As a septaguinarian who cut my teeth on the poetry of Walter de la Mare and Rudyard Kipling and the classics of children's literature, I agree wholeheartedly. It's where I began a passionate love affair with language and literature that fed my sense of idealism and my desire to be a writer. Schools no longer teach classic literature in their desire to be relevant, and children raised on the short attention spans of electronic media don't have the patience for "slow literature. "
I love the framing of choosing beautiful books as rebellion for the good of humanity. And the pushback against programs like 1,000 books before Kindergarten (whose purpose is undoubtedly well-meaning) allows me to exhale. Phew! We couldn’t do it, despite the fact that we read all the time in our house, and now I know why.
I was reflecting on some of these same ideas the other day while staring at DADA (a Christmas gift for our 10 month old from a family member) in our board book stack right next to a Sandra Boynton box set. All of my kids as babies have gravitated toward Boynton’s books. One of my favorites is But not the Hippopotamus, which opens “A hog and a frog cavort in a bog,” a pleasurable line for many reasons! To me, this proves that children—even babies—have the natural appetite for complex language and storylines; it’s up to us to give them access to the good stuff.
Reading slowly reminds me of the classical education principle “Much, not Many”. I am just learning how to live that out in our homeschool as I have natural maximalist tendencies and like to collect books.
When reading aloud to a child one also has to ask open ended questions( without there being a right answer) about the graphics, new words, what could happen next, what did they think if mole and his cleaning up! He does sound ‘horribly good’😆 what do they think it would be like to live undeground? All sorts. Children will hear sentence structure, plot( good luck) and new vocabulary in a safe environment. Its not how much is read, its also the joy of the whole reading experiences future , thinking readers
It’s sad that society only regards our physical and economic needs as practical, and doesn’t understand that the needs of the soul and spirit are just as ‘practical’ to our souls and spirits. Education gets reduced to what’s digitally quantifiable. It’s amazing that we fall for such materialism, considering that all our most important concerns… family relationships, social and economic justice, mental illness, chronic illness, war, are far removed from the quantifiable, and have everything to do with depth and beauty of soul and it’s virtues. Thankfully, there is a growing understanding that our emotional and mental life is a seamless unity with our physical well-being, and the body politic.
When I feel pressured to rush, I think of carding wool. If you pull hard and fast, the wool locks up. It wont let you fluff it up. But, if you pull very slowly and gently, the wool releases. It immediately opens up to you, and quickly fluffs up. People assume ‘slow’ means poor results, because they only know a shallow, deadening kind of slow. They don’t know the slow which invigorates, animates and yields rich results. Carding wool is a wonderful experience to learn the kind of attentive ‘slow’ which actually gives better and quicker results.
As a septaguinarian who cut my teeth on the poetry of Walter de la Mare and Rudyard Kipling and the classics of children's literature, I agree wholeheartedly. It's where I began a passionate love affair with language and literature that fed my sense of idealism and my desire to be a writer. Schools no longer teach classic literature in their desire to be relevant, and children raised on the short attention spans of electronic media don't have the patience for "slow literature. "
I love the framing of choosing beautiful books as rebellion for the good of humanity. And the pushback against programs like 1,000 books before Kindergarten (whose purpose is undoubtedly well-meaning) allows me to exhale. Phew! We couldn’t do it, despite the fact that we read all the time in our house, and now I know why.
I was reflecting on some of these same ideas the other day while staring at DADA (a Christmas gift for our 10 month old from a family member) in our board book stack right next to a Sandra Boynton box set. All of my kids as babies have gravitated toward Boynton’s books. One of my favorites is But not the Hippopotamus, which opens “A hog and a frog cavort in a bog,” a pleasurable line for many reasons! To me, this proves that children—even babies—have the natural appetite for complex language and storylines; it’s up to us to give them access to the good stuff.
Reading slowly reminds me of the classical education principle “Much, not Many”. I am just learning how to live that out in our homeschool as I have natural maximalist tendencies and like to collect books.
When reading aloud to a child one also has to ask open ended questions( without there being a right answer) about the graphics, new words, what could happen next, what did they think if mole and his cleaning up! He does sound ‘horribly good’😆 what do they think it would be like to live undeground? All sorts. Children will hear sentence structure, plot( good luck) and new vocabulary in a safe environment. Its not how much is read, its also the joy of the whole reading experiences future , thinking readers
Beautifully said! I wholeheartedly agree.
It’s sad that society only regards our physical and economic needs as practical, and doesn’t understand that the needs of the soul and spirit are just as ‘practical’ to our souls and spirits. Education gets reduced to what’s digitally quantifiable. It’s amazing that we fall for such materialism, considering that all our most important concerns… family relationships, social and economic justice, mental illness, chronic illness, war, are far removed from the quantifiable, and have everything to do with depth and beauty of soul and it’s virtues. Thankfully, there is a growing understanding that our emotional and mental life is a seamless unity with our physical well-being, and the body politic.
When I feel pressured to rush, I think of carding wool. If you pull hard and fast, the wool locks up. It wont let you fluff it up. But, if you pull very slowly and gently, the wool releases. It immediately opens up to you, and quickly fluffs up. People assume ‘slow’ means poor results, because they only know a shallow, deadening kind of slow. They don’t know the slow which invigorates, animates and yields rich results. Carding wool is a wonderful experience to learn the kind of attentive ‘slow’ which actually gives better and quicker results.