Essay: Why Build a Children’s Library?
I grew up with a love of books, nurtured by my parents who worked hard to give me and my brothers an excellent education. As a homeschooling family with limited television, we boosted the circulation of our local library significantly. Every Tuesday we lay in wait at the corner near our house for the bookmobile; we would greet the friendly librarians, return what we had checked out last week, and ransack the shelves for as many books as we could carry. Then, backs stiff and heads craned back, with chins supporting the stacks held precariously against our chests, we would teeter home to examine our finds.
There was a lot of sand carried home in the prospector’s pans. I devoured the Tarzan series, Nancy Drew, and Sweet Valley High, and didn’t know how badly my time was wasted. But sometimes I would find a treasure. The day I happened on The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis began a season of enchantment as I entered the world of Narnia. Seemingly minutes later, I closed the back cover with a sigh and subsided into reverie. When I read on the back jacket that there were six more in the series, I immediately visited the local library and brought home the rest. I read and reread them hungrily, wishing there were more. The same happened with Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and the Swallows and Amazons series, whose title and author I forgot after reading once, but remembered wistfully each time I entered the bookmobile. One sweltering summer at my aunt’s farm I found a copy of My Side of the Mountain in the living room (my cousin had been assigned it in school). Two hours later he found me with it, snatched it away, and taunted me for days until I appealed to his mother. He had hidden it in his tree house during a rainstorm, and when he grudgingly returned it I dried it in the sun and blissfully turned the stiff pages until the story was complete. (Twenty years later, we are friends again.)
The best stories I found were compelling and all-consuming; they filled my imagination in a way that television never did, although the hypnotic set at my friends’ homes certainly did attract my attention. But today I remember few television programs, except the ones that got me into trouble. The stories that stayed with me were the ones that required my full engagement: their writers painted mental pictures with well-crafted words, and within these worlds the heroes found danger and excitement, and often love. These books opened a door to wonder.
Throughout my college and graduate school career, the importance of stories kept emerging in my writing. I wrote a dissertation proposal for the Georgetown linguistics school, in which I planned to study stories told by Native American elders. I was interested in how people use stories to interpret their lives and draw meaning out of their experiences. I had the dissertation approved in the Spring of 2006, six months pregnant with Quena’s and my first child.
When Christopher was born I put my graduate work on hold and came home to care for him. My attention shifted from stories people use to interpret their lives, to stories that would shape my children’s lives. I began to collect my favorite books from childhood, and visited the local library looking for good titles. Early on I ordered a favorite childhood series, and when it came in the mail I puzzled over the small-size volumes, wondering if they were a miniature edition. Then it dawned on me that they were exactly the same size as when my mother had read them to me. As I explored the changed world of children’s literature, I realized that some of my old favorites were not only smaller than I remember, but also not as good, and I began to develop a clearer picture of the kind of books I want my children to enjoy.
David Mills’ essay, “Enchanting Children,” in Touchstone Magazine, provided me with a focus. In this essay he suggests that good stories, which capture a child’s imagination through delight, can influence a child’s view of the world in a way that formal moral instruction cannot. Through the adventures of characters in a story world, good books can provide experiential evidence that will persuade children to accept the truth they intellectually assent to. He writes:
Even if Johnny has memorized the Baltimore Catechism or the Westminster Confession, or even hundreds of verses of Scripture, if his imagination has been formed by the wider, secular culture, he will respond to temptations as a secularist, not as a Christian…. even the devils believe, in the sense that they know what the reality is (James 2:19). But they cannot imagine that the reality is good. They may know of God the Father, but to them such Fatherhood feels like domination and oppression, because their imaginations are so completely corrupted….
What we want our children to imagine depends upon what we want our children to be. As Christians, we want them not just to learn to understand and analyze rightly, but to react rightly because they see the world rightly. We want our children to know by instinct or intuition what is the right answer, the right action, the right attitude….To put it another way, we want to raise kings, children at least somewhat worthy of the status of sons of God they have received through the Lord’s death on the Cross. We do not want the average, the mean, the mediocre. We want the elite. Children with a special calling must be trained in a special way. They must be set apart. More must be asked of them than we would ask of other children. This is not easy to do…. One way to set them apart is to try to form their imaginations, to give them an alternative to the worldly lessons even the sheltered child absorbs as if from the air, by immersing them in books that express the Christian understanding of the world.
Some children seem to be impervious to even the most obvious lessons, but in general, a child who spends time in a good writer’s world will find his imagination formed by it, at least a little. A good story will not make him good, but it should help him understand goodness a little better and make doing good a little easier by making it feel more normal. It will teach him that the world is this kind of place and not that kind.
(Touchstone Magazine, December 2006)
Good books can be a means to pursue our children’s hearts for God. Not only will good stories help them accept the normality of truth and virtue, but more importantly, they will open the way for the essential Story: that the hero Jesus gave His life to reconcile their relationship with the holy Father God, from whom all good things come. Stories about good fathers and good families can point our children toward the Father from whom all families derive their origin (Ephesians 3:14-15). Children will see the effect of noble fatherhood in their stories, and this will provide a way for them to interpret the role of Father God within their own lives. Hero stories will open their minds to seeing the perfect Hero, the firstborn brother of all Christians (Romans 8:29). In the courage of Frodo trudging up Mount Doom they may glimpse a shadow of Jesus’ torturous journey up Golgotha.
Moral instruction may fail to reach their hearts, but a good story can keep their attention and persuade them to accept these truths about the universe. Stories can get through the chinks in the wall of deception that each sinful heart holds up against truth.
As an added benefit, their knowledge of the world will expand. Through good books they will travel back in history and into the future, they will ride horses and fly airplanes, they will slay dragons, they will withstand bullies. They will defend their families and fall in love. They will fight on the Great Wall of China, they will build a log cabin in Kansas; run along Holland’s dikes, and storm the gates of Troy. They will write the Constitution, battle pirates, run for President, man the Underground Railroad. And they will grow to be the kind of people who populate their books.
My goal is that at every age, our children would be surrounded by good books appropriate to their age and personality. It is our task to select the best books, protecting our children from the harmful and inoculating them against the mediocre. Then we need to help them love their books, praying that their best-loved stories will lead them toward a Christian worldview and an acceptance of the Gospel.
Quena, Shanna, Anthony and Christopher Gonzalez
Categories: Essays
Tags: Approach, Christian Worldview, David Mills, Purpose
Posted on April 5, 2009
2 responses to Essay: Why Build a Children’s Library?
Leave a Response
Subscribe
Give Our Kids a Book
Search by:
Tags
Quote of the Hour
Imagination. The word comes from “image” — a mental picture. And these pictures have a way of sticking in our memory and making demands on our conscience long after the explanations have been rubbed thin by the frictions of daily life.
—
Thank you Shanna for writing down your thoughts. It is very encouraging and challenging to know that we can help our children grow towards the Gospel through the books that we share with them. Thank you for putting together this resource, making it easier for others to find these good books.
Shanna, This is a great website. It shows an inquisitive mind, a magnanimous heart and a great talent, all placed at the service of the most important people on earth: the children. I pray God’s grace, strength and creativity for you, and a multiplied readership for your efforts.