The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  If Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web has her antecedents in Lady Fenn’s 1783 Cobwebs to Catch Flies, then late-twentieth-century developments such as DISTAR (Direct Instructional System for Teaching and Remediation) and DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators for Basic Early Literacy Skills) have their antecedents in Joseph Lancaster’s 1803 Improvements in Education as It Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community, a factory-model system based on instant order and obedience. Children respond, in unison, to direct instructions:

  A number of commands, trifling in appearance, but conducive to good order, are given by the monitors. When a new scholar is first admitted, he is pleased with the uniformity, novelty and simplicity of the motions made by the class he is in. Under the influence of this pleasure he readily obeys, the same as the other boys do.

  Lancaster offers minutely detailed accounts for teaching each step of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a teacher signalling a command and monitors enforcing its execution. The beauty of the method, as Lancaster explains, is that ‘if seven hundred boys were all in one room, as one class, learning the same thing, they could all write and spell by this method, at the dictation of one monitor’:

  The commands that a monitor usually gives to his class, are of a simple nature: as, to go in or out of their seats: ‘In’–‘Out.’ The whole class do this at one motion – they learn to front, or go to the right or left, either single or double. They ‘show slates’, at the word of command; take them up, or lay them gently down on the desk, in the same manner.

  Lancaster’s factory model was admirably cost-efficient, and, because he had to do more with less, he developed inspired pedagogical practices. Rather than insist that children purchase expensive books, pens and ink – which had to be replaced when used up – Lancaster focused on renewable materials. Beginners learned to write their letters in small sandboxes set at a child’s table height. After each attempt at writing a letter with a pointed stick, the sand was smoothed over. As the children progressed in the Lancastrian system, they wrote with soft slate pencils on the hard sheets of slate – wiping the slate clean at the end of each exercise. Lancaster also developed a cheap alternative to the one-book-per-child model of reading instruction. By printing each leaf of a book at three times its normal size and suspending it from string or a nail on the wall, groups of children could move around the room reciting the lessons as they went from sheet to sheet. That way, Lancaster explains, ‘two hundred boys may all repeat their lessons from one card, in the space of three hours’.13

  Despite Lancaster’s pedagogical creativity, his instructional techniques look and sound eerily similar to the DISTAR method, developed by Siegfried Engelmann in the 1960s. The Direct Instruction website offers a series of training demonstration films. Under the ‘Mastery of Reading’ title is a model which, like the Lancastrian method, involves a series of oral and visual cues given by a teacher, to which children respond in unison. A teacher holds a big book in her hand, raises her free hand in a fist, and issues the verbal cue, ‘Get ready.’ Then she points to a letter, M for example, and the children make the sound – ‘mmm’ – holding it for at least two seconds. In the American film clips, the teachers and the children are predominantly African-American or Hispanic.14 The lesson sounds almost identical to one Lancaster described in 1805:

  They are required to read every word slowly and deliberately, pausing between each. They read long words in the same manner, only by syllables; thus in reading the word, Composition, they would not read it at once, but by syllables: thus, Com-po-si-tion; making a pause at every syllable.15

  The tediousness – and the tyranny – of the Lancastrian process persists. In ‘Slow Reader’, from Allan Ahlberg’s 1983 poetry collection Please Mrs Butler, this kind of instructional oppression is poignantly manifest:

  I-am-in-the-slow

  read-ers-group-that-is

  all-I-am-in-I

  hate-it.16

  As literacy instruction increasingly focused on how to teach rather than what to teach or why, it became disconnected from anything important – such as saving a life or being inducted into a cultural community. As the mass-market factory model came to dominate, literacy instruction increasingly narrowed into regimented, tyrannical modes.

  T is for Textbook and Test

  The search for the very best methodology for literacy instruction contributed to the rise of an entire industry. The story of American educational publishing makes the general pattern clear. The New England Primer probably stands as the first bestselling textbook, although it was about teaching religion as much as reading. The pedagogical emphasis changed from religious to political with Noah Webster’s eighteenth-century ‘blue-back speller’, as the 1829 edition was called (the original version was published in 1783 as the first part of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language). Webster believed that his instructional textbooks would serve to galvanise and unify Americans, ‘to implant, in the minds of the American youth, the principles of virtue and liberty’.17 In the nineteenth century, the Eclectic Readers created by William Holmes McGuffey (first published in 1836) marked the change from ‘speller’ to ‘reader’ as the term used to identify an introductory textbook of literacy instruction. The McGuffey Readers also gave voice to American culture, as they featured the developing genre of American poetry. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha, for example, appeared in McGuffey’s sixth Reader and was recited by generations of school-children across the country. By the 1930s, however, an increasingly industrialised approach was being used and the Elson-Gray Dick and Jane readers, with their controlled vocabulary lists and look–say methods of instruction, came to dominate literacy instruction.

  By the late 1950s a backlash against the look–say model was in full swing. In Why Johnny Can’t Read? (1955), Rudolf Flesch produced a scathing, influential critique on the use of a sight vocabulary to teach reading. His central point is that the flexible technology of the phonetic alphabet provides complete access to a literate community – while static words do not. According to Flesch, every ‘Johnny’ force-fed on basal readers (that is to say, this kind of reading textbooks series) was doomed:

  He gets those series of horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers, the stuff and guff about Dick and Jane or Alice and Jerry visiting the farm and having birthday parties and seeing animals in the zoo and going through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting middle-class, middle-income, middle-I.Q. children’s activities that offer opportunities for reading ‘Look, look’ or ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘Come, come’ or ‘See the funny, funny animal’.

  Besides being disgusted with the prose, Flesch is also disgusted with the profit motive fuelling the production and adoption of commercial reading programmes. ‘There are’, he says with despair, ‘millions of dollars of profit in these little books’.18 Fifty years later, billions of dollars are now at stake – as the George W. Bush administration’s ‘Read First’ and ‘No Child Left Behind’ initiatives made abundantly clear.

  The spectre of Flesch’s barely reading Johnny still haunts us – though the methodology battles have not changed much. In the 1960s and 1970s they see-sawed between look–say and phonics, and in the 1970s and 1980s between phonics and whole language. The key point here is that the public discussions rarely addressed the idea of matching methodology to child – as advocated by the maternal pedagogues at the end of the eighteenth century. The twentieth century saw competition for a single ‘best’ instructional methodology. Lost from view were the reasons for reading: the religious reasons of the seventeenth-century New England Primer, the political reasons of Webster’s eighteenth-century speller, and the cultural reasons of the nineteenth-century McGuffey Reader. Perhaps as a response to the loss of reasons for learning to read, British author Pat Hutchins composed The Tale of Thomas Mead (1980) about a boy who refuses to learn to read. ‘Why should I?’ he keeps asking, intelligently. Hutchins demonstrates the dangers of illiteracy. Thomas ignores the warning about workmen on l
adders and ends up with paint spilled on his head. He pushes the pull door and knocks people over, then enters the women’s washroom instead of the men’s. He is eventually arrested for jaywalking and thrown into prison where:

  His cellmates thought it was a crime

  that Thomas Mead was doing time,

  and all because he couldn’t read.

  ‘Please help me to!’ cried Thomas Mead.

  They taught him words he ought to know

  Like UP and DOWN and STOP and GO,

  IN and OUT, EMPTY, FULL,

  EXIT, ENTRANCE, PUSH and PULL,

  and BATHROOM, LADIES, GENTLEMEN,

  and DANGER, WET PAINT, WALK, DON’T RUN

  and then they said they’d better get

  him started on the alphabet.19

  Hutchins plays the look–say / phonemic awareness debate diplomatically, by engaging both sides.

  Battles about reading methodologies, however, pale in comparison to battles about reading assessment. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, across the Western world, the emphasis on a ‘best’ method has been replaced by a focus on keeping score. The medium has shifted from books of reading instruction to instruments of assessment – otherwise known as ‘tests’. These testing regimes, often mandated by local or national governments, are fundamentally driven by a need to produce high literacy scores, and are the result of a perceived need for data which can be compared across political and geographical boundaries. The tests, generally, are designed to examine a child’s understanding of narrowly defined rules of literacy with little regard for literacy’s chief benefits and purposes (fostering cultural, religious or political awareness – as well as developing facility with language).20 And because entire testing edifices have been built only on rigidly constricted scoring rubrics, the prose to which school-children might be exposed has too often descended from the heights of Charlotte’s clarity into the muddy troughs of assessment.

  In opposition to the recent fixation with testing and ranking of literacy scores are the findings of a team of American researchers who studied the induction into literacy of eighty children over a two-year period in 1985. Their findings emphasised the relationship between reading and interpretation. In stark contrast to the tightly controlled ranking of literacy skills in large-scale assessment exercises, their longitudinal studies demonstrated that learning to read is not so much about skill as about interpretation and knowledge.21

  Despite my attention to methodology in this chapter, it would be wrong to conclude without attention to the literature which inducts children into a literate community. For children learning to read in the middle of the twentieth century, Dr Seuss, a pseudonym for Theodore Geisel, was a kind of magician, a saviour from the tyranny of basal readers, a writer able to negotiate the precarious balance between reading instruction and reading pleasure. The Cat in the Hat may well subtly make that point himself when he says in his eponymous book:

  I can hold up the cup

  And the milk and the cake!

  I can hold up these books! And the fish on a rake!22

  Other examples of compelling inductions into a literate community include Allan Ahlberg and Colin McNaughton’s Red Nose Readers (from 1985), Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad stories (from 1970) and Brian Wildsmith’s Cat on the Mat books (from 1982). A final example of the kind of book that begins with the assumption of the intelligence of children and their desire to learn, and is engaging to even the newest of young readers, is Mommy? (2006), drawn by Maurice Sendak around a scenario by Arthur Yorinks, and with paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart. The book has only two words and two punctuation marks: ‘Mommy?’ and ‘Baby!’ Sendak’s round, sleep-suited baby looks for his Mommy in a haunted house of pop-up monsters: ‘Mommy?’ he asks on each page, as he searches for her. At each page-turn, a monster pops up to threaten him. And each time, the baby provides the consolation – popping a soother into a vampire’s mouth, pulling a painful bolt out of Frankenstein’s neck, unwrapping bandages from a mummy – until he is reunited with his bride-of-Frankenstein Mommy – who smiles happily as she reaches to her ‘Baby!’ In Sendak’s story, the ‘Baby’ is a competent person, able to assess and resolve tricky situations. The child reader is invited into the story, becoming a participant, a member of a network of readers who belong to a literate community. If there is any hope for a literate future, it is found with the authors who care about clarity and communicating something that new readers want to know. Texts in a large-scale assessment exercise have little hope of doing that.

  The last words in this chapter go to Ted Hughes. In his introduction to Poetry in the Making, a book about reading and writing poetry for school-children, Hughes explains that ‘All falsities in writing – and the consequent dry-rot that spreads into the whole fabric – come from the notion that there is a stylistic ideal which exists in the abstract.’ Teachers, he explains, ‘should have nothing to do with that’. Instead, he says, their ‘words should not be “How to write” but “How to try to say what you really mean” which is part of the search for self-knowledge and perhaps, in one form or another, grace’.23 Unlike the advocates of assessment tests, Ted Hughes, E. B. White, Charlotte and the felons who were spared because they could read the ‘neck verse’ all aspire to clarity, and to grace.

  Notes

  1. William Strunk, The Elements of Style with Revisions, An Introduction and a Chapter on Writing by E. B. White, 3rd edn (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 79.

  2. Robert Sabuda, The Christmas Alphabet (New York: Orchard Books, 1994).

  3. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 213.

  4. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (Toronto: Alfred Knopf, 1996), p. 71.

  5. The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, a facsimile reproduction of the 1766 edition (Tokyo: Holp Shuppan, 1981), and The History of Giles Gingerbread: A Little Boy Who Lived Upon Learning (York: Kendrew, 1820), p. 19.

  6. Leonard R. Mendelsohn, ‘Sophisticated Reading for Children: The Experience of the Classical Jewish Academy’, Children’s Literature, 2 (1973), 35–9 (p. 37).

  7. Clare Bradford, Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007), p. 19.

  8. Mitzi Myers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Traditions in Georgian Children’s Books’, Children’s Literature, 14 (1986), 31–59 (p. 34). Myers deployed the term ‘mentoria’ to refer to these ‘rational dames’, playing on Ann Murry’s book Mentoria: or The Young Ladies Instructor (1782).

  9. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Lessons for Children (London: Baldwin, Cradock et al., 1834), pp. 3–4. This passage was first introduced in the 1808 edition.

  10. See Arizpe, Evelyn, and Morag Styles, with Shirley Brice Heath, Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children and Texts, (Lichfield: Pied Piper, 2006).

  11. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Lessons’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (7 vols., London: Pickering, 1989), vol. iv, p. 469.

  12. Mrs Felix Summerly, The Mother’s Primer: A Little Child’s First Steps in Many Ways (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844), p. 4.

  13. Joseph Lancaster, Improvements in Education as it Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community, 3rd edn (1805; rpt with an introduction by Francesco Cordasco, Clifton: Augustus M. Kelley, 1973), pp. 108–9.

  14. Association for Direct Instruction website, ‘Tips on Signalling’: http://adihome.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=40 (accessed 21 March 2008).

  15. Lancaster, Improvements in Education, p. 21.

  16. Allan Ahlberg, Please Mrs Butler (London: Puffin, 1983), p. 13.

  17. Quoted in E. Jennifer Monaghan, A Common Heritage: Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller (Hamden, CN: Archon Books, 1983), p. 13.

  18. Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Ca
n’t Read? (New York: Harper and Row, 1955), pp. 6–7.

  19. Pat Hutchins, The Tale of Thomas Mead (New York: Greenwillow, 1980), pp. 6–7.

  20. In Ontario, Canada, for example, several school districts mandated the use of ‘Comprehension, Attitudes, Strategies and Interests’ (CASI) packages: reading booklets, test booklets, a teacher guide and anchor booklet (containing grading rubrics). In the tests, children are scored on a 1–4 scale on several categories, including reasoning, communication, organisation of ideas, and application of language conventions. The texts on which literacy skills are tested are distinguished by their banality.

  21. Edward Chittenden and Terry Salinger with Anne M. Bussis, Inquiry into Meaning: An Investigation of Learning to Read, revised edn (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2001), p. 38.

  22. Dr Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 18.

  23. Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’ (London: Faber, 1969), p. 12.

  9 Gender roles in children’s fiction

  Judy Simons

  Girlhood and boyhood, at least until quite recently, have often been treated as separate, different and unequal in children’s literature. Eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s books are full of strong, active boy characters, and much more submissive, domestic and introspective girls. But equally prevalent, even if sometimes less immediately obvious, has been a recurrent expression of the flimsiness and artificiality of the division between boys and girls, and of the desire of many protagonists to contravene the gender identities enjoined on them. Many favourite characters from children’s books either long to defy the simple gender categorisation imposed on them as members of the Anglo-American middle classes, or actually actively transgress the roles assigned to them. Here, for instance, is Georgina, speaking out in the first of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books: