Defending Ramona, Defending Hope

The title of the article got my attention, and not in a good way: “In Defense of Beverly Cleary.”?

My first thought was, "Wait... WHAT? Beverly Cleary needs to be defended?!"

(For those of you who have lost your Child Soul, Beverly Cleary was a children’s author whose delightful characters included the irrepressible Ramona Quimby.)

Once I started reading the article, I understood. It's an argument I've heard before, though never with Ramona Quimby as "Exhibit A" -- that the best children's literature should help form a child's character through positive role models.

One of the joys of homeschooling, and something that drew me to it, was shaping my children’s education – and in fact, the life of our family – around books. Before we were even officially homeschooling, I had discovered the writings of British educator Charlotte Mason, an early advocate of what she called “living books.” Definitions of living books differ, but here is what Mason herself said about them:

“Why in the world should we not give children, while they are at school, the sort of books they can live upon; books alive with thought and feeling, and delight in knowledge, instead of the miserable cram-books on which they are starved?”

?

Living books can be nonfiction or fiction, and I think Mason had the former in mind when she asked the above question. So many of the texts that are written for school-aged children resemble encyclopedia articles – an uninspiring, emotionless delivery of data, composed only with efficiency in mind.

A living book, on the other hand, engages you. My favorite definition of a living book is that it brings its subject to life. In my home library is a book entitled Biography of an Ant, by Alice Lightner Hopf. It is, as you would expect, the story of an ant. But it brings the reader into the life of the ant by telling her story in third-person narrative form. Hopf does not just tell you the details – she makes you feel that you are part of the ant’s world. This is done not through cutesy, anthropomorphic devices (cartoon drawings, talking insects) but by making the details engaging. We can never know what it is like to be an ant, but we can imagine the challenges this one faces as she lives her life, just as we face challenges in living ours. The books of Jean Craighead George – particularly her Thirteen Moons series (various animals through the seasons) and the One Day books (biomes) -- vividly accomplish the same purpose.?

What does a living book look like when it’s fiction? This is trickier, because the whole point of fiction is to bring an imaginary story to life. Charlotte Mason advises us to look for?

“worthy thoughts, well put; inspiring tales, well told… the fit and beautiful expression of inspiring ideas and pictures of life.”

There is a powerful case to be made here for the works of such classic authors as Charles Dickens, Frances Hodgson Burnette, and Robert Louis Stevenson. But we seem to hold modern works to an impossible (read: Victorian-era) standard. It’s not that 21st-century children cannot benefit from a 19th-century example. But even Victorian-era literary characters needed reform. That is the whole point of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: each of the March sisters has something in her character that must be mastered and gradually replaced by its counterpart, and this takes place on a literal and figurative journey through daily life.?

Not all authors do this believably. There were books – including some that appear on lists of classics – that my children turned a jaundiced eye to at once: “Mom, please – no one could be that perfect.” Relentlessly good characters fail a key test of a living book: they do not engage you.

But Ramona Quimby does.?

She’s not a long-suffering orphan who is rewarded for her patience and virtue by the eleventh-hour appearance of a rich relative. But neither is she an instigator, rebelling against everything in sight and leading her peers into iniquity.?

When you think about it, she’s not that different from the March sisters. Growing up with the support of a loving family, she is growing up and growing in character and wisdom with every challenge she faces.?

She is real. She is believable. And in her, Beverly Cleary shows us what is possible. I call that “hope.”?

Children are not models of perfection, any more than their parents are. They are lifelong works-in-progress. The balance that we must strike in showing them the way is one between giving them ideals to aspire to and reassuring them that they are not alone in their imperfections. With apologies to Alexander Pope, “to err is human; to find a better way is divine.”

Rom