Children's literature

“ To even the casual reader of English literature the answer is plain, if this subject of toy-books be regarded as of near kin to the larger body of writing. It has been somewhat the custom to consider children’s literature as a thing wholly apart from that of adults, probably because the majority of the authors of these little tales have so generally lacked the qualities indispensable for any true literary work. ”

“ Children should be fed with the literature that represents the childhood of the race. Out of that literature has grown all literature. Give a child the contents of the great books of the dawn, and you give him the best foundation for subsequent literary growth, and in after life he will be able to follow the intricate interweaving of the old threads throughout all modern thought. He has an immense affinity for those old books, for they are full of music and picturesqueness, teeming with vigorous life, bursting with the strange and wonderful. ”

“ In the first place, we shall permit no pseudo Art to live in the same house with our children; next, we shall bring our own facile tastes and opinions to some such searching test as we have indicated, knowing that the children imbibe the thoughts that are in us, whether we will or no; and, lastly, we shall inspire our children with those great ideas which shall create a demand, anyway, for great Art.
In literature, we have definite ends in view, both for our own children, and for the world through them. ”

“ We trust our young readers will find it a source of entertainment; those more advanced, a useful companion in their reading; those who travel, and visit museums and galleries of art, an interpreter of paintings and sculptures; those who mingle in cultivated society, a key to allusions which are occasionally made; and, last of all, those in advanced life, pleasure in retracing a path of literature which leads them back to the days of their childhood, and revives at every step the associations of the morning of life. ”

“ If literature reflects contemporary life with fidelity, we may well marvel that for so many hundreds of years the boys and girls of their generation were so little regarded that they are rarely mentioned in song or story. When they are, we are afforded glimpses of a curious attitude of aloofness or of harshness. Nowhere do we meet the artlessness of childhood. ”

“ I have said much of history and science, but mathematics, a mountainous land which pays the climber, makes its appeal to mind, and good teachers know that they may not drown their teaching in verbiage. As for literature—to introduce children to literature is to instal them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child’s intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find. ”

“ Within the last century and a half, too, many authors have collected and retold for children innumerable traditional stories from all parts of the earth—traditional fairy stories, romantic stories of the Middle Ages, legends, and myths.
The child's inheritance. As has been indicated, children's literature is of two kinds: first, the traditional kind that grew up among the folk of long ago in the forms of rhyme, myth, fairy tale, fable, legend, and romantic hero story; and, second, the kind that has been produced in modern times by individual authors. ”

“ There had been no "children's literature" to speak of before, except for the oral and "popular" tradition, including lullabies and Mother Goose, some of which go back as far as Tudor and even medieval times.
Children's literature today is an immense and complex domain; and leaving aside for the present the works composed by children themselves, what remains varies tremendously in skill and delight, as well as in subtlety and intention. ”

“ If the student reads thoughtfully the literary selections in the following sections of this book, he probably will realize that children's literature is also literature for adults, and that it is not only the child's inheritance, but also the inheritance of humanity. ”

“ Now, one would hasten to add that there are children in every class, and it may be in every family—unimaginative, matter-of-fact, commonplace children—who need to have given them, and to learn to enjoy, if possible, the mere vagaries and haphazard inventions; and it would be a pity to deprive any child of them in his hours of intellectual play. But it is from his contact, frequent and deep, with the more artistic and ordered bits of literature that we may expect the child to find that special cultivation of the imagination, the power of seeing an organized imaginative whole ”

“ We commend it to parents who are selecting literature for their children, assured, as we are, that it will convince them that books may be found which will engage the attention, and stimulate the imagination, of the young, without dissipating the mind, or blunting the moral sensibilities."—Philadelphia Messenger. ”

“ The problem of children’s reading is one of the greatest with which parents and teachers are confronted. It is the purpose of this series to provide the very best literature in every field for the use of children and young people of all ages,—poetry, fairy lore, fables, nursery rhymes, short entertaining stories, etc., etc. ”

“ It is, I think, a familiar precept to educators, that children should not have their literature too much simplified for them. We are told that they like something beyond them, and that it is good for them to have a sense of mystery and power beyond the sense they grasp. ”

“ Teach your chosen bit of literature according to its nature and genius. Study it so sympathetically that you can follow its hints, and make its emphases. Teach each piece for its characteristic effect, and do not try to teach everything in any one piece.
6. Be contented to read with the children a limited number of things. You cannot read every delightful and helpful thing. You can only introduce them to literature and teach them to love it. ”

“ Within less than a score of years there has been such reading of varied literary masterpieces by children as to bring us face to face with a problem of prime significance in education, the place and importance of literature in the education of American children. ”

“ It has not taught the child to judge good literature from the bad; it has supplied, in a prescribed course, certain isolated books or stereotyped poems, with which the child is wearied in the class-room, and from which, once outside, the child turns with natural dread. I am judging solely from the standpoint of juvenile taste. And so, with the entrance of a new consideration—the children’s reading-rooms—it may well be queried at the outset: What will this institution add to the creative force? ”

“ In the study of characters more than in any other aspect of story, we must allow for the growth of the children within the elementary period. The youngest children are prepared to appreciate the activities of people, and are interested in the active persons, and by transfer of sympathy, in the persons for whose sake the deeds are done. Their typical readiness in reading character does not fail them when the character has been transferred to literature. ”

“ Charles Lamb apparently was one of the first to get the modern thought that literature for children should be just as artistic, just as dignified in its presentation of truth, and just as worthy of literary recognition, as literature for adults. ”

“ Before venturing on a list of books that will serve the boy fairly well as he passes through the primary and the grammar grades of school, a few of the superior books that have stood the test of time must be noticed. They are fundamental in school and in general reading. The arguments of literary critics as to what constitutes this good literature have no place in a work of this nature that aims to aid teachers and parents in selecting books for their children. ”

“ As literature for the kindergarten and first grade, they have not often been excelled by modern writers. The task of selecting suitable material from the many poems, stories, and books written for children in recent years is difficult, but if the teacher has a keen appreciation of good literature and is guided by the likes and dislikes of her pupils, she probably will not go far astray. ”

“ As children themselves are the perfect flowers of life, so a collection of the best poems written on children should be the most perfect of all anthologies. Yet, the book itself is not by any means a success. Many of the loveliest child-poems in our literature are excluded and not a few feeble and trivial poems are inserted. ”

“ The low-grade selection that is many times given the child by the school reader as subject-matter from which to learn the great art of reading.
The prejudice of parents and even of communities against fairy tales and all forms of highly imaginative literature—the hardest thing to meet from the reading side of the question. Librarians are requested not to give fairy books to children. Such books are thought to be bad. The demand is for true books. Parents have not discovered the existence of the imagination and the part it has played in the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual progress of man. ”

“ The boy whose reading has been properly directed graduates from tales of adventure into the better forms of literature, including standard fiction, imaginative narration, history, historical novels, essays, and poetry. Few children, unaided, develop a taste for good literature; it must be cultivated by judicious direction. The best literature is as potent in its influence for good as trashy reading is for evil. ”

“ This is because the images and pictures they find in literature retain in the minds of the children the glow of imagination, the warmth of emotion, the vitality of a remembered joy. And it is true, as every teacher knows who has taught it aright, that a bit of literature arouses in the children a mood of creative imagination such as no other subject ever can awaken. This mood of imaginative creation instinctively expresses itself in literary composition, in drawing, painting, designing, modeling, acting, or music. ”

“ First arouse in your children the emotion—an original personal emotion of their own, growing out of the legitimate background; then, if perchance you are so fortunate as to find a poem or a story which also reflects this emotion, and which is at the same time good as art, you are so much the richer. The children will find their own feeling reinforced and nobly expressed, and consequently deepened and dignified.
The same thing is true as to the love of animals. If the children have the literature first, or only the literature, they may have only a second-hand and perfunctory love of the beasts. ”

“ Out of practically every story, and out of many of the poems, they get an inspiration for a picture or a bit of modeling. Such associations with literature are legitimate and natural. This appears very clear when we reflect that we are hoping to cultivate the taste and imagination of the children, and to teach them to love human life, with all that this implies, as well as to drill them in language, grammar, and writing. ”

“ In accordance with this fashion it seems the easiest way to take the privilege of the day and without more ado assume that books of literature are necessary in the education of a boy, and conclude therefrom that a principal business of the teacher is to train the boy to read books intelligently and to form a substantial taste for them. And why should not a schoolmaster who dotes on a few old favourites have an unshaken faith in his assumption and go merrily on to the business of the literature itself and what may be done toward developing among school children a taste for it? ”

“ The fact that literature for children is likely to have a strong interest for adults is strikingly suggested in a few sentences in John Macy's A Child's Guide to Reading:
When "juveniles" are really good, parents read them after children have gone to bed. I do not know whether Tom Brown at Rugby is catalogued by the careful librarian as a book for boys, but I am sure it is a book for men. ”

“ Encourage children to read poetry aloud. By example and suggestion help them keep their minds on the ideas, the pictures, the characters. Only by doing this can they really read so as to interpret a poem. No one can read with a lazy mind, or merely by imitation. ”

“ He has something to measure against, some standards to cling to. But we are talking about children still in the early plastic stages of standards who will take the relationships we offer them through stories and build them into the very fabric of their thinking.
[Pg 34] Now, how much of the classical literature follows the lead of the children’s own inquiries? How much of it stimulates fruitful inquiries? What are the relationships which sagas, myths and folk-lore interpret? ”

“ Culture through literature. He was a wise educator who said, "The boy who has access to good books and who has learned to make them his close friends is beyond the power of evil." Literature in the grades, in addition to furnishing intellectual recreation, should so cultivate in the pupil the power of literary appreciation that he will make good books his close friends. The child who has heard good music from infancy is not likely to be attracted by popular ragtime. ”

“ There are, however, certain characteristics of different periods of childhood which are fairly universal, and which may, therefore, be taken as guiding, determining factors in the selection of suitable literature.
JUNIOR FORMS
1. One of the most striking characteristics of young children is the activity of their imagination. They endow their toys with life and personality; they construct the most fantastic and impossible tales; they accept without question the existence of supernatural beings. ”