Yesterday I started off by talking about what we define as morally excellent literature for our kids right now (3 1/2 and 1 1/2).
Um, isn’t this a bit limiting? A lot of the great literature of the Western Canon doesn’t match up with Biblical Truth. We’ll be reading a lot if it as a family—just not yet. We’re going to address things as the kids reach the age where they encounter those issues in real life. Tommy’s blessed to have a bunch of friends with loving parents right now. We’re not going to do a lot of reading this year on abusive husbands, adultery, teen pregnancy, or parents who abandon their children. As his life experience encounters similar situations and his maturity grows to be able to process such things, we’ll talk about them and read about them. (One of my biggest problems with “young adult fiction,” which I sometimes don’t think should exist, is that it hits kids with adult issues they’re not ready for yet.) Thankfully, there’s a plethora of great children’s literature with appropriate content that we’ll enjoy in the early years.
As our children grow in discernment, however, we’ll be able to expose them to more divergent ideas so that we can discuss them together and train them to assess the worldview. Derek and I love A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s pretty dark, though, and there are some pretty big philosophical questions that the Baudelaire orphans have to face as they struggle for survival. We’re not going to be reading them with the kids until they have the maturity to discuss them—probably not for at least a decade. But we will read them, because they’re great literature, and they’re great conversation starters. I personally love detective fiction, and I can’t wait to read great authors like Dorothy Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, and Josephine Tey aloud with the kids. Sayers makes the point that murder mysteries are a moral anomaly in 20th century literature because the bad guy always gets caught (!), but obviously there’s content—infidelity, lies, intrigue, even some colorful English profanity—that won’t be appropriate until the kids are teenagers.
Our goal is not to shelter our children, but to train them to evaluate everything they read against the standard of Truth. As Nancy Pearcey points out in her excellent book, Total Truth,
The dominant methodology in many Christian schools and churches has been to protect children from nonbiblical ideologies, and in part that is educationally sound. It makes sense to protect children until they are developmentally ready to handle complex ideas. But in many cases children are never exposed to competing ideas within their families, churches, or Christian schools, and as a result they go out into the world unprepared for the intellectual battles they are about to encounter, especially on secular college campuses.
When these young people start their classes and are confronted by new, plausible-sounding ideas, they may begin to wonder whether the adults in their lives were covering something up. They may suspect that their parents and teachers did not criticize competing ideas because there are no good criticisms—that they did not demonstrate how to defend Christianity because it is indefensible.” (Total Truth, p. 126)
I’ve seen what Pearcey describes first-hand, and I’m so grateful for the worldview training my parents gave me so that I didn’t falter when faced with conflicting ideologies, especially those in the books I read. I am convinced that Christianity is coherent and defensible, especially compared to the other belief systems I’ve encountered! So to bring things back to the literature our children read, we have two major goals—to ground them from a young age in literature that reflects truth, and then to introduce books with divergent worldviews at an intellectually appropriate age.
Thoughts? Next week I’ll tackle the touchy question of setting a standard of literary excellence…
(to part three)