It is incredible how powerful words can be. A single word can have an incredible effect. A multitude of words working together can influence, build, destroy, create... a plethora of possible outcomes from something as menial as a few lines on a paper.
As Aldous Huxley said, "Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."
Mr. Huxley must have known all too well the truth of Hebrews 4:12, "For the word of God is
quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even
to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and
marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart."
Clearly God knew the significance of words. With all of the different
ways to communicate He didn't choose music, art, or a motion-picture. He
chose words. Words knit together to form sentences, verses, chapters, a
volume... a book. Just how important are these words of God? God speaks
of the significance of reading His words and applying them to our lives.
Romans 12:2 "And be not conformed to this world: but be ye
transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that
good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."
Philippians 4:8, "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are
true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things
are just, whatsoever things
are pure, whatsoever things
are lovely, whatsoever things
are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be
any praise, think on these things"
Psalms 119:11, "Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee."
2 Timothy 2:15, "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth."
Let's be honest. What goes in must come out.
We take in food and liquid either to the edification of our bodies or to the destruction. As a child I would have preferred to eat McDonald's, pizza or any other form of what my mom called "junk food" at any meal but as I have grown I understand the value of consuming food that won't sacrifice my health for a few moments of pleasure.
It is the same case with our minds. We can either take in information that is edifying or information that is destructive. As adults we don't just blindly walk into a book store and pick up any form of random literature so why would we allow children to read about just anything? For the same reason we (hopefully) don't allow our children to eat "junk food" at every meal. Because the mind is powerful and it is formed, influenced and effected by the things we put into it.
I especially like Romans 12:2 and how it says we should be renewing our minds, so when I read the article below, by Meghan Cox Gurdon, regarding the low standards and horrors of today's Young Adult literature I felt a vehement agreement and thought you might appreciate reading it as well. It is time that we start caring for the innocence of our youth and grow them up to have healthy, happy, discerning minds rather than polluted, dark and fearful minds. Minds that will further the cause of Christ and raise up another generation for the Lord. There are no excuses, for "we have the mind of Christ" (1 Cor. 2:16):
MEGHAN COX GURDON has been the children’s book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal since 2005. Her work has also appeared in numerous other publications, including the Washington Post, the Washington Examiner, the San Francisco Chronicle, National Review, and the Weekly Standard.
In the 1990s, she worked as an overseas correspondent in Hong Kong,
Tokyo, and London, and traveled and reported from Cambodia, Somalia,
China, Israel, South Korea, and Northern Ireland. She graduated magna
cum laude from Bowdoin College in 1986 and lives near Washington, D.C.,
with her husband and their five children.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale
College on March 12, 2013, sponsored by the College’s Dow Journalism
Program.
ON JUNE 4, 2011, the number one trending topic on Twitter was the
Anthony Weiner scandal. I happen to remember that, because the number
two topic on Twitter that day—almost as frenzied, though a lot less
humorous—had to do with an outrageous, intolerable attack on Young Adult
literature . . . by me. Entitled “Darkness Too Visible,” my article
discussed the increasingly dark current that runs through books
classified as YA, for Young Adult—books aimed at readers between 12 and
18 years of age—a subset that has, in the four decades since Young Adult
became a distinct category in fiction, become increasingly lurid,
grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly.
Books show us the world, and in that sense, too many books for
adolescents act like funhouse mirrors, reflecting hideously distorted
portrayals of life. Those of us who have grown up understand that the
teen years can be fraught and turbulent—and for some kids, very
unhappy—but at the same time we know that in the arc of human life,
these years are brief. Today, too many novels for teenagers are long on
the turbulence and short on a sense of perspective. Nor does it help
that the narrative style that dominates Young Adult books is the first
person present tense—
“I, I, I,” and “now, now, now.” Writers use this device to create a
feeling of urgency, to show solidarity with the reader and to make the
reader feel that he or she is occupying the persona of the narrator. The
trouble is that the first person present tense also erects a kind of
verbal prison, keeping young readers in the turmoil of the moment just
as their hormones tend to do. This narrative style reinforces the
blinkers teenagers often seem to be wearing, rather than drawing them
out and into the open.
Bringing Judgment
The late critic Hilton Kramer was seated once at a dinner next to
film director Woody Allen. Allen asked him if he felt embarrassed when
he met people socially whom he’d savaged in print. “No,” Kramer said,
“they’re the ones who made the bad art. I just described it.” As the
story goes, Allen fell gloomily silent, having once made a film that had
received the Kramer treatment.
I don’t presume to have a nose as sensitive as Hilton Kramer’s—but I
do know that criticism is pointless if it’s only boosterism. To evaluate
anything, including children’s books, is to engage the faculty of
judgment, which requires that great bugbear of the politically correct,
“discrimination.” Thus, in responding to my article, YA book writers
Judy Blume and Libba Bray charged that I was giving comfort to
book-banners, and
Publisher’s Weekly warned of a “danger” that
my arguments “encourage a culture of fear around YA literature.” But I
do not, in fact, wish to ban any books or frighten any authors. What I
do wish is that people in the book business would exercise better taste;
that adult authors would not simply validate every spasm of the teen
experience; and that our culture was not marching toward ever-greater
explicitness in depictions of sex and violence.
Books for children and teenagers are written, packaged, and sold by
adults. It follows from this that the emotional depictions they contain
come to young people with a kind of adult imprimatur. As a school
librarian in Idaho wrote to her colleagues in my defense: “You are naïve
if you think young people can read a dark and violent book that sits on
the library shelves and not believe that that behavior must be condoned
by the adults in their school lives.”
What kind of books are we talking about? Let me give you three
examples—but with a warning that some of what you’re about to hear is
not appropriate for younger listeners.
A teenaged boy is kidnapped, drugged, and nearly raped by a male
captor. After escaping, he comes across a pair of weird glasses that
transport him to a world of almost impossible cruelty. Moments later, he
finds himself facing a wall of horrors, “covered with impaled heads and
other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears,
penises. Where the f— was this?”
That’s from Andrew Smith’s 2010 Young Adult novel,
The Marbury Lens.
A girl struggles with self-hatred and self-injury. She cuts herself
with razors secretly, but her secret gets out when she’s the victim of a
sadistic sexual prank. Kids at school jeer at her, calling her
“cutterslut.” In response, “she had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the
badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her
belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn’t
breathe.”
That’s from Jackie Morse Kessler’s 2011 Young Adult novel,
Rage.
I won’t read you the most offensive excerpts from my third example,
which consist of explicit and obscene descriptions by a 17-year-old
female narrator of sexual petting, of oral sex, and of rushing to a
bathroom to defecate following a breakup. Yet
School Library Journal praised Daria Snadowsky’s 2008 Young Adult novel,
Anatomy of a Boyfriend,
for dealing “in modern terms with the real issues of discovering sex
for the first time.” And Random House, its publisher, gushed about the
narrator’s “heartbreakingly honest voice” as she recounts the “exquisite
ups and dramatic downs of teenage love and heartbreak.”
The book industry, broadly speaking, says: Kids have a right to read
whatever they want. And if you follow the argument through it becomes:
Adults should not discriminate between good and bad books or stand as
gatekeepers, deciding what young people should read. In other words, the
faculty of judgment and taste that we apply in every other area of life
involving children should somehow vaporize when it comes in contact
with the printed word.
I appeared on National Public Radio to discuss these issues with the
Young Adult book author Lauren Myracle, who has been hailed as a person
“on the front lines in the fight for freedom of expression”—as if any
controversy over whether a book is appropriate for children turns on the
question of the author’s freedom to express herself. Myracle made clear
that she doesn’t believe there should be any line between adult
literature and literature for young people. In saying this, she was
echoing the view that prevails in many progressive, secular circles—that
young people should encounter material that jolts them out of their
comfort zone; that the world is a tough place; and that there’s no point
shielding children from reality. I took the less progressive, less
secular view that parents should take a more interventionist approach,
steering their children away from books about sex and horror and
degradation, and towards books that make aesthetic and moral claims.
Now, although it may seem that our culture is split between Left and
Right on the question of permissiveness regarding children’s reading
material, in fact there is not so much division on the core issue as
might appear. Secular progressives, despite their reaction to my
article, have their own list of books they think young people shouldn’t
read—for instance, books they claim are tinged with racism or jingoism
or that depict traditional gender roles. Regarding the latter, you would
not believe the extent to which children’s picture books today go out
of the way to show father in an apron and mother tinkering with
machinery. It’s pretty funny. But my larger point here is that the
self-proclaimed anti-book-banners on the Left agree that books influence
children and prefer some books to others.
Indeed, in the early years of the Cold War, many left-wing creative
people in America gravitated toward children’s literature. Philip Nel, a
professor at Kansas State University, has written that Red-hunters,
“seeing children’s books as a field dominated by women . . . deemed it
less important and so did not watch it closely.” Among the authors I am
referring to are Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Ruth Krauss, author of
the 1952 classic
A Hole is to Dig, illustrated by a young
Maurice Sendak. Krauss was quite open in her belief that children’s
literature was an excellent means of putting left-wing ideas into young
minds. Or so she hoped.
When I was a little girl I read
The Cat in the Hat, and I
took from it an understanding of the sanctity of private property—it
outraged me when the Cat and Thing One and Thing Two rampaged through
the children’s house while their mother was away. Dr. Seuss was probably
not intending to inculcate capitalist ideas—quite the contrary. But it
happened in my case, and the point is instructive.
Taste and Beauty
A recent study conducted at Virginia Tech found that college women
who read “chick lit”—light novels that deal with the angst of being a
modern woman—reported feeling more insecure about themselves and their
bodies after reading novels in which the heroines feel insecure about
themselves and their bodies. Similarly, federal researchers were puzzled
for years by a seeming paradox when it came to educating children about
the dangers of drugs and tobacco. There seemed to be a correlation
between anti-drug and anti-tobacco programs in elementary and middle
schools and subsequent drug and tobacco use at those schools. It turned
out that at the same time children were learning that drugs and tobacco
were bad, they were taking in the meta-message that adults expected them
to use drugs and tobacco.
This is why good taste matters so much when it comes to books for
children and young adults. Books tell children what to expect, what life
is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave—what the spectrum
is. Books don’t just cater to tastes. They form tastes. They create
norms—and as the examples above show, the norms young people take away
are not necessarily the norms adults intend. This is why I am skeptical
of the social utility of so-called “problem novels”—books that have a
troubled main character, such as a girl with a father who started raping
her when she was a toddler and anonymously provides her with knives
when she is a teenager hoping that she will cut herself to death. (This
scenario is from Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 Young Adult novel,
Scars, which
School Library Journal hailed
as “one heck of a good book.”) The argument in favor of such books is
that they validate the real and terrible experiences of teenagers who
have been abused, addicted, or raped—among other things. The problem is
that the very act of detailing these pathologies, not just in one book
but in many, normalizes them. And teenagers are all about identifying
norms and adhering to them.
In journalist Emily Bazelon’s recent book about bullying, she
describes how schools are using a method called “social norming” to
discourage drinking and driving. “The idea,” she writes, “is that
students often overestimate how much other kids drink and drive, and
when they find out that it’s less prevalent than they think—outlier
behavior rather than the norm—they’re less likely to do it themselves.”
The same goes for bullying: “When kids understand that cruelty isn’t the
norm,” Bazelon says, “they’re less likely to be cruel themselves.”
Now isn’t that interesting?
Ok, you say, but books for kids have always been dark. What about
Hansel and Gretel? What about the scene in
Beowulf where the monster sneaks into the Danish camp and starts eating people?
Beowulf is admittedly gruesome in parts—and fairy tales are
often scary. Yet we approach them at a kind of arm’s length, almost as
allegory. In the case of
Beowulf, furthermore, children reading
it—or having it read to them—are absorbing the rhythms of one of
mankind’s great heroic epics, one that explicitly reminds us that our
talents come from God and that we act under God’s eye and guidance. Even
with the gore,
Beowulf won’t make a child callous. It will help to civilize him.
English philosopher Roger Scruton has written at length about what he
calls the modern “flight from beauty,” which he sees in every aspect of
our contemporary culture. “It is not merely,” he writes, “that artists,
directors, musicians and others connected with the arts”—here we might
include authors of Young Adult literature—“are in a flight from beauty .
. . . There is a desire to spoil beauty . . . . For beauty makes a
claim on us; it is a call to renounce our narcisissm and look with
reverence on the world.”
We can go to the Palazzo Borghese in Rome and stand before
Caravaggio’s painting of David with the head of Goliath, and though we
are looking at horror we are not seeing ugliness. The light that plays
across David’s face and chest, and that slants across Goliath’s
half-open eyes and mouth, transforms the scene into something beautiful.
The problem with the darker offerings in Young Adult literature is that
they lack this transforming and uplifting quality. They take difficult
subjects and wallow in them in a gluttonous way; they show an orgiastic
lack of restraint that is the mark of bad taste.
Young Adult book author Sherman Alexie wrote a rebuttal to my article
entitled, “Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood.” In it, he
asks how I could honestly believe that a sexually explicit Young Adult
novel might traumatize a teenaged mother. “Does she believe that a YA
novel about murder and rape will somehow shock a teenager whose life has
been damaged by murder and rape? Does she believe a dystopian novel
will frighten a kid who already lives in hell?”
Well of course I don’t. But I also don’t believe that the vast
majority of 12-to-18-year-olds are living in hell. And as for those who
are, does it really serve them to give them more torment and sulphur in
the stories they read?
The body of children’s literature is a little like the Library of
Babel in the Jorge Luis Borges story—shelf after shelf of books, many
almost gibberish, but a rare few filled with wisdom and beauty and
answers to important questions. These are the books that have lasted
because generation after generation has seen in them something
transcendent, and has passed them on. Maria Tatar, who teaches
children’s literature at Harvard, describes books like
The Chronicles of Narnia,
The Wind in the Willows,
The Jungle Books, and
Pinocchio as “setting minds into motion, renewing senses, and almost rewiring brains.”
Or as William Wordsworth wrote: “What we have loved/others will love, and we will teach them how.”
* * *
The good news is that just like the lousy books of the past, the
lousy books of the present will blow away like chaff. The bad news is
that they will leave their mark. As in so many aspects of culture, the
damage they do can’t easily be measured. It is more a thing to be felt—a
coarseness, an emptiness, a sorrow.
“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as if it does not
matter.” That’s Roger Scruton again. But he doesn’t want us to despair.
He also writes:
It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only—or even
at all—in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that
surrounds them and live another way. The art, literature, and music of
our civilization remind them of this, and also point to the path that
lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred
and the sacrificial.
Let me close with Saint Paul the Apostle in Philippians 4:8:
Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is
pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent
or praiseworthy—think about such things.
And let us think about these words when we go shopping for books for our children.
_______________________________
“Reprinted by permission from
Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”
