Abby Goodnough writes in the New York Times about a charter school in Springfield, Mass, where Thomas Wartenberg and students from Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books as a springboard for philosophical discussions. Bravo! Stories take children into counterfactuals worlds, challenging them to explore the perils and possibilities that authors have described in response to that great question “What if?” In another post, I described the work of Alison Gopnik and how she views children as philosophers, scientists, and explorers who use their curiosity about the world not only to make discoveries but also to envision how things might be, could be, and should be.

Professor Wartenberg describes the upside to the philosophy lessons, and the children in the Springfield school are already wonderfully wise, as they reveal when asked to explain why they like philosophy.

It’s giving kids a way to figure out what they think, support their own views and reason with one another,” [Wartenberg] says. “So I can’t imagine this isn’t helping them on standardized tests.”

But the pupils in Ms. Runquist’s class said they liked philosophy because it involved reading good books and expressing themselves.

“We can say things about what we believe and stuff,” a girl named Autumn said. “It’s what we feel and what we think.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18philosophy-t.html?pagewanted=1

Heidi Hirschl sent me this article about the new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Curious George Saves the Day.” The story behind the Curious George series is fascinating–worth a book of its own. Margret and H.A. Rey fled Paris in 1940 on bicycles, making their way to Lisbon. They went initially to Rio de Janeiro, then New York, and finally settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now that Curious George has become a franchise, he has been tamed to a great extent. The ether scene in one of the early books can no longer be found in versions of George’s adventures today.

Here’s the link to Edward Rothstein’s fascinatingly informative article about the exhibit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/arts/design/26curious.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

Julie Just writes about the “parent problem” in young adult literature and reminded me that Chapter 6 of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn gives us the one of the first fully elaborated accounts of child abuse from the point of view of the victim. Here’s a brief excerpt:

But by and by pap got too handy with his hick’ry, and I couldn’t stand it. I was all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome. I judged he had got drowned, and I wasn’t ever going to get out any more. I was scared. I made up my mind I would fix up some way to leave there.

We live in a culture that refers constantly to helicopter parents, yet there are many young adult books with self-absorbed, negligent parents who can’t be bothered to attend to their children’s needs. In children’s literature you need a certain degree of parental incompetence and absence to enable the child’s “triumphant rise.” An earlier age depicted cruel, abusive parents or simply killed off the biological mother and father, but in a very different genre–fairy tales and fantasy. Is the parent problem in YA fiction symptomatic of a new hands-off attitude among parents today?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/review/Just-t.html