The Editor's High Chair: Including an Interview with Madame Indira Gandhi

The breakdown of belief in truth and goodness has reached such proportions that it is accepted as normal in much literature, including that written for children. Children's stories often tell about going to a grocery store or a department store. How many of them mention that, when mother makes her purchase (often with the child watching) and writes the check, she must show her driver's license, then be photographed and even fingerprinted, and that the parcel she carries is carefully stapled shut to prevent her from dropping any stolen merchandise into it?

Teachers are represented as telling stories to children in a kind of idiot vacuum. How many people realize that some insight into these stories would help the children and that few teachers are given insight through graduate courses in the humanities? No one has a doctoral degree from a program in children's literature in the humanities, and it is likely to take a great struggle even to get a well-established course in the subject listed in a graduate school catalog.

If, as many people feel, the humanities, like the churches, are dying, it is because some academic humanists dislike facing real issues and habitually take a bland, Chamber of Commerce attitude toward the needs of the students to whose well-being they should be dedicated. A professor who gives complicated exegeses of literature parroted from books of criticism may wink at cheating, perhaps because he himself has cheated. Small wonder, in a world of tiny cheats and careful skirting of the problem in literature, that when students write their own stories, cheating is not considered serious. For example, when a class was assigned the writing of fables, several of them wrote fables something like this one:

A mouse steals a little bit of cheese each day from a woman's kitchen. Then one day, he manages to drag away a whole chunk of cheddar. Missing the chunk, the lady of the house sets a trap and catches the mouse. Moral: It's O.K. to cheat a little bit, but don't do it on a large scale or you're likely to be caught.

When children grow up with this attitude, then the fingerprinting, the photographing, the stapling are necessary. Professors of English should strive to relate literature to such situations here and now, to relate it to life.

Those who scorn children's literature fail to realize that, because of its simplicity, it is most difficult to teach, and its teaching should be an honored profession. It comes near to the hearts and psyches of all of us. Few people quote Milton, but many quote snatches of Mother Goose. Even Shakespeare, in the most serious part of King Lear, found it necessary to use parts of several rhymes later known as "Mother Goose rhymes," including "Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man," "Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill," and "Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd? / Thy sheep be in the corn." It was in this simple poetry that he could fuse the beauty and the horror of the world, as he did in his own verse: "Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made."

The neglect by humanists of the study of the literature of the future generation is not limited to the United States. In fact, more tolerance is shown to children's literature here than in Europe or in the Far East. In the summer of 1974, I went to India to interview Mme Indira Gandhi on the current state of children's literature there. An account of that interview follows:

In mid-April, Professor Narayan Kutty, who teaches children's literature at Eastern Connecticut State College, suggested that because of the interest her father, Nehru, had in children's literature, I should try to arrange an interview with Mme Gandhi during a research trip to Southeast Asia later that spring. Accordingly, on April 26, I wrote her. Since I was about to leave the country and was not sure when I would arrive...