On Blank Books
And children whose only entertainment is mum’s iPad
Hop on Pop by Dr Seuss
I regret to tell readers of this newsletter that this will not be an in-depth, down to brass tacks review of Dr Seuss’s bestselling book for very young children, Hop on Pop. I know some readers will be upset, even desolated. They had wanted a dramatic and thorough going through of that book. They wanted to see its mysteries unveiled, its depths plumbed. Its hidden scandals brought out into the sunlight.
They wanted dense and allegorical readings. They wanted a feminist case; they wanted a Marxist interpretation; they wanted a series of intriguing postmodern disentanglements, and some fascinating post-structuralist critiques which took the whole thing apart, really got a look inside the machinery, and told us all what we’re actually teaching our little ones, yeah?
Admirers of Lacan wanted something trenchant and bizarre; fans of Butler wanted something impossible to follow but doubtless difficult and thus worthy. Any survivors from my own university days thought there could be discrete micro-historical route to take on this particular problem, with distinct if limited sources, which could nonetheless yield a fairly tasty slice of the not-too-recent past. Perhaps there was a synoptic approach that might yield something — really problematise some previously accepted assumptions, right?
And in theory, someone may do that. May do any of those things. For all I know, someone already has. But I’m not the man.
Instead, I’d like to talk a little about literacy and how we try to teach it to children. I’ve heard recently from more than one source that very young children in school are not expected to read any longer — or rather, they are not believed likely to arrive at school able to read, and in some cases, they are not expected to read even after they’ve turned up there, at ages where previous generations were being taught words and how to spell.
This is prompted by a story circulated within a corner of Twitter which appears to show that young children are given blank books at school. So they can learn, not to make out letters, sounds and words, but instead the mechanical process of how to turn the pages.
As in, it’s too hard to imagine they’ll know what a book is. It’s too hard to expect them to read at home, even with parental help. So let’s get them into the idea by steps and by stages, one of which is simply holding something vaguely like a book in their hands, and work up from there.
Some people I’ve seen are driven wild by this — and I admit U was briefly tempted in that direction. But let’s hear out for a moment some of the reasons why this may be deemed necessary in British schools.
Many children grow up with a phone or an iPad thrust into their faces from an early age. A phone or iPad is a little unlike TV — the previous cheapest babysitter parents could buy — in that iPads and phones are manipulated by swiping. Children can in theory have permanent, endless entertainment, but only if they learn to swipe the vertical videos one after the other, and play the simple games with their fingers, or else they’ll loop again and again, and that might be less stimulating.
Although I wouldn’t know.
So the purpose of the blank books here — what they’re intended to do — is to teach children that, if you want the next thing to appear in a real book — if you want to move on with the story — you have to turn the page. You can’t swipe the paper. You have to turn the page if you want the image or the word before you to change.
In a sense, it’s a worthy idea. If children are so hypnotised by mum’s iPad that they don’t know any other form of entertainment, there’s no other thing for it. They must be given dummy books, decoy books, and be made to feel comfortable holding them in their hands and turning the pages. They must learn to use cardboard and paper as our grandparents’ generation were slowly, if at all, weaned onto computers and phones — with great hesitance and difficulty, and without much initial hope of success.
It’s a question of acclimatisation, to a degree. It is a question of getting used to it before you realise it’s doing you good. Some readers may remember Bart Simpson eagerly playing a video game until he realises it’s educational and throws it down in disgust. ‘That’ll teach you to teach me!’ he cries.
The same principle applies here.
How does Dr Seuss approach roughly the same problem — the problem of very young children being unused to books and to reading? Mainly, as we know, Seuss does what he does with absurd humour.
Mouse and house rhyme. We’re used to the idea, can even visualise it, of a mouse sat on top of a house. But we — and our children — may be less used to the idea of a house on top of a mouse, with the mouse demonstrating almost Jerry-like strength in holding the house aloft while grinning.
In a way, this kind of inversion is good for two things. First, it maintains childish interest. Funny things are funny. Funny things are interesting.
Second, it may possibly introduce children to unfamiliar concepts made by using words they already know. It might just make their minds a little more flexible.
Who’s to say? It beats a blank book, after a while.