Several years ago, not long after my son was born, I developed an insistent, almost religious habit of reading Goodnight Moon to him every night before bed. I hadn’t actually loved the book as a child—something about the darkening room spooked me—but as an adult, I found it soothing, a cozy throwback to the days before educational apps, brain games, flash cards, attachment gurus and the whole vast library of kid-genius books had all but destroyed the promise of the great green room. Childhood had been enriched to a state of radioactive intensity, turned into a nuclear achievement race that not only struck me as a bummer for kids but bad for society. As at least one study I read suggested, the cult of constant enrichment has seriously exacerbated the education gap; in the age of rising inequality, this is one way elites reproduce themselves. As I flipped through stacks of ABC books we’d been given (and, yes, bought), I mourned the loss of the pure, egalitarian times when a book like Goodnight Moon could be written.
Of course, if I had paused to think about it, I would have realized that Goodnight Moon was also a fabrication, as much a projection of its time and place as today’s brain-stimulating baby books. Published in 1947, Goodnight Moon was at once a groundbreaking work of progressive educational philosophy and a rather conventional ode to postwar middle-class stability, with a distinct vision of what children want and need. After all, this is what children’s books do. They distill the dreams and distortions of older generations, boil them down into bold-colored allegories that entertain, yes, but also edify, indoctrinate, guide, mold and nurture. The ultimate in loco parentis.
“What you’re seeing is, in a way, how culture is made,” said Leonard Marcus, a well-known children’s historian, during a recent phone conversation about the long-running role of children’s books. “It’s each generation setting down its hopes and dreams for the next generation. That’s what children’s books do.”
Such generational hopes and dreams—as well as a few nightmares—are at the heart of a fascinating exhibit that runs through March 2014 at the New York Public Library called “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.” Curated by Marcus, the exhibit was commissioned by the library as a kind of declaration of children’s books’ artistic and historical merit, both of which have tended to be overlooked. The fact that children’s programming has become such a solid bet in today’s kid-obsessed culture—more enrichment!—couldn’t have hurt either.
The exhibit unfolds much like a children’s tale. Visitors begin by walking through an enchanting door—this one draped in stripy, white-and-yellow bunting—on the other side of which there is a winding path full of twists, turns and lots of discoveries. There are titillating artifacts, like the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee figurines that a still-enthralled Lewis Carroll gave to an adult (and married) Alice years after he penned his tales for her. There are delightful relics, like the pine-green umbrella, its handle shaped like a parrot’s head, which served as P.L. Travers’s inspiration for the one Mary Poppins carried. Mostly though, there are the hopes and perversions of centuries of elders, each doing their part to shape the next generation.
Consider The New-England Primer, the first book featured in The ABC of It. Originally published in 1690, the primer was the most prominent young-person’s book in America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though it’s hard to see the appeal today. A downer if there ever was one, the book is filled with the sour warnings and moral reprimands of a culture that viewed children as wayward souls in need of salvation—and salvation’s favorite sidekick, discipline. “In Adam’s Fall, We Sinned all” reads a typically cheerless line from the primer. “The Idle Fool, Is whipt at School” reads another, while on the verso page, vocabulary words like “fornication” and “fidelity” serve as their own kinds of warnings.