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Grace Under Fire's avatar

Yes, it’s bad with literature, but you should try music. Anything beyond a one-idea song comprising a few notes is “too difficult”. Yet when you give children of every age complex, melodic and beautifully harmonised music their eyes sparkle and if they are young enough they will get up and dance.

Please let’s give our children complex and beautiful ideas, forms and structures to play with. Otherwise we churn out mediocre adults, who think they know everything but cannot even think clearly, let alone originally.

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ClemenceDane's avatar

I think you apologize too much for your thesis, or at least anticipate too much criticism "the accusation of stuffy traditionalism." I think it's time to speak boldly about what we know in our hearts is true and that we learned from experience. Our current system is drastically underestimating - and shortchangng our children. Let children be gourmands. Give them access to copious books at all levels. Assume they are up to the challenge and bring them the classics. A child gets something even from a book that is over his head.

This intellectual reductionism is the same as some parents not letting their 14 year olds cross major streets on their own when children as young as five used to walk to the shops. It's like a sudden collective and violent memory loss of what children are capable of.

And I object to your statement that 11 year olds cannot read about dismemberment and cannibalism! Why not? I read the complete abridged works of Shakespeare the summer I was 10. I may not have fully understood everything or got all of the language, but I enjoyed it. Grimm's Fairy Tales contain many dark episodes including dismemberment and cannibalism.

When I was seven and eight years old my father and I read out loud together Great Expectations, Alice in Wonderland, Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stephenson and many others. After that I tended to read on my own, and in the summer when I had the gift of boredom - that thing we never allow our children to feel anymore - I read just about every book on my father's bookshelves, save physics textbooks and investment guides. I read The Double Helix, The Voyage of HMS Beagle, various Dickens novels, E.B. White, old copies of Smithsonian magazine, etc. Later I did the same with my Mom's books, plus all the usual children's books - Oz, Narnia, Ursula Lequin, Madeleine L'Engle, Harriet the Spy, Peanuts, Paddington, Little House on the Prairie, and all sorts of random old children's books like Lad: A Dog from my school's library.

I don't know where this is going to end, but I do know all these books are still there waiting for our children to discover them.

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