Overall, I got a ton out of reading Learning from the Left! I was especially inspired by Mickenberg’s methodological approach, particularly in contrast with some of the other scholarship we’ve read. For one thing, I appreciated Mickenberg’s emphasis on the role of the publishing industry in influencing how and what people read. I’m very interested in the history of the book so I was fascinated by Mickenberg’s discussion of how subversive texts were able to be printed because of the lax ways in which the children’s publishing industry was regulated.  I also loved that Mickenberg notes how trends in education and library curation impacted the popularity and accessibility of different books.

In general, I noticed Mickenberg using a different approach and archive than other children’s literature scholars—Gubar, Rose, and even Kidd, for example.  This sentence from the introduction stuck out to me as particularly distinct: “In the course of interviewing people and reading their published work and private correspondence, I encountered very few people conforming to the stereotype of the dogmatic closed-minded Stalinist” (11). First of all, Mickenberg here uses the first person and implicitly acknowledges her own authorial intervention. Secondly, Mickenberg points to using interviews—which she conducts herself—as an important part of her research. I don’t remember any other scholarship we’ve read that used that approach. In a way, because Mickenberg draws our attention to her methodology and subjectivity (however briefly), we remember that she (and the critic more generally) is herself a librarian-like figures who curates our reading experience.

However, because Mickenberg is using a slightly different archive than some of the other criticism we’ve read, she doesn’t really situate herself within childhood studies or children’s literature scholarship. That is to say, although her work is strongly reliant on primary texts and historical information, Mickenberg doesn’t cite contemporary critical conversations happening in childhood studies—some of which seem to complement her readings. As I was reading, I would encounter an opinion that reminded me of someone else we’ve read, but Mickenberg didn’t offer a nod to that scholar. For example, Mickenberg describes Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories as equally “for adults as for children. The stories speak to both an imagined child reader and to an adult fantasy of the child’s liberated imagination” (36). Mickenberg’s framing of imagined childhood and the importance of adult readership reminded me of Rose (even though Rose was of course talking about a historical time and setting). I don’t think Mickenberg’s failure to reference to childhood scholarship is necessarily a bad thing, only something that sets it a part from some of the other works we’ve seen. It may just be because Mickenberg situates herself in a different academic discipline (American studies?) and as such uses the more conventional archive for that field.

Another question I had about Mickenberg’s approach was how she sees the roles of the reader and meaning. For example, I took issue with Mickenberg’s discussion of the moral of Kay’s Battle in the Barnyard: “Perhaps children would interpret the story literally and think of its lessons only in terms of animals, but there is enough anthropomorphism here that Kay’s meaning seems fairly transparent. Moreover, the children who were likely to have read this story had parents who would be sure to make its intended meaning clear” (52). I wonder, though, if the ways in which children could’ve interpreted this text may have been more varied than Mickenberg indicates. It almost seems like Mickenberg thinks there is one “intended” (or even true) “meaning” behind this text—an idea I disagree with. Does Mickenberg believe that the experience of reading a radical text in a particular context (with the intervention of progressive parents, in school, etc.) is what makes the makes a text radical? Or is it what’s in the text in and of itself?  Or both?

Let’s start by offering up the interesting back matter found on current copies of The Lorax:

“UNLESS someone like you,

cares a whole awful lot,

nothing is going to get better.

It’s not.—The Lorax

Nearly forty years ago, when Random House first published Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, it sent forth a clarion call—to the industry and consumers alike—to conserve the earth’s precious and finite natural resource. The message of it’s whimsical yet powerful tale resonates today more profoundly than ever. In every corner of the world we are at risk of losing real-life Brown Bar-ba-loots, Swomee-Swans, Humming-Fish, Truffula Trees, and the forests they inhabit.

Together, Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Random House proudly sponsor The Lorax Project, an ongoing multifaceted initiative designed to raise awareness of environmental issues and inpsire earth-friendly action worldwide by passionate individuals of all ages.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Random House support conservation groups around the world to enhance critical activities needed to protect the real-life Lorax forests, whose preservation is essential to all life on our planet” (Seuss, The Lorax).

The front cover of newer copies of The Lorax also comes stamped with “earth-friendly, printed on recycled paper” (Seuss, The Lorax).

Before even opening the book, readers are given explicit indication of the political implications of the text.

As a researcher of children’s picturebooks, Continue reading →

Abate persuaded me that Raising Your Kids Right is an important book, and for the most part I really enjoyed and learned from Abate’s methodology. This book is a fun read. Knowing nothing about it, I wasn’t sure what Abate’s politics would be, and it’s to her credit that I didn’t figure it out until halfway into the introduction.

That said, I question moments in the book when Abate seems to choose black-and-white characterizations of issues instead of engaging with their nuances in depth—which is exactly her critique of The Book of Virtues and The Truax. I loved her description, for example, of The Book of Virtues as offering “concrete and unquestioned moral certainties, which were arguably never really certain in the past and are surely no longer steadfast amid the complications, complexities, and upheavals of the postmodern world” and her use of Nussbaum’s quote that the book “‘prefers an easy unity of feeling to the hard puzzles of moral reflection’” (42). This is deft phrasing, and pages 35-45 are full of especially juicy nuggets like these. So I was a little disappointed when she occasionally dips into similar modes of thinking with different ideologies; sometimes it feels like she’s just fighting partisan conservative politics with partisan liberal politics. While conversations like that are necessary, I’d like to think there’s a better way (at least from the liberal point of view, since we have truth on our side, just kidding/not kidding/just kidding).

What do we want to teach our children and what don’t we want to teach them? That seems like a fair place to start, right? We want to teach children to stick up for themselves and each other, but not to be bullies; to have high self-esteem, but not be egomaniacs; to be kind, but not be pushovers; to be independent thinkers, but only if they express those independent thoughts in approved ways (e.g., show independence by running for office, not by doing drugs); to be adventurous, but not reckless (Be bold! Try new things! But don’t drink the fabric softener or stick a fork in the electrical outlet); to be creative and artistically free, but not flaky or exploitative or parasitic; to be responsible and take care of business, but not deadened corporate drones with crushed souls. We want children to listen to parents and teachers, and frankly, more or less do what they say (don’t play with doody; don’t bully the shy kid; do your homework), but we also want them to question authority and embrace their own agencies. We want them to be obedient in all the right ways for their own safety and positive development, but we don’t want them to feel helpless or insignificant, and we never want to think of ourselves as teaching them blind obedience.

These are all extremely fine lines, and I think it’s easy to criticize any piece of children’s literature for not getting the balance quite right—especially when children’s lit is also vulnerable to the valid critique of being excessively didactic. Abate calls for children’s lit to incorporate more subtlety, but at what point do extensive pains to tune a book’s message to a precise political key render it even more overtly didactic? We talked a bit about libraries and curation in class last week, and I wonder if the best solution is simply a multiplicity of texts. That’s easier said than done, of course. While I don’t intend to universalize my experience, I grew up in a house with a lot of books, including crusty old traditionalist tomes from the 50s that belonged to my mom and aunts when they were kids (hoarding isn’t all bad). As a kid, I found some of those books exotic and quaint and others stupid and lame, but I didn’t swallow any of their messages whole, and I could sniff them out as dated propaganda. Of course, no one insisted I read them and I was fortunate to have a lot of alternatives. In reading Abate’s discussion of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” I thought of Leo Leoni’s Frederick, a direct counterpoint to “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” Frederick the mouse appears to do nothing while the rest of the mice labor all summer, and then in deep winter when the mice are cold and their food stores are empty, Frederick brings them warmth and comfort with the poetry he brooded over all summer, and he saves the day. Would I have understood or appreciated Frederick if I never knew the story of “The Ant and the Grasshopper?” That’s hard to say, but I know I read Frederick thousands of times, and “The Ant and the Grasshopper” only once or twice. If kids can identify and avoid preachy messages in literature, maybe we don’t have to be too scared they’re being brainwashed in any direction.

With respect to the issue of safety, I question Abate’s characterization of Tootle the Train (1945) and Scuffy the Tugboat (1946) as conservative because they teach the respective lessons of staying on the rails and staying in the bathtub. Are these lessons motivated by politics or the desire to teach the child not to wander off in a crowd, stick her fingers in a light socket, or get into a stranger’s vehicle? As is the case with adults, some children are naturally cautious, but others are not, and parents of an incautious child might want to gently discourage her from exploring that abandoned mine shaft, and maybe to plant seeds of caution hoping that, 15 years later, she’ll make really sure that MDMA pill isn’t rat poison before she swallows it. Now, if Tootle and Scuffy were the only pieces of literature parents offered their children on how to balance boldness with caution, it would be problematic indeed. But consider how even The Polar Express suggests that kids should step beyond their “comfort zones,” take risks, and seize opportunity and adventure in defiance of parental authority. Think about the encouragement of bold adventure in many other pieces of children’s literature (including Harry Potter; recall the article we discussed in class last week about safety hazards at Hogwarts). I’ll plant my flag here and say that Tootle and Scuffy are reasonably gentle counterpoints to grand adventure stories for reminding young children that sometimes caution is a good idea—not to make them neurotic or to cultivate blind obedience, but to survive. Sure, explore the world fearlessly like Dora the Explorer, but…maybe don’t explore climbing that rusty old electrical tower, or explore grand adventures like these.

Abate acknowledges this problem at the end of the chapter on The Book of Virtues; quoting Jean Porter, she recognizes that “One person’s courage is another person’s rashness, and one person’s prudence is another person’s small-minded caution” (51). But Abate puts this statement at the end of the chapter and smooshes it between a reiteration of Bennett’s hypocrisy and a discussion of status politics, both of which make it feel like an afterthought. How would her argument change if she put this issue in the foreground?

It is also worth noting that current parenting practices’ (probably necessary) use of constant surveillance wasn’t the norm in the 1940s. Perhaps there’s less need for Tootle or Scuffy these days because kids don’t have as many opportunities for adventure and don’t make as many risk-benefit choices as kids in the 1940s who played in the street and the woods without adult supervision. But this also raises the question: should we really code safety-motivated messages to stay on the rails as politically conservative? Doesn’t that somehow imply that politically liberal parents are negligent about children’s safety? Is it more liberal or conservative to teach a child to be cautious in an adult world and then give him or her more freedom, versus teaching children to be adventurous but never giving them any opportunity? Trying to code these things politically makes my head spin, and I wonder what purpose such coding really serves.

Shifting gears to The Truax, I would have preferred that Abate discredit The Truax’s environmental claims with sources other than environmental groups. While I think the Wilderness Society is a great organization and I trust them, conservatives would argue that it’s no more neutral than is the National Oak Flooring Manufacturers Association is. How can we make these arguments without appearing to fight partisan politics with partisan politics? I also would have preferred a lot more detail about why The Truax’s claims are wrong, but I also recognize Abate doesn’t set out to convince us that logging is bad (that would require a much longer book). Even so, the fact that she just tosses off a few quotes as evidence of The Truax’s deception tells me that she intends to preach exclusively to the choir. On one level, that makes practical sense, on another, I’m a little uncomfortable being told to reject propaganda because its information is “not reliable” on the basis of rather superficial evidence, particularly since the crux of The Truax’s argument is that environmentalists are ill-informed and brainwashed by propaganda. Clearly, both sides of the logging debate feel the other side is plainly misinformed. But it seems to me that The Truax sends a useful message about how to advocate for the environment without projecting Guardbark’s presumption, impatience, and disinterest in evidence, and that a fairly superficial treatment of the evidence makes it so easy for conservatives to say, “See, you’re just like Guardbark.” I don’t want to make it easy for them to say that; my affinity for the cause motivates my critique. So the question becomes, am I asking too much of Abate, or might there be a better way?

Allow me to get a little autobiographical here for a moment. I had a bit of a Baader-Meinhof experience reading the Abate that provoked some interesting questions for me, and they might be helpful to some of the discussions we’ve been having about childhood and children’s literature this semester.

I was alternately doing my reading and cleaning out an old bookshelf (thanks, Marie Kondo) when I fortuitously came across an old copy of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories I forgot I owned. I’ve had it since I was a kid, in fact, and I remember my mother buying it off the discount book table at Costco, chuckling through it on the way home, and giving it to me. I was about eleven when it came out and I had read “adult books” before, or tried to, struggling mightily with Michael Crichton in the wake of seeing Jurassic Park but plowing through my mother’s Stephen King and scrappy lady investigator mysteries. This book felt *very* adult though, because I knew I was supposed to understand both what it was saying to me and what it wasn’t saying to me, and how adults spoke to each other in order to get that something was going on.

I bring this up because my mother is an avowed Democrat, and yet she purchased Politically Correct Bedtime Stories and gave it to me. And while I haven’t looked at the book since then, what I took from it as a child was not an aversion to “political correctness,” but rather the sexist stupidity of fairy tales. In fact, I remembered this so clearly and was so convinced Abate’s reading of this book was wrong that I went back and flipped through it again, shocked to see it was of course a send-up of “P.C.” liberalism and not the subversive text I’d perceived it to be. What my mother got out of it I’m not sure, but she is a Democrat married to a blue-collar Republican, and they both read only the New York Daily News, never the New York Times. I suspect the thing my parents have in common is the thing she found funny here–a snickering disdain for things they find to be pointlessly pompous. (Dad’s a ball at MOMA.)

Anyway, my experience of Politically-Correct Bedtime Stories lead me down an interesting path–or really, down a series of questions–that ties the Raising Your Kids Right back to some of our other reading. As I was reading about The Book of Virtues and The Truax, I was preoccupied by the fuzzy model of conservative childhood I was getting from Abate’s work–it just wasn’t coming into focus for me. I’m not sure investigating this was the goal of her project because she seems to be working in a bit of a Kidd-like way, in that she uses a historical lens and selects certain works as case-studies to reveal larger themes. Her introduction is heavily historical, tracing the shape of the American conservative movement from the mid-20th century through the present, or the present when the book was written. At least in the chapters chosen for this week, her motive seems to be exploring moments in conservative children’s literature to reveal truths about conservatism, not necessarily what it does for children. I wish she had done more with this, though again I don’t think it was her goal–I wish it because it would be helpful for our class, and for my understanding of childhood studies.

What is the conservative idea (or ideal) of childhood, and what role do books play? I think Bennett’s Book of Virtues points to certain popular conceptions of Victorian childhood that Gubar has so graciously complicated for us, and also to a belief that a child absorbs what they are presented as-is. But if modern conservatism is characterized by traditionalism, an feeling that was “opposed to progressive social changes and promoted the status quo” [12], which the child is, I think, supposed to absorb through the simplified or sanitized moral tales in The Book of Virtues, how and when does that child also learn to question and push back against cultural change? How can political ideology be transmitted through a book to children who may, as I did with Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, take from it a completely different lesson?

Though this is a bit half-baked, I found myself reaching back to Bernstein and wondering whether or not we might be able to look at the children’s book itself as a scriptive thing to get at some of these concepts of childhood. An illustrated picturebook, for example, is meant to be touched and opened, enjoyed visually by the child alone but read in tandem with an adult who can decipher the print. Its script requires contact between adults and children to fully transmit the book’s contents. I’m wondering then about the particular scripts around The Book of Virtues, which at more than 800 pages a child might not even be able to lift for herself and which (from a quick glance inside the book on Amazon) contains almost no illustrations. Or the scripts surrounding the Truax, which, to a child who cannot yet read, might be indistinguishable from The Lorax. These two examples seem to bind together the child receiver to the adult transmitter of the children’s book particularly tightly, and I wonder if that isn’t something important to our understanding of conservative childhood–that one should hew closely to one’s elders.

Due to my fascination with the intersection of literature, history and politics (and with the Age of Containment in particular) I had great expectations for Julia Mickenberg’s text. Although I am mostly satisfied by her findings, and I found her readings of the primary texts particularly insightful, I was frustrated by her occasional one-dimensional treatments of history. I will thus use this post to explain why I believe Learning from the Left can be taken as an example of both good and bad interdisciplinary work.

Mickenberg does a great job in piecing together the information she draws from her massive and multifaceted corpus of sources. The all-embracing analysis of the primary material she selected is particularly impressive. She takes into consideration an extensive repertoire of books for children that differ broadly in terms of genre, settings, stock characters, ideologies, narrative techniques, tropes, origins (national VS transnational), distribution and reception. I also particularly appreciated her close readings, most of which literally prompted me to look up the primary texts online (ever before Prof. Hintz uploaded some of them in the Dropbox).

What’s even more stunning is the way she engages with material as diverse as periodicals, interviews, and archival records. The employment of those sources allows her to enrich her analysis on multiple levels. First, she retraces the personal histories of those who worked in the field in order to persuasively show how different people were moved by different motives in their perpetuation of a leftist ideology through children’s literature. Furthermore, they enable her to connect the dots and successfully delineate the interwovenness and synergies (among authors, publishers, political organizations, educators, and librarians) that made its emergence and diffusion possible, as well as to expose the importance of the gendered nature of the apparatus.

However, much to my displeasure, I found Learning from the Left occasionally subject to oversimplification and historical inaccuracies that illustrate some of the challenges that can emerge from engaging with interdisciplinary work. I will take the first chapter and her treatment of progressivism, which I personally found quite problematic, as an example of my critique.

Let me start by saying that the very way in which she uses the term “progressive” confuses me at times – throughout the book, it is unclear when she employs it as an adjective (as in “using or interested in new or modern ideas especially in politics and education”, vid Merriam Webster http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/progressive ) and when she is addressing the actual progressive movement that emerged in the United States early in the 20^th century. When she refers to the latter, she is correct in pointing out that progressives, like Lyrical Leftists, also believed in the idea of “salvation by the child” and largely invested in programs intended to mold (especially urban) children, before they disappeared into “the anonymous mass” (as Jacob Riis put it in How the Other Half Lives). Their efforts ranged from environmental improvement programs (i.e. the construction of parks and playgrounds in heavily populated urban areas) to experimental education.

Mickenberg frames progressivism as a school of thought that

embraced what cultural historian Michael Denning has called the Popular Front “structure of feeling,” which included a commitment to challenging fascism, racism, and imperialism; to promoting democracy; and to forging international, working-class solidarity. As some readers probably already gather, progressive was often a code word for “Communist”. (10)

However, she fails to frame the context in which they operated, and to fully explain the nuances of a movement that was hardly homogeneous in its operations and ideologies. Regardless of their (apparent) antipathy for genteel society and capitalism, progressivism was hardly a leftist initiative. In fact, the term progressive eluded political ideologies, as the movement counted on individuals from across the political spectrum, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. According to New Leftist historians (such as William Williams and Gabriel Kolko), despite the large involvement of the middle-class, progressivism was indeed largely led by part of the new industrial ruling class who identified the corporation as the central institution of the system. From this perspective, public intervention on business regulation promoted by the progressive movement should not be considered a victory of the people against the power of private tycoons, but rather the beginning of the control of business over politics that eventually brought to the establishment of political capitalism. Now, one can clearly see how locating progressives in the same tradition as Lyrical Leftists, without at least mentioning its underlying contradictions, could be somehow misleading.

Moreover, Mickenberg posits that the “[the left] built upon progressive traditions- especially marked in the Settlement House Movement from the turn of the century – of celebrating the distinctive cultural contributions of the national’s immigrant groups.” (46) Such a claim represents yet another historical inaccuracy. The Settlement House Movement was composed of social workers who aimed at educating the poor by establishing settlement houses in poverty-stricken urban areas where they would also live. Settlement workers, predominantly young, white, middle-class, college-educated Protestants, hoped to relieve the poverty of their low-income neighbors by transmitting knowledge and culture, and by providing services such as daycare, education, and healthcare as well as recreational spaces (among which resourceful libraries). The Settlement House Movement emerged from the progressives’ deeply rooted beliefs in immigrant assimilation. In other words, they believed new-comers were to become Americanized by rejecting their native culture for the one of their new country, a process that did not entail only taking up new cultural mores, but also, as Robert Downling has pointed out, “the initiation […] into a democratic society increasingly consumer oriented and actuated by industrial growth.” (114) What is celebrated by Mickenberg as an early attempt to instill in children the importance of ethnic diversity reflects instead the will of progressives to assimilate immigrant children, the great majority of whom belong to the working class, to mainstream society – a goal in clear contrast with the leftist’s aims to foster independent thinking.

I will bring one more example to your attention. The nuances that characterized the progressive movement are once again ignored altogether when she points out that “the emphasis on self-directed activity among the children was characteristic of practices widely promoted by advocates of progressive or “experimental” education.” (31) Although most progressive educators agreed on the necessity of rethinking the role of educators in primary and secondary schools, different fringes of the movement were also in disagreement on the degree to which teachers should function as authoritative figures. This division went beyond the school context. I think for example of the dichotomy between the “park movement” and the “playground movement”, both of which placed a special emphasis on new generations to create for children an alternative environment to the vice-ridden city streets. Whereas the former encouraged unsupervised play, playground enthusiasts believed the presence of a trained supervisor was required on the premises, as in the lack of such control, “the playground community would degenerate into anarchy and chaos.” (Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 249)

Although these are only few among many passages in the text that I found problematic, all in all, I do not think Mickenberg’s general claims are undermined by her occasionally superficial analysis of politics and history. I attribute to the author great merits in illustrating how in the first half of the 20^th century, leftist authors employed children’s literature as a mean to provide lessons to the nation’s youth by instilling their work with social significance. She accurately decodes the (more or less explicit) messages in the primary texts she examines, messages ranging from a critique of the status quo, to the promotion of causes such as the working class struggle and racial equality. However, from Learning from the Left we also learn that stepping in multiple fields can be challenging. I understand that the Progressive Era is not Mickenberg’s main concern, but considering she invested a whole chapter tracing the origins of several elements of leftist children’s literature in the practices of the progressive movement, I believe she should have provided her readers with the proper historical contextualization, rather than granting us only pieces of information that were instrumental to her thesis. I do not mean to bash the text, nor the author, but – as our field is increasingly embracing (and encouraging us to reach out to) other disciplines (vid last week’s class discussion and readings) – I thought I’d mention these dissonances as an example of problems that can possibly be encountered while conducting interdisciplinary research and I am hoping that more potential issues will be brought up during our class discussion.

A colleague of mine, Martha Joy Rose, recently completed an MALS in Motherhood Studies at the GC.

Here are some resources:

http://mommuseum.org/mother-studies/

https://gc-cuny.academia.edu/JoyRose

I’d never heard of childhood emancipatory studies before reading this article and I’m still not totally sure I understand what it is—I found this to be one of the least accessible pieces we’ve read this semester. But my sense of the field—at least how Mary Galbraith sees it—is that it is an interdisciplinary one (with a strong bent toward psychoanalysis) that roots itself in the subjective experiences of children, who are often marginalized and silenced. Galbraith proposes that we need to emancipate children by “understanding the situation of babies and children from a first-person point of view, exploring the contingent forces that block children’s full emergence as expressive subjects, and discovering how these forces can be overcome” (188). But for Galbraith, the way to accomplish this is adult-centered: “through adults transforming themselves and their own practices” and “reevaluat[ing] their own childhood experience as part of a personal emancipatory human project” (188-89).

While I think this is a valid idea, I think that Galbraith fails to emphasize the intersectionality of difference sorts of “emancipatory studies.” There is an enormous discrepancy in how silenced or marginalized a child is depending on his/her socioeconomic status, race, gender, learning or cognitive dis/abilities, family background, etc. For example, studies have shown that students of color are penalized more often and more harshly than their white peers at schools across America. (See below for some articles about these studies.) This type of research comes out of sociology or anthropology, fields I didn’t really see Galbraith giving much of a nod to compared to psychoanalysis and philosophy. In a field like childhood emancipatory studies—or really, any field that’s attempting some sort of understanding of someone’s “subjectivity” who isn’t ourselves—it’s especially important to be mindful of cultural difference. Maybe combining multiple emancipatory models—Galbraith lists liberation theology, feminism, and pedagogy of the oppressed as examples outside childhood emancipatory studies—would allow for more nuanced and comprehensive analyses of emancipation.

Ultimately, what I found most compelling about this article was how Galbraith questions “postmodern skepticism”—which I too have found frustrating. For Galbraith, a key problem of postmodern analysis is “showing theoretical access or even existence” of childhood or other experiences outside ourselves, which can hinder any sort of scholarly conversation about childhood whatsoever (191). But I wonder if a postmodern, skeptical reading is really all that different from the approach that Galbraith encourages and attempts. For example, Galbraith’s analysis of the Polar Express seems based in a certain kind of skepticism of traditional readings of children’s stories. And although, like Kate, I find her analysis of Polar Express with Santa as Hitler-figure questionable at best, I do see how using an approach like Galbraith’s—one that encourages that we question our presumptions and traditional modes of understanding—can be very useful in studying children’s literature and in fact go hand in hand with the type of postmodern criticism that Galbraith seems to oppose.

Articles about race and disciplining in schools:

http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/new-data-us-department-education-highlights-educational-inequities-around-teacher-experience-discipline-and-high-school-rigor

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/us/higher-expulsion-rates-for-black-students-are-found.html

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/21/292456211/black-preschoolers-far-more-likely-to-be-suspended

Notwithstanding my disagreement with Galbraith’s reading of The Polar Express, I was fascinated by the rest of her article. Here are a few responses.

I admire and agree with Galbraith’s interest not in “an apocryphal ‘child reader’ but on different ‘children’ in the literary transaction who can be approached as individual beings who have left a verbal and artistic trail that can be studied: individual child characters, the unique childhood of the author, and the unique childhood of the critic” (200). I feel rather strongly that children are just as diverse in temperament and interests as adults. Is the child innocent or not-so-innocent, whatever that means? It depends on the child.

Gratefully accepting Galbraith’s license to reflect on my own childhood, I vividly recall my disdain for the philistine tastes and preferences of other children my age; I also remember frequently thinking that many of my classmates were jerks, prone to bizarre, obnoxious behavior that my mother explained as “negative attention-getting.” Nothing made me more indignant than an adult’s assumption that I shared the primitive tastes of others my age, or that I failed to notice and feel appalled at other children’s antisocial behavior. I guess I was an uptight kid. I cringed at adults’ presumptuous statements of “kids like this” and “kids think that,” statements that seemed to explicitly deny me individuality and subjectivity (though I didn’t know the word for it then). I felt that adults that insisted on such essentializing dogmas did so because they were philistines themselves as children and had somehow managed to reach adulthood without noticing anything beyond their hopelessly limited perspectives. Or perhaps they did know better, but nevertheless insisted that “kids are all the same” for the sake of convenience and the blissful intellectual laziness of categorical, black-and-white thinking.

My indignance must have abated when I was finally old enough to escape feeling personally implicated by such statements because I haven’t thought about these outrages for a long time. Until recently, in fact, I had tended to lump young people together in that noisy, messy, tedious category of kiddies—squalling, Raffi-listening, Barney-loving monsters—without allowing for outliers and for the diversity of temperament of which I was so keenly aware as a young person myself. It’s so easy to view children this way.

But while my own assumptions might have been intellectually lazy indeed, I may have judged the essentializing parents and teachers too harshly in light of the deeply-ingrained social orders that render authentically individualized treatment of children much easier said than done. Hopefully, sometime in the future we will enjoy a sufficiently safe society that children will not have to be incessantly guarded, supervised, and surveilled, and therefore constantly lumped together to facilitate such policing, but as it is, child-rearing resources are limited and efficiency is premium. Children who all like the same things and think the same way are much more efficiently managed, like an obedient hive, than a collective of distinct, individual young people. I say this not to defend conventional western child-rearing practices, but to direct the blame for them towards the socioeconomic structures that impede more individualized, emancipatory practices.

In other words, I agree with Galbraith, and I believe (yes, the bell rings for me!) in the potential of “adults transforming themselves and their own practices” (Galbraith’s emphasis) instead of trying “to mold children through training them” (188). But even though we and Galbraith are talking about methodological approaches to children’s literature rather than clinical, “real-world” applications of psychological methods, I feel compelled to point out the extraordinary impediments to attachment parenting in western culture. I’ve only recently noticed this phenomenon, and I’m so dismayed by it, I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment. Parents cannot take their young children to work (they really, really can’t, no matter what their jobs are), and—in the vast majority of cases—work they must, every day and all day. On-site child-care is a nonexistent unless you are one of the lucky few employed at an uber-progressive start-up or university, and even then, chances are very slim that the option will be available. The result is a widespread, daily routine of unpreventable, extended attachment breaks for the vast majority of young children. After reading Galbraith’s article and a bit of Alice Miller’s work, I find this state of affairs really alarming.

Social structures also frustrate parental attempts of “transforming themselves and their own practices” in even more subtle, insidious ways. I had terrible insomnia throughout my preschool to school-aged years, and I vividly recall the nightly despair of lying awake in the dark for hours, trying to remember movies I’d watched scene by scene and playing bizarre games in my head because, like all children, I wasn’t allowed to just turn the light on and read like normal adults do. Bedtime and child resistance to it is so ingrained and normalized that the bitter, one-note comedy of Go the Fuck to Sleep has made it a beloved bestseller. Go the Fuck to Sleep reinforces the hegemony of bedtime instead of questioning it, but it also offers sympathy for the problem of alternatives to enforced sleep habits, particularly when those parents must also “transform themselves and their own practices” to satisfy the demands of contemporary capitalist western society. In a better world, parents could decide to open their rag-and-bottle shops late if they’ve been up all night with the baby, but in this world, parents must clock into their jobs at an exact time without exception and must perform those jobs with such robotic consistency that the rest of their lives, including their children’s sleeping habits, must be arranged to enable parents’ capacities to satisfy the expectations of corporate employers (who are, in turn, legally obligated to arrange their companies to maximize shareholder profits, not employee well-being). In other words, the parents have to sleep so they can function well as employees, and therefore insomniac children must lie awake in the dark wondering why their individual, biological needs are so painfully ill-matched to their inescapable circumstances.

I have great parents, but childhood is hell even under the best of circumstances. Bad things—things we would find utterly intolerable and unfairly punitive as adults—are constantly happening to children to the point that this “badness” (to take a word from a certain special French child) can be understood as a fixed expectation in a child’s daily life. Frustration, disappointment, and a veritable carnival of irritations and harassments are constant in the lives of children. Children’s desires are routinely denied for many good reasons, but children also must constantly cope with conflicts between their natural urges and whatever they are being forced to do. I will venture to say that adults have a lot of little habits that contribute to their well-being which are forbidden to children. If we really need the cookie, and are going to lose our minds if we don’t eat the cookie, as adults, we can just eat the cookie and get on with our lives; kids can’t, and therefore lose their minds. If we are in some uncomfortable situation where we truly cannot stand the way people around us smell and look at us, we can usually make our excuses and flee, but children are trapped. If we’re hot, we, as adults, can take our jackets off, but babies cannot, and have no way to articulate their discomfort, and no guarantee that their needs would be met even if they could express them. My own memories of such childhood frustrations awaken my empathy in ways that otherwise stay dormant when I feel tormented by a screaming baby on the subway, for instance.

I grant that my current memory of these childhood experiences are probably contaminated by innumerable presentist distortions, but they might also be perfectly accurate, and I’m grateful to Galbraith for acknowledging the revelatory potential of considering one’s own first-person, subjective experience of childhood. If I automatically dismissed these kinds of personal reflections as distorted to the point of zero value, I would shut down consideration of a view of childhood with emancipatory potential. We can easily critique humanist disregard for categorical differences as its own form of oppression in its denial of real alterity, but attempts to identify with the Other’s first-person, subjective experience—empathy across categorical boundaries—can expedite movements in the direction of emancipation. Insisting that emancipation is only possible when the oppressed can speak for themselves dooms babies and young children, animals, and those without language to their present conditions. Insisting on the unknowable alterity of the very young and the universal fallibility of childhood memories entrenches the status quo and shuts down inquisitive, open dialogue between children and adults. I love Galbraith’s characterization of indirect approaches to formulating childhood experience, including episodic memory and revisiting one’s own subject position in childhood, as “fingers pointing to the moon,” but not “the moon itself.” That seems like a really good start.

I think I’ll stop here, but to summarize: I’m quite persuaded by Galbraith’s support of Miller and deMause (among others) and their psychohistorical analysis of the causative link between normalized early childhood parenting practices and adult atrocities. I also agree with the contention that children’s literature presents “SELVES [why does she capitalize this?] in predicaments from epistemological perspectives unavailable to ordinary interaction, but resonant with our own vulnerability as embodied creatures” and therefore that children’s literary criticism is a valuable indirect means of accessing childhood experience, particularly if the individualities of all involved (readers, authors, critics, characters) are taken into account (193). Legitimizing the attempt to access one’s own childhood experience seems to offer more emancipatory potential than the “’brashly accepted helplessness’” of foreclosing the possible accessibility of childhood memories. At the very least, validating such reflection offers more chance for empathy for the children’s suffering in the yoke of normalized child-rearing practices, and little risk of making things worse considering the inherently dependent relationship of children on adults. But actually preventing Hitlers and Bartsches from continuing to sprout up requires attention to the structural impediments to emancipatory practices, and these arise from western capitalist society’s deeply rooted ideas about professionalism and its belief in the need to sequester young children and parenting modes altogether from the world of professional work. Fortunately, such considerations are also a job for literary scholars, among (many) others.

I’m going to be a little sneaky here and double-post because I have so much to say about Galbraith’s article. This post is about her reading of The Polar Express; later on I’ll post some thoughts about her broader discussion of emancipatory child studies (which blew my mind).

I think Galbraith’s one misstep in this fabulous article is her reading of The Polar Express. I agree that the image of masses of identically-clothed elves gathered to greet Santa does resemble a Nazi rally, but it also resembles a rock concert, a royal wedding, and an Obama campaign rally. Galbraith might object that the fact that the elves are all dressed in one color resonates with uniformed Nazis and distinguishes them from these other kinds of democratic assemblies, but consider the popularity of matching event t-shirts distributed at fundraisers, or the wearing of pink at the Avon breast cancer walk. Or Santacon, for that matter. These communities aren’t perfect and suffer plenty of valid critique, but it seems like a stretch to accuse them—and the elves—of being Nazi-esque for assembling en monochromatic masse.

My second quibble with Galbraith is that Chris Van Allsburg was born in Michigan in 1949, so he certainly wasn’t attending any Nazi jubilees during his childhood or adolescence. But what about his family? Even if we humor Galbraith and hypothesize that Van Allsburg’s parents were German immigrants who raised him on a steady diet of their fond childhood memories of Nazi Youth rallies, what are the odds that these vicarious memories inspired Van Allsburg when he had direct access to the many powerful mass assemblies of 1960s America? Why can’t we point out Santa’s resonance with rock stars and civil rights leaders instead of Hitler? Moreover, would we say that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the performers at Woodstock were fŭher-like because huge crowds gathered to listen to and venerate them?

Galbraith claims that Polar Express resonates with “the imagery of a Nazi Youth rally” in part because “a lonely and yearning child travels by magical night train through a Northern European folktale/operatic landscape.” Doesn’t that also describe Harry Potter aboard the Hogwarts Express, complete with uniforms and the intention to see a Great Man, Dumbledore (and the hope to curry favor with him)? Yet Vauldemort, not Dumbledore, is the charismatic leader with genocidal interests. The Nazis simply cannot have the monopoly on magic train imagery. Magic trains are conducive to a liminal, otherworldly atmosphere; my personal favorite magic train might be the one Chihiro rides in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which also offers a very clear counterpoint to the argument that trains inherently serve as emblems of industrialization and its decay. There is something emancipatory about the notion of train travel, especially for a child; it has something to do with the fixedness of the stations and schedules, and comforting anonymity of getting on and off without one’s presence affecting the train’s movements or agendas. It also feels, subjectively, very safe and free of traffic and the possibility of collisions; there is none of the free-floating anxiety or unpredictability of air or motor travel. But perhaps above all there is something thrilling about an endless network of train tracks that can go far beyond the horizon of the unknown via a very familiar, safe-feeling, and comforting mode of transit. It would be a shame to write off magic trains as Nazi images.

I also do not accept that travelling through the “Northern European folktale/operatic landscape” must resonate with Nazi imagery. The train climbs “a mountain so high it seemed it would scrape the moon” and crosses a “polar desert of ice.” While that does indeed sound like the sort of fairy tale landscape that the Nazis coopted for their own propaganda, I’m reminded of Percy Shelley’s anxiety about the vulnerability of poetic images to perversion, and his injunction to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of retiring these images permanently for such contaminating associations, we should reclaim and rehabilitate them, perhaps as images of the Romantic sublime, for example. Whenever a particular aesthetic becomes firmly associated with a movement, the aesthetic and the movement risk damage to the other, and sometimes for no good reason. For example, until recent efforts to rehabilitate the aesthetics of the environmental movement, “going green” was so firmly associated with hippie aesthetics, people could hardly recycle without worrying their neighbors would see them as tie-dye wearing, unwashed stoners. On the flip side, the negative associations of so many kinds of aesthetics have left us with the whitewashed minimalism of modern design for the last sixty or seventy years, as though retaining the more ornamental aesthetics of the past would somehow perpetuate the social problems of earlier eras as well.

Next, there is the matter of Polar Express’s reference to the factories at the North Pole, which could be construed as glorification of industry, another Nazi red flag. But the factories also serve a greater, less political purpose as bridges between the impossible logistics of the highly figurative Santa Claus fantasy and the more literal fantasy of Santa’s functioning in accordance with the laws of physics. Obviously, even if Santa had the vastest army of elves and unlimited access to the most advanced technology, he still couldn’t distribute toys to all the boys and girls (leaving aside, for the moment, the also-obvious fact that the majority of children are not Santa-believers) in accordance with their personal wishes and surveillance intel as to naughtiness or niceness; on this, I believe, we can all agree. The industrialized version of the fantasy is still a fantasy; it’s just a different kind of fantasy—one that can perhaps temporarily stave off an older child’s skepticism about the logistics of a pre-industrial North Pole, but which also begins to introduce some of the problematic social realities that lie beneath the fantasy without ramming them down the child’s throat. The book doesn’t develop this much, but the inordinately creepy film adaptation of Polar Express portrays the North Pole’s toy factories as sinister and dangerous places where one clumsy slip could cost a child his life. Isn’t this a gentle but firm introduction to the reality that most toys are produced in sinister, dangerous third-world factories by oppressed workers? The elves aren’t Nazis so much as quasi-enslaved factory workers. Moreover, the children arriving on the Polar Express aren’t new recruits bound to join the ranks of the elves; the children are mere tourists on a temporary visit to the North Pole. The elves, on the other hand, are Santa’s permanent laborers; nothing suggests their ability to board the train back to civilization or the availability of any means of crossing the “polar desert” in which they are stranded in their labors. In the film adaptation, elves speak to the children in a particularly ominous way that suggests significant resentment against these privileged beneficiaries of their labor. It’s a far cry from a heavy-handed Marxist message, but still, the film and even the book plant the seeds of the ideas that toys are not made by happy elves in cozy pre-industrial workshops.

One last point about Galbraith and Polar Express: Galbraith presumably objects as anti-emancipatory to the narrative of a lonely child “chosen out of a crowd for a special gift from a powerful and charismatic adult,” and I agree with this to an extent. But the gift and its presentation are merely rewards for the story’s precipitating action: the boy’s choice to get on the train. The story is telling us that sometimes opportunities and adventures come along in life and yield their rewards only to those who actively choose to grab them. For the young, such opportunities often appear via those who are older and more financially, socially, or professionally established in the world of adults. The book (and the film) take care to emphasize the boy’s agency; the conductor tells him he doesn’t have to board the train. (Of course, if the train conductor turned out to be a molester luring the boy into his vehicle with promises of Santa Claus, we would have a very different story.) Perhaps that’s the other reason why the mode of transit must be a train, which always remains an open, public space and thus precludes the privacy required by contemporary predators (and yet another reason why the Nazis cannot have train imagery). But the point is that even if the reward is bestowed by a “great man,” the principle choice is still the boy’s. There is also some emancipatory potential in the fact that the opportunity does not arrive through any mainstream or normative channels; again, it’s a magic train, and the conductor is not an authority figure from the child’s life. The boy ventures outside of the familiar, normative, highly regulated environment in which he dwells, which strikes me as a grab at freedom.