For kids and adults

By Amanda Hamedany
Collegian Reporter
February 28, 2007

Call me crazy, but I just can’t relate to Hamlet. I have never been a Danish royal, donning tights and a dagger. I have never been confronted by the ghost of a relative demanding revenge for his death. I have, however, experienced the growing pains of getting older, like the Little Prince (from the book of the same name) on Asteroid B-612, who traveled far away from his tiny planet to learn about the universe. At every stop the Little Prince makes, he meets an unfortunate grown-up, and, with every encounter, he learns what truly matters—and what doesn’t—in the grand scheme of the universe. Perhaps I don’t read between the lines thoroughly enough, but these universal messages are just not found in grown-up books, or “great” literature.

Children’s literature is not the stuff of flowery language pregnant with thy’s and thou’s; it is simply structured—subject, verb, period—full of meaning, devoid of superfluous adjectives. The meaning stays with you long after the fluff has melted away, pushed out of your memory by other, more important ideas. So why do grown-up books get to call themselves “great,” while children’s literature can never be more than “good?” If Thomas Hardy’s Jude was so obscure, why do we care more about him than Peter Pan, Wendy and the Lost Boys? I suppose that it is because many grown-ups, those newspaper editors and directors of this and that board and committee who get to decide what is “great,” forget that most of the lessons they learned that enabled them to become Mr. Big were learned in childhood, from the stories read at bedtime or on cold snow days on the couch. Every little boy and girl learned to dream big from stories like Peter Pan; these big dreams changed as the child aged, from joining the circus, to going to college, to being a successful businessman. Eventually these dreams turned into goals, and these goals lost the romance of childhood. With this loss, these children, who were now no longer children but CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies and corporate lawyers, also lost the memory of how they first began to dream big; instead, they attributed their “goals” to an innate drive to wear a silk tie and have the office with the biggest window.

So maybe some of the lessons taught by children’s literature are lost in the transition between blithe childhood and cynical, corporate adulthood. Perhaps children’s literature will never get the glory of grown-up prose, but it can claim an achievement that “great” literature cannot: children’s literature is our first muse. It teaches us to dream big, that we are not alone and it teaches us to be wary of a world that prizes conformity of the mind. Perhaps Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and J.M. Barrie will never have Barnes and Noble gift cards designed with their pictures, but I still consider their work far greater than most of the “great” literature on bookshelves today.

hamedanya1@lasalle.edu