parents and children

Michael Norris, “an American publishing expert,” says, “Parents have too much of a role in deciding which books their child is going to read. It is turning children off. They should let them choose.” This is plausible. Let’s look into this some more.

First, he argues, reading should never be described with "work words" which make it seem like a chore. Too many families, Norris suggests, have fallen into the trap of stereotyping reading as a "good" activity and digital or online game playing as "bad". Instead, it is important to let reading become associated with pleasure and achievement, just as game playing is.

I like that thought. But then Norris goes on to say,

"The average child consumes a ridiculous amount of media in any given day, from television, videogame content and audio content, so new reading devices, such as the iPad, are not going to have as great an impact on the younger market as people hope. When they are not playing games or listening to music, the majority of a young adult's time is spent on the phone, talking or receiving and sending text messages. Books don't even factor into their thinking."

Seems generally true. But how can parents cause books to factor in to their children’s thinking without affirming that books are “good”?

Make sure children talk directly to a librarian or a bookseller, while parents stand well back. Looming over a child takes all the fun out of their discoveries, he says. Parents should allow children to choose their own reading material.

"Even if a mother or father is just standing with the child when the bookseller asks them what they like to read, we have found that the child will give an answer they think their parent wants to hear. It will not be the same answer they would give alone," said Norris. . . .

It is also important, he added, for parents not to enthuse about books that they loved as children: "Parents often say, 'When when I was your age...', and it tends to put off children too."

This seems to presume an oddly, strongly oppositional relationship between parents and children. Should parents really be forbidden to introduce books to their children that they themselves loved? Isn't it at least possible that one bond between parent and child can be shared love of a book? It seems rather closed-minded for a “publishing expert” not to take that option into account. My son Wes was indifferent to some of the books I recommended to him — or, earlier, read to him — but rather than ceasing to recommend books, I simply made sure he knew that his response was just fine and that he was not expected to like something just because I did. And then there are other books I asked Wes to read that we both love and have talked about often over the years, to our mutual delight. Should I really have refused to recommend those books to him because of the chance that he wouldn't care for them?

Maybe we can understand Norris’s attitude better when we read this:

"My father forced me to read The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy when I was much too young and I have never read another Clancy since," said Norris.

Ah, well, there’s your problem.

natural signs

In an earlier post I linked to this excerpt from Albert Borgmann’s extraordinary book Holding On To Reality, and I want to invoke Borgmann again now. One of the key concerns of that book is to separate and classify the kinds of . . . well, reading is what I would say — the kinds of reading we do. But Borgmann would probably say that he wants to understand the various kinds of signs we confront and the various ways we interpret them. Borgmann is especially concerned with our diminishing ability to read what he calls natural signs:

Information about reality exhibits its pristine form in a natural setting. An expanse of smooth gravel is a sign that you are close to a river. Cottonwoods tell you where the river bank is. An assembly of twigs in a tree points to osprey. The presence of osprey shows that there are trout in the river. In the original economy of signs, one thing refers to another in a settled order of reference and presence. A gravel bar seen from a distance refers you to the river. It is a sign. When you have reached and begun to walk on the smooth and colored stones, the gravel has become present in its own right. It is a thing. And so with the trees, the nest, the raptor, and the fish.

Borgmann teaches at the University of Montana and it’s clear from his books that he spends a lot of time outdoors; in one sense you could say that his major works are attempts to forge a meaningful connection between the experience of doing philosophy and the experience of walking through the Montana landscapes.

I have been thinking a lot about this emphasis in Borgmann’s work lately, and it affected the way I read this story about changes in the new version of the Oxford Junior Dictionary:

It is difficult to read the list of words excluded from the new Oxford Junior Dictionary without a sharp sense of regret. Here are some of the words that have been culled: catkin, brook, minnow, acorn, buttercup, heron, almond, marzipan, ash, beetroot, bray, bridle, porpoise, gooseberry, raven, carnation, blackberry, tulip, catkin, porridge and conker.

But you are likely to be overwhelmed by a greater sadness when you see the words that have elbowed them out. They include celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro, square number, block graph, attachment, database and analogue.

Unlike Henry Porter, I am not “overwhelmed by sadness” when I note the new words that are included; but I am dismayed to see the ones cast off, because those castoffs are largely words that describe the natural world — words that enable an understanding of “natural signs,” words that embody “information about reality.” As Porter rightly says, “what we are witnessing is a gradual triumph of abstract words over objects that can be seen and experienced.”

Porter has other complaints about the changes as well — the new dictionary’s “war on Anglo-Saxon simplicity,” its exclusion of religious and historical references — but this is the one that strikes me, at the moment, as especially significant. As our world becomes more complex, our children’s dictionaries (and adult ones too, for that matter) may just have to get bigger. But if hard choices have to be made, I’d rather start them off learning about brooks, acorns, and ravens; there will be plenty of time for databases and celebrities later.