I remember reading the first promotional flyer for Beginner Books back in the ’60s. Their big boast was that they would only use easy words that your preschooler already knew, giving him or her the proud accomplishment of saying, like the beaming child in the photo, “I can read it all by myself!” As a kid that seemed to me like a decent idea for smaller kids, but my mother saw the flaw right away: “If it only uses words they already know, how will they learn any new ones?” (Of course, the real inducement to parents translated as, “With these books you don’t have to read to your kids, or explain the books to them. You can stick them in the next room and concentrate on watching your soaps.”)
When I read as a child, I was frequently challenged by the words – so i looked them up in the dictionary, or I deduced their meaning (usually more or less correctly) from the context. When even the dictionary didn’t help, as with T. H. White’s joyful wallowing in medieval terms, I at least had the sense that there was a whole world of fascinating mysteries to discover. Of course, my parents had started me out by reading to me every night. That was how I learned to read; that was how I learned to ask what words meant.
But Beginner Books kids never had quite that same experience, did they? They were never challenged, so they came to see challenges as something to be avoided. Instead of seeing new knowledge as something free for the taking, they grew up feeling that it was somehow alien and essentially unfair – why should they be expected to perform above their level? That wasn’t what those first books had prepared them for! No wonder that in high school, when I showed any knowledge beyond my ABCs, other “students” woulf fix me with a sullen glare and say resentfully, “You read that in a BOOK!”, as if that marked me as some sort of criminal.
I’m not saying that I don’t like the Cat in the Hat. If I ever need a home demolished, he’s the first one I’ll call. (The second and third would be Curious George and Amelia Bedelia. Between the three of them, they could level Manhattan.) But there’s a reason why so many people these days seem to have a cog missing. Thinking doesn’t just come automatically. It’s a process that has to be learned. And teaching kids to be satisfied with what they already know is not the way.
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