Entries from TeachingWriting

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Jun 2006

The books that her son, Alex, and his friends are compelled to read are highly regarded by teachers and professors of education. Many come decorated with Newbery medals and endorsements by the American Library Association. They are books known in the field of children’s literature as Young Adult (YA) literature. All are highly realistic, written in a confessional tone, usually in the first-person voice of an angry or alienated teenager. The protagonist deals with traumatic experiences: murder, suicide, the death of a parent or friend, incest, sexual abuse, rape, drugs, abortion, kidnapping, abandonment. Friendly or protective adults are virtually nonexistent; the main character’s mother, writes Feinberg, is dead, missing, or nonfunctional. Children in these novels almost never play. Often they feel guilty for whatever catastrophe befalls them. The books are uniformly humorless, earnest, and depressing. Their message, to the extent that they have one: the world is a nasty and brutish place, and you can depend only on yourself.

What is missing from YA books, says Feinberg, is any recognition of the role that imagination and fantasy play in children’s ways of experiencing life. Instead, the books seem dedicated to shocking children, destroying their fantasies, and giving them a mean dose of reality. One of the children that Feinberg knows said of these books, “They give me a headache in my stomach.” It is as though the authors, the publishers, the teachers, and the professors of education share a bizarre consensus that ordinary children need to be shaken out of their complacency, stripped of their innocence, and frightened by the horrors that the world has in store for them at any moment.

Here's part of the op-ed Barbara Feinberg published in the TIMES two years ago:

HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — I don't remember exactly what books were on the summer reading list handed out on the last day of school back when I was 10 — more than 30 years ago — but I do recall that they were merely "suggested reading." I can remember scraps of stories: children making kooky inventions; a lonely girl making a Japanese doll house out of bright fabric; something about a fat little witch afraid of Halloween.

But mostly it's the easy feeling I remember when I picture reading that summer. I imagine myself sitting under a broad, shady tree, surrounded by distant hills, turning pages of a crinkly covered library book....

I can't imagine how I would have fared if I had been asked back then to read the hard-hitting books on current summer reading lists....Less common too is "suggested" reading. "In September," reads an addendum to a summer book list handed out to sixth-graders in a nearby school, "you will be given a computer-generated test on your summer reading. This will count as 20 percent of your grade, or two quiz scores."

The required books are often the "good books" — that is, the ones that garner the highest literary prizes, like the Newbery Medal. They tend not to be about children having adventures or fighting foes in slightly enchanted realms, as the young characters do in, say, "A Wrinkle in Time," the 1962 classic by Madeleine L'Engle. Instead, they depict children who must "come to terms," "cope with" and "work through" harsh realties. Where characters in my books lollygagged in meadows, as it were, the children in these books are trying to hack their way out of cellars.

Their suffering is generally caused by adults: a parent has died, or run off, or otherwise acted irresponsibly, drunkenly, selfishly, dissolutely. The children are left trying to put together the pieces. No magic swoops in to aid a resolution; no fantasy cushions the pain. As a group, these books are well written; they have some complex characters and subplots, and are rich in cultural description. But the angst and crash landings of the books is what sticks with you. A 10-year-old attending the creative arts program I run told me, "Those books give me a headache in my stomach."

I can see why. Here are some novels assigned this summer to American sixth-graders, all winners of the highest literary prizes: "Walk Two Moons," by Sharon Creech, chronicles a daughter's search for her missing mother, who fled, it turns out, because of a deep depression after a miscarriage and subsequent hysterectomy. At the end, the girl discovers that her mother was killed in a bus accident. In "Belle Prater's Boy," by Ruth White, a missing father is found to have died because he shot himself in the face; Belle Prater, the errant mother, is never found, although her son remembers her saying that she's in a straitjacket: "Squeezed to death. I can't move. I can't breathe. I have to get out of here." A far gentler book, "Because of Winn-Dixie," by Kate DiCamillo, is about a girl who finds a friendly dog who in turn helps her rebuild her life. But she must do that because her mother abandoned her; we are told also that the mother "loved to drink."

These kinds of books, often referred to as "realistic" or "problem novels," emerged as a genre in the 1960's, and have been in full swing ever since. In the last few decades, writes a children's literature historian, Anne Scott Macleod, "the path of American adolescent novels has been from outward to inward; from concern with the young adult's relation to the larger community to a nearly exclusive emphasis on the adolescent's inner feelings." Sheila Egoff, also an expert in the field, writes that such books "take the approach that maturity can be attained only through a severe testing of soul and self, featuring some kind of shocking `rite of passage.' "

The rationale for exposing 10-year-olds to such potentially upsetting books is that children who read about situations different from their own gain a larger frame of reference for understanding human behavior and cultural diversity. Some educators believe that life is harder than it used to be; books shouldn't shield children from this. The argument is, as the head of the English department in a school here in Westchester County told parents, that anxiety is useful to children.

[snip]

The kind of realistic fiction that seems more "useful," according to my observation of my children and their friends, affords its young heroes and heroines a certain measure of emotional protection. These novels manage to relay rich material, but don't need to tell all, and instead are quirkily selective, in a way that feels consistent with how an authentic child might filter experience. "The Devil's Arithmetic," by Jane Yolen, about the Holocaust, and "The Watsons go to Birmingham — 1963" by Christopher Paul, about the racist South, are books my 16-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter loved when they were 10. While the circumstances of these stories are indeed harrowing, they are not experienced as emotionally shattering: the child characters are protected by adults throughout.

But what remains most loved, and most useful in helping children "face adversity," is the realm of fantasy, or the realm of the slightly less real world — like Louis Sachar's "Holes," for example. A universe where scary things are blunted — that is, by a blanket of fantasy — is easier to enter; it's helpful too for the main character to have access to a tiny bit of magical power. One need only to remember that Harry Potter, after all, has had to deal with the murder of his parents and an abusive foster family. His magic accompanies him; he is looked out for at every turn. Rather than confronting evil in the form of a violent realistic father, say, it is vastly less stressful for some children to contemplate evil in the form of "he who must not be named."

[snip]

Strangely, it seems that in such stories the only people who get to break free are the missing parents: these characters seem to have found their lives too stressful and boxed-in, and have fled — right out of the books.