[On July 14th, 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock published the first edition of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. In that book and throughout his career Spock was one of our most vocal & vital early childhood educators and advocates, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other such advocates, leading up to a special weekend post on my favorite early childhood educator!]
On how and why we can think about children’s books as early childhood education.
I don’t want to give away entirely the focus of this weekend’s special post (although it won’t be much of a surprise to anybody who knows me at all), but I can’t start a post on Margaret Wise Brown without sharing my first-ever Guest Post, from way back in early January 2011: my Mom Ilene Railton on the deceptively simple genius of Goodnight Moon (1947) and its unique, talented, and hugely influential author. Please check out that post if you would, and then come on back for more of my thoughts on Margaret Wise Brown and early childhood ed.
Welcome back! In that beautiful Guest Post, Mom writes, “Brown worked with children in the writing laboratory at Bank Street, encouraging them to swap stories with her. She even brought illustrators into kindergarten classes to draw in front of the children. She wanted their ideas, and the way they saw the world, to be at the center of her work.” While Brown did work for a short time as a classroom educator before publishing her first children’s book, 1937’s When the Wind Blew, I would extend Mom’s point there and argue that it was in fact in that subsequent 15-year career as a children’s book author and editor (before her tragically early death in 1952 at the age of 42) that Brown did her most consistent and crucial educational work. It’s not just that she wrote, edited, and contributed to so many children’s books during that time, although certainly that alone meant that she was as influential on generations of kids as anyone I’ve highlighted in this week’s series. It’s that her own books, especially Goodnight Moon as Mom argues but not limited to that one by any means, fundamentally changed the genre, offering new and important ways to both reflect and shape children’s perspectives, voices, and worlds.
Much of that is specific to Brown and her career, life, and legacy, of course. But English Studies Professor that I am, I want to end this post and this weeklong series (ahead of that weekend tribute post that you had better return for!) by making a quick case that all children’s books represent a central and crucial component of early childhood education. I hope I don’t have to tell anyone reading this blog about the well-established and undeniable benefits of reading to (and really just sharing books with) young children. Nor, to go back to Tuesday’s post on John Dewey and my arguments there for universal pre-K, am I suggesting that parents/guardians reading to and with young children can or should be a substitute for collective educational spaces. But no matter what else we as a society can do for our youngest and most important people—and we can and must do a great deal more for every single one of them—we have to make sure to follow in the lead of one of our greatest saints (to echo last week’s series), Dolly Parton, and ensure that every American kid has books, and plenty of ‘em. I know that the focus of my weekend tribute post would say the same!
That special tribute post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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