Letters from Pemberley

The Little House series is almost universally recommended for young girls, but that shouldn’t stop us from making sure that it measures up to the standards we have for our children. Continue Reading »

(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 5^th and 6^th 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)

I wanted to wait on this until more people had had a chance to read it (you can do it online here), but I think we’ve discussed her so much in general in the comments that I need to address my concerns with her now. Continue Reading »

One more day to discuss the importance of literary standards of excellence…

3. Good Literature Develops Our Literary Palate

If the aesthetic merit of a book matters, how do we teach young children to discern it?  We learn the difference between great and badly-written literature by studying the rules of grammar, composition, and rhetoric.  We also learn this practically by reading good examples.  It’s hard for a five year old to explain the difference between the clean prose of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the sloppy writing of the latest mediocre kid-lit writer, and that’s why it’s so important to fill his mind with good writing so that he’s developed a taste for excellence.  Children who hear proper English spoken all the time naturally pick it up and may cringe at poor grammar even before they’ve studied it in school.  (I naturally say “This is she” on the phone because my mom modeled that for me years before I learned about the difference between “she” and “her.”)  The child exposed only to well-written literature can learn in time to distinguish for himself when he picks up junk, even if he can’t yet elucidate the exact literary techniques in question.  (This applies to illustrations, too.  We try to expose our kids to great illustrators—Tasha Tudor, Beatrix Potter, Robert McCloskey, Ezra Jack Keats, and Gyo Fujikawa are some of our current favorites—because why not spend time looking at real art instead of computer-generated mediocrity?)  You wouldn’t train your child’s palate by serving them only chicken McNuggets and spaghettios; why are so many parents content to give their kids literary junk food and yet expect that they’ll be able to appreciate Austen or Shakespeare?

Parents can train their child’s literary palate. Growing up, my mom spent just as much or more time discussing the writing style of my books as the moral questions.  I was an early and voracious reader, and I don’t think she could possibly have had the time to keep up with everything I read, but we read enough together that I had a very good sense of what she’d think of a book’s style even if she hadn’t read it.  You don’t have to have been an English literature major like me—my mom was trained in microbiology!—to point out to your child a beautiful turn of phrase or a melodramatic and unsatisfying plot line.  C.S. Lewis said that “a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last.” (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children”) If you as an adult find a children’s book unsatisfying, it’s a good bet that your child doesn’t need to read it. If you still find yourself captivated by the illustrations or storytelling of a children’s book, it’s usually a sign that the book was created with care and attention to the rules of good writing.

At the very least, parents who don’t have the time to keep up on their kids’ reading can educate themselves on the authors (generally, books found both on the Newberry or Caldecott Honor lists and in a Christian compendium such as Books Children Love or The Book Tree will be works of both moral and literary excellence).  It’s a lot of work, but parenting is a full-time job! 

And of course we should pick the cream of the crop when we’re doing our family read-aloud time.  My whole family grew as readers by listening to my dad read aloud David Copperfield, The Lord of the Rings, and A Christmas Carol.  I don’t know anyone who objects to the values or the beautiful writing of The Chronicles of Narnia, so that’s a great place to start!

Now I know this is pretty controversial subject matter with some of my friends, so we’ll pause here for comments and discuss why this is all important to us next week!

(to part six)

Continuing in my defense of the importance of literary excellence…

2. We aren’t relativists when it comes to art. 

We believe in artistic standards of excellence.  We who hold to absolute standards of truth shouldn’t suddenly become relativists when it comes to art.  The beauty of the humanities is that an individual’s enjoyment of a work of art is partially subjective; Derek loves 20^th century Southern authors, while I prefer 19^th century British novelists.  However, within literature, as with other art forms, there are established rules for good writing. 

In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis mentions distinctions of good children’s literature: “descriptions that really describe, dialogue that can produce some illusion, characters one can distinctly imagine.”  Here’s how it works for us right now.  Tommy’s really into trains, and the clever Thomas the Tank Engine marketers have produced a lot of pulp book tie-ins that appeal to little boys like Tommy.  However, these books are not works of art or even written by real authors.  Instead of giving Tommy Thomas books (which are morally acceptable), we have provided him with train-themed books with quality illustrations, dialogue, and characters—The Little Engine that Could, Choo-Choo, The Caboose Who Got Loose, and The Little Red Caboose.  This decision is not based in my dislike of Thomas mania (for the record, Tommy is NOT named after the train), but in the fact that our books are objectively better literature.

I love how Lewis explains literary standards.:

 The rules for writing a good passion play or a good devotional lyric are simply the rules for writing tragedy or lyric in general: success in sacred literature depends on the same qualities of structure, suspense, variety, diction, and the like which secure success in secular literature…Christian Literature can exist only in the same sense in which Christian cookery might exist.  It would be possible, and it might be edifying, to write a Christian cookery book.  Such a book would exclude dishes whose preparation involves unnecessary human labour or animal suffering, and dishes excessively luxurious.  That is to say, its choice of dishes would be Christian.  But there could be nothing specifically Christian about the actual cooking of the dishes included.  Boiling an egg is the same process whether you are a Christian or a Pagan.  In the same way, literature written by Christians for Christians would have to avoid mendacity, cruelty, blasphemy, pornography, and the like, and it would aim at edification in so far as edification was proper to the kind of work in hand.  But whatever it chose to do would have to be done by the means common to all literature; it could succeed or fail only by the same excellences and the same faults as all literature; and its literary success or failure would never be the same thing as its obedience or disobedience to Christian principles.” (“Christianity and Literature”)

There are absolute standards of excellence in literature, and that it’s important to acknowledge them.  Furthermore, as Lewis points out, the skills necessary to create great Christian art are the same skills necessary to create great art in general.  Today’s Evangelicals are often so stuck in our little Christian ghetto that we refuse to acknowledge that by letting go of high standards of artistic expression, we’ve come to judge our art, literature, and music only by what Lewis calls ‘obedience…to Christian principles’ and and not by centuries-old rules of good art.  I see this especially in the homeschool community.  Martha Finley wrote a series of books about a perfect heroine intended to instill Christian principles in young girls, so they must be good literature.  L.M. Montgomery wrote a series of books intended to delight young girls with the hilarious exploits of a realistic orphan girl, but those books are suspect because they are not explicitly Christian and because their heroine (gasp!) is imperfect.  Both series are by Christian authors, but because the Elsie books are chock-full of scripture verses, mothers give them to their daughters despite their abysmal writing style while hesitating about the worldliness of Anne of Green Gables.  I’ll be blogging on the literary and spiritual value of both series later on, as the contemporary treatment of these two series is a particular pet peeve of mine! 

If we paid more attention to the literary merit of books, we’d be better equipped to dialogue with others about children’s literature.  Remember the Harry Potter controversy when those books were coming out?  Having read them, I can say that The Chronicles of Narnia are better—not because Narnia’s fantasy has elements of Christian allegory (which makes it “safe” to Potter critics), but because Lewis is a more skilled, thoughtful, beautiful writer than Rowling.   

Can you tell I love Lewis?  I’ll continue on this topic tomorrow…

(to part five)