(Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five)
Why Does This All Matter?
Okay, at this point you may be thinking we’re compulsive about a relatively unimportant area of our children’s lives. After all, it’s just books!
For our family, books are the single most influential media form we encounter. We watch very little TV, we rarely see movies, and we don’t listen to the radio. The kids are not allowed online, though occasionally they’ll watch youtube videos of their friends. Our kids spend more time daily with books than with any particular toy.
Because of this focus on books, we’ve decided that we have a responsibility to ensure that the books we read are excellent. This is perhaps easier for us because we’ve both studied literature in college, but we’ve also done a lot of philosophical reading (I’m very influenced by C.S. Lewis and his disciples) on the topic. (I’ve also tried to note valuable resources we’ve found in our search for books of excellence, and I’ve appreciated the great suggestions from some of you.) We will try to address other areas as they come up: Derek is currently doing an “independent study” of children’s cinema to come up with standards and acceptable choices for our family there; my dad is a professional classical musician, so we look to him for guidance in music; neither of us is super-knowledgeable on art, but we’ll seek guidance in that as our children develop an interest there. But right now, it is pragmatic to concentrate our energies on the books we read.
Partially this emphasis on books is a choice we make because Derek and I both love to read, but it’s also important to us because of the role that stories have in shaping the moral imagination of our children. There’s a wonderful Alan Jacobs interview on Mars Hill Audio Journal that discusses this point in the context of (yes!) C.S. Lewis. Jacobs raises the Augustinian notion that we’re defined by what we love. I want my children to love “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise.” What kind of literature trains the mind towards what Jacobs and Lewis call “the baptized imagination” so that the individual loves these Philippians 4:8 qualities? Hopefully in this series Derek and I have argued coherently alongside Lewis that the best kind of literature for this task is that which is of moral and aesthetic excellence.
How realistic is this goal? It’s helpful to compare it to food. While the ideal is for me to serve my children home-cooked, from-scratch meals every day, sometimes that isn’t going to happen (especially when I’m in the midst of a difficult pregnancy or sleep-deprived with a new baby!). While this series is addressed mostly to fellow parents and parents-to-be, all of us have other jobs and responsibilities outside of parenthood that will prevent us from controlling the quality of every bite that goes in our kids’ mouths or every book that they read. And this is okay. It is not sinful to eat box brownies or read Janette Oke. Furthermore, we’ve all read some literary trash in our lives and survived—I inhaled the Mandie books in the church library in 5th and 6th grade; Derek entered marriage with a complete hardback collection of the Left Behind series. But there are hundreds of morally and aesthetically excellent children’s books out there, and we aspire to focus the bulk of our reading there.
This is our family’s personal position. I’ve made the decision to take a confident tone in expounding on it because I wanted to provoke discussion and be persuasive—it’s what I tell my high school students to do when they’re writing essays. I want to repeat that I do not stand in condemnation of friends who might disagree with us or friends who have simply never considered the topic. (I do, however, feel unhappy that some Christian organizations aggressively market mediocrity to parents who then assume their only choice is between morally-good-aesthetically-bad or morally-bad-aesthetically-good literature. That’s a false dichotomy. The excellent Sonlight, Bethlehem Books, and Veritas catalogues are full of morally and aesthetically excellent choices for our children, and we would do well to follow their lead. We do not have to put up with mediocrity in our efforts to raise virtuous children.)
In Conclusion…
So ideally, we don’t want to compromise on the philosophical or literary merit of the books we read our kids. When we look at a book, we ask two basic questions: Does this accurately represent God’s creation? and Is this a work of literary and artistic excellence?
In the coming weeks, I’m going to try to hit on some of the series mentioned in the discussion with my friends or that get mentioned in the comments, and I’d really love to hear feedback from my fellow bookworms, other moms, and homeschoolers! Are there any books you’d like us to discuss together? We can think of this as our online reading club. I’m looking forward to discussing old favorites and discovering new ones.
(Next week: The Little House series)