Children, Literature, and ChLA: A Plea for a New Literate Age

From the time the theme of the twentieth annual ChLA Conference—"Literature for Children in a Post-Literate Age"—was first proposed, it has had a discomfiting, even a frightening effect on me. That says more about me, I am sure, than it does about the theme. The Conference title named something which, up to that time, had been for me real but more or less nebulous, inchoate. To tell the truth, I was not eager to examine that something, the fact that while the younger generations in America—and I dare say based upon the few Canadian students in my classes, in Canada too—might well be able to decode, to read sufficiently well to survive in contemporary society, they no longer read literature nor grow up reading for pleasure. And the consequences of that deprivation are far-reaching.

Certainly one of the constructions of "Post-Literate Age" is that people no longer do read even if and when they can. Over the last two years, I have found myself in rare spare moments thinking and worrying about what implications this practice has for the human condition. And those implications I find alarming. First, is it true that young people no longer read literature for enjoyment, thereby garnering the insights into language and thought, into human nature and society which good literature yields? My students, by and large, do not.

As many of you know, three years ago I made a major career change, moving from an English department in the Southeast to an Elementary and Early Childhood Education Department in the northern Midwest. In my current position I work almost exclusively with pre-service and practicing teachers. One of the major differences between my classes now and those of a few years back is that they no longer include a significant number of English majors. Whether or not, or to what degree, that accounts for the fact that my students are not readers, I am not at all sure, for not many of my former English majors seemed ever really to enjoy reading or to read just for enjoyment. Be that as it may, my students today are preparing to teach in our elementary schools. That they are not readers and yet will teach children sobers me and my colleagues.

Some students volunteer that before taking children's literature they have never had a library card. All but a few, though they have come through twelve years of education in states whose students have continually ranked among the highest in the nation on standardized tests, have never realized that one can read fiction for anything besides the plot, and they believe that understanding a novel is synonymous with being able to sequence major events in the plot. They have never read to understand the people who populate fictional worlds nor recognized character growth and development; they have been unaware of setting as anything more than a backdrop against which action takes place; they have been immune to metaphor, allusion, and irony, and certainly to patterns in story.

Statistics compiled by the curriculum librarian at my University are telling. In 1989, circulation records show that 8,337 novels for children and adolescents were checked out of the Curriculum Center of Livingston Lord Library, a few undoubtedly by children of the faculty but the preponderant number by majors in elementary and secondary education. In 1992, that figure dropped to 3,612. This drop is despite the fact that Moorhead State's collection is rich, numbering 7,332 volumes of fiction, excluding picture books, and is kept up to date by a full-time curriculum librarian working with faculty. Although, in accordance with a decree from the state, we have somewhat decreased enrollment in our elementary education program, this reduction alone is nowhere near sufficient to explain the drop in circulation of novels for young readers.

Clearly, our students have rarely been exposed to beautiful, elegant, mellifluous prose. Little wonder, then, that they are poor writers, composing awkward, lumbering, often meaningless sentences, manifesting little understanding of or respect for words and syntax. The best models of...