"THE MOON WAS SHINING SULKILY":
McCarthy, Abigail
"THE MOON WAS SHINING SULKILY" It has occurred to me that in the recent textbook controversies-in West Virginia, in Maryland, and elsewhere -no one has thought to question the underlying attitude...
...I took one down from the shelf the other day to see if it was as I remembered it...
...The editors had room for Blake's A Laughing Song, "When Mary and Susan and Emily With their sweet round mouths sing, "Ha, ha, he...
...Because she thought the sun Had got not business to be there After the day was done-" And much else...
...Not a bad idea really, because, as famous Greek scholar Edith Hamilton says, behind good literature in any tongue there must have been centuries "when men were striving to express themselves with clarity and beauty, an indispensable proof of civilization...
...For us, this trove of my father's was a fascinating addition to the complete volumes of children's classics with which my mother and aunts stocked our bookcases...
...And for Tweedledee's recitation for Alice, "The moon was shining sulkily...
...The parents of West Virginia look on textbooks as transmitters of American and religious values...
...Some of the authors anthologized have failed the test of time-Jacob Abbott, Felicia Hemans and Dinah Mulock Craik, who are they...
...The selections were made in order to create an appetite for good writing in child readers, for, as the editors say, "As soon as the children begin to read with fluency and understanding they begin to enjoy reading...
...It was fun to read...
...My father, while still in his early twenties, was County Superintendent of Schools...
...Church women have searched textbooks to see whether they were international in outlook...
...By the time I was born that time Abigail McCarthy of glory was far in the past, but the house was filled with the legacy of his days as an educator...
...There were primers and arithmetic books, and series after series of the old "readers" -the Elson readers, the Jones readers, the Cyr readers...
...It fed a need which perhaps new texts do not-the need for escape into nonsense and fantasy...
...Rather sententiously they urge teachers using the book to "call attention to a fine description, to a thought well expressed...
...It gave him an office in the Court House, and entailed rolling about the countryside in a shiny buggy behind a fast mare from the livery stable in order to make regular, but unannounced, visits to every school district...
...All this is not to say that modern texts are not rich in good writing, but I wonder if we who use them distinguish between literature and propaganda, and whether we think of the textbook as a tool for the child or for society...
...their opponents expect them to build better social attitudes, and to inure the young to the harsh realities of our society-realities like skepticism and violence rampant...
...In a time when the written word fares badly in competition with other means of communication no one seems to be asking whether the books lead to delight in reading and in the riches, subtlety and suppleness of the English language...
...But I can testify that it was a tool for a child growing in the delight in language...
...in fact, use every opportunity for leading the children to love the true, the good, and the beautiful in literature as well as in nature and art...
...feminists find in them male and female "stereotyping...
...Odd, some of these last, to present to nine-and ten-year-olds, you might think, but not if you remember George Eliot's small Maggie Tulliver running away to join the gypsies, little Cosette and the marvelous doll in Les Miserables, and Ruskin's fairy tale, King of the Golden River...
...It was a rare honor and an exalted position for one so young...
...fun to read...
...THE MOON WAS SHINING SULKILY" It has occurred to me that in the recent textbook controversies-in West Virginia, in Maryland, and elsewhere -no one has thought to question the underlying attitude toward books as books...
...There are selections from Alice in Wonderland and A Christmas Carol, but, more supris-ing, from Walter Scott, George Eliot, William Blake, Hawthorne, Keats, and, yes, Victor Hugo, and Ruskin...
...So awesome was his authority that one school teacher dropped in a faint when she saw him at the door of her one-room school-so he used to tell us with amusement and, I am afraid, some satisfaction...
...As anthology it would fail tests based on the criteria listed in the first paragraph above...
...Readers," that is, graded hard-bound collections of readings and probably our first anthologies, were treasuries for school children in the day when school libraries consisted of a few old books on a shelf in a classroom corner...
...Unless my memory is very faulty there was a time when textbooks did that-when they were for reading...
...My old Child Life reader certainly had flaws...
...I was amazed at the stories and poems and writers I must first have encountered there, when this little green book was already old...
...It was a fourth reader in the Child Life series published in 1900...
...minorities have scrutinized them for racism...
...The criticisms from both sides reveal the heavy burden of expectation placed on them...
Vol. 102 • March 1975 • No. 1
