Children's Literature and Pre-professional Students: The National Endowment for the Humanities

In January 1980, Northeastern University was awarded a quarter of a million dollars by the NEH to develop a series of courses in the humanities which would appeal to students in professional schools. Northeastern is a particularly good school for such a program, since its most popular programs—business, engineering, criminal justice, and the health professions—enroll heavily and yet have students who must take humanities electives. The logic of the grant proposal group was that if humanities courses could be geared especially toward the interest of pre-professional students, both the students and the humanities departments would benefit, the former by exposure to issues not usually confronted in their professional courses, the latter by increased enrollments and a diversity of courses for their faculty to teach.

The grant writing team was divided into four subgroups, each concerned with one of the four major professional groups mentioned above. Interested faculty from humanities departments and from the professional schools involved met to discuss possible courses and the recruitment of faculty with expertise to teach these courses. I worked with the faculty from the college of criminal justice on developing a course finally titled "The Punishment of Children in Children's Literature." The course was designed to survey children's literature involving or implying the punishment of children from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. My purpose in such a design was twofold: first, to teach the principles of literary criticism and composition, in short to discuss how literature works; and second, to discuss the historical, social, psychological, and biographical aspects of the books in order to show students what the particular work implied about the nature of childhood at the time and both the author's and the society's conception of how children should act and what the appropriate methods of punishment were. Because of student interest, the class discussion focussed frequently on child abuse and neglect and the differing standards for male and female behavior at the time of each book's composition. A list of readings is included at the end of this essay.

I taught the course in the winter quarter 1981. Because class enrollment was small, I conducted sessions as a seminar. Had it been larger, I would have required midterm and final exams as well as papers. Instead, I required a single project, topics negotiated between teacher and individual student. The projects were presented both in written form (fifteen-page minimum submitted to be graded) and in-class presentation, with frequent progress reports made orally during the quarter. This plan worked well, especially since the students were all seniors. I am pleased to report that a beneficial intellectual experience was had by all.

It would seem to me that more courses of this nature are possible, given the breadth of children's literature. I was also part of the proposal group for the health professions, where I had proposed a course on children's literature about health, illness, and dying. In its preliminary form, the course, for nurses and physical therapists, would have examined health education books, the informational books on sex, the "Johnnie goes to the hospital" books, as well as the problem novels about various diseases and about death. Although such a course was not included in the final proposal, I would think that one like it would, with proper publicity, appeal to such students. And yet one need not feel that one is "prostituting" one's humanistic interests; it is still possible to teach the course as literature while drawing on the students' professional interests.

Booklist (in the order in which they were studied during the quarter):

• John Cotton, Milk for Babes, paired with U. N. Declaration of the Rights of the Child

• Bible passages: Genesis 22: 1-18; 2 Samuel 11-12; 2 Kings 2: 23-25; Proverbs 30: 11-17; Mark 7: 9-13; 10: 13-16; Ephesians 6: 1-4

• Newbery, Little Goody Two-Shoes

• Alcott, Little Women

• Alcott, Little Men

• Aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy

• Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays

• Burnett, The Secret Garden

• Potter, Benjamin Bunny...