What Great Books Do For Children.(Brief Article)

In his new memoir A Life in the 20th Century, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. discusses how he became a reader early in life, and why classic children's literature is valuable.

I particularly remember my mother sitting in her chair reading aloud to her children. She was a splendid reader, spirited and expressive, and Tom and I insisted that she keep on reading to us long after we were able to read to ourselves. She was also an astute skip-er. I recall her amusement at my indignation when I discovered that, in books like Ivanhoe and Parkman's Conspiracy of Pontiac, she was unscrupulously omitting passages she found static or boring.

Of all childhood pastimes, reading was my passion. Now that television has replaced the book in the life of the young, mine may have been the last generation to grow up in the high noon of the print culture. Perhaps it may be of historical interest to recall the profound excitement, the abiding fulfillment, books provided in those ancient and no doubt unimaginable days.

My mother gave me an appetite for books as well as a capacity to read them quickly. "Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives," Graham Greene has well said. "... In childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future ... What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation of those first fourteen years?" [Indeed] most people will have done most of the reading they will ever do by the age of 25 and must live off those books for the rest of their lives.

My mother began with fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, with Greek and Roman mythology, especially as marvelously rendered by Hawthorne in The Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales; and with the wondrous Arabian Nights. When I began to read for myself, a six-volume series called My Book House came into my life, an entrancing and resplendently illustrated anthology of historical adventure, fairy tale, poetry, mythology, something for every mood and moment.

I fear that such an initiation into a larger world would be much condemned today. For these were all tales filled with cruelty and violence, mutilation and murder, magic and fantasy, streaked by what is now seen as classism, sexism, racism, and superstition. Approved children's books today are by contrast didactic in intent, dealing with prosaic, everyday events and intended to improve relations among classes, sexes, and races. Such books, it is ...