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Places You’ll Go), we hear, “And now you won’t ride. No way. Not never. No riding for you, you’ll walk … forever.” It had seemed that at the end of those ellipses, we might encounter something more … complex. But alas, we don’t.
Half of the 10 children’s picture books on the current Times list are about going to school. Four of those involve ways of managing the anxiety that might attend school. Five of the titles are focused on boosting the self-esteem of their readers. Even the potentially mythical Dragons Love Tacos is about a commonplace event — a taco party. (This is, in fairness, a source of its humor, lest I begin to sound too cantankerous.)
That is to say, this list, thematically, is extremely narrow. Diction-wise, syntactically, these books are even more so. These are books that meet my 3-year-old right where she is and take her no further. Though seemingly emotional (“And the STUFF!… There is sooooooooo much stuff to learn!” the pigeon wails), they relate, really, to a small fraction of her emotional life. They have very little of beauty, philosophy, morality, or character (unless the expression of anxiety counts).
There is a particularly extreme counterexample to this to be found in The New England Primer, the primer of choice for more than a century of American teachers. First published in 1690, it was used regularly in classrooms until the mid-19th century. In a 1727 edition, children were marched right from the alphabet to vocabulary lists featuring words like “glory,” “absent,” “drunkenness,” “impudent,” and “fidelity,” and from there onto to the tale of the martyrdom of John Rogers, in which, “his wife, with nine small children, and one at her breast, followed him to the stake; with which sorrowful sight, he was not in the least daunted; but with wonderful patience, died courageously, for the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“The language is colloquial to an extreme.”
With the pressing concern of salvation came high expectations. For their souls’ sake, children needed to distinguish the “abominable” (another vocabulary word) from the beautiful. (“What is God?” the primer states. “God is a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable, in his Being, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Justice, Goodness, and Truth.”)
I’m not suggesting we return to The New England Primer. But it’s clear that children can and should be introduced to diction, syntax, and concepts far beyond what is in much of our children’s literature today. I believe it is what they want. (My daughter often asks me, “When are we going to die?”)
After The New England Primer, children’s school primers grew increasingly simplified. In the early 20th century, the rise of the “Look-Say” method, which advocated against phonics and for whole-word memorization using very simple vocabulary lists, culminated in the mind-numbingly repetitive Dick and Jane primers. Kids reared on these texts were forced to endure sentences like: “Jane said, ‘Run, run. Run, Dick, run. Run and see.’”
In response to the outcry against these primers, William Spaulding, Theodore Geisel’s editor, commissioned the book that would become The Cat in the Hat. “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down,” Spaulding said, supplying Geisel (whose pen name was Dr. Seuss) with a list of the 348 simple words he was allowed to use — the Look-Say method, but fun. And it was. “It is fun to have fun/ But you have to know how,” says the Cat in the Hat. “I can hold up the cup/ And the milk and the cake!” It was more than fun — it was explosively popular. To date, The Cat in the Hat has sold more than 16 million copies; it continues to sell about half a million copies a year. It is often thought of as the quintessential children’s book.
But we should think of The Cat in the Hat not as the quintessential children’s book, but as the quintessential children’s reader — a book a child can pick up when she begins to read on her own. In this, it is remarkable — energetic and comic and magically formed of the simplest words. Unfortunately, the popularity of Seuss enshrines simplicity as the central virtue of children’s literature, and this behemoth has come to swallow up all other possibilities. We also need a subgenre of children’s literature that feels more like literature.
In childhood, our minds work differently. Children can learn multiple languages simultaneously without the enormous effort adults must put forth to achieve often worse results. This should also be the period in which they hear elevated language: beautiful, beguiling, weighty, humorous — a version of adult language. It would be so much more effortlessly and naturally acquired than at any other time, and it, too, could be theirs — if only we’d read them the books that would bring it to them.
There are books like this, even if they seem too hard to find. One notable example can be found in the works of William Steig, a near-contemporary of Seuss. One of Steig’s classics, Amos and Boris, tells the tale of a mouse on a sea journey: “One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he [Amos] marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water. Lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense, starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.”
Like The New England Primer, Steig’s work doesn’t shy away from the ultimate questions of life and of meaning, though here there are no clear answers. Treading water in a deep ocean, we read, Amos “began to wonder what it would be like to drown. Would it take very long? Would it feel just awful? Would his soul go to heaven? Would there be other mice there?” There is characterization and deep emotion. Amos is eager and temperamental; Boris, the whale who arises from deep in the ocean to rescue him, is practical and purposeful. They become fast friends. They cry when the inevitable occurs — Amos must live his life on land, and Boris in the ocean.
Children are born into a sea of mysterious signals; it is in their nature to decode the strange world before them. Why, when we begin to read to them, do we so often present them with the little they already know? We should trust them, more often, with complexity in their literature. What they can’t yet grasp, they will grow to understand. There should be, off in the distance, at least a few of those luminous whales.
