You are not fearfully and wonderfully made look, each animal’s dignity is compromised, they are trapped by the gross machinery of their form. There is a miserable nihilism looming behind “F is for Fart.” Your body is ridiculous, child. Perhaps it’s telling that the highest praise in children’s literature seems to be “you’ll die laughing.” There’s nothing to do but point, mock, and laugh. Here the child encounters a world of noise, hastiness, and sneers.
Then there is the bad, which is so very, very bad, and there is so very, very much of it, and by and large it is what most people are able to access. Enchantment suggests a maker and so, it seems, it must be reduced to mere magic. The very best of these books, though, still place a ceiling above the world, a world deliberately disenchanted. Christopher Haughton uses color brilliantly while writers and illustrators like Adelina Lirius, Kevin Henkes and Teagen White have a genuine gentle loveliness about their work. Some contemporary illustrators do use the flat image to great effect and these books possess a charm in their own right. There is no place for the child’s eye to linger because everything has been shorn down. When the choice is between serif and sans-serif, the publisher inevitably chooses a sans-serif world. Realism has vanished, let alone the mysterious realism which can be found in many of the books written between the late 1940s to the 1970s. Within these books nearly every image a child will encounter is flat: a sander has been taken to the human form (and everything else) until one is left with a paint-by-numbers worksheet quality. Here quantity trumps quality as deluges of new releases pour down each week. What’s stocked by most libraries, preschools, and book chains is not nearly so serene. Many of these books emphasize colors, rhythms of the day and seasons, and show an interest in plants absent from today’s children’s literature and media. These little creatures bond with the young child and help them to navigate the confusing world of their elders. These exclusive schools and their devotees fill their children’s minds with writers like Elsa Beskow, whose stories take place in an often-fantastic but slow-paced world peopled by flowers, gnomes, bats, owls, and talking toads. And that means books of a different character. The people who own the publishing industry, though, like all wealthy individuals, usually want the best for their children. The books currently pushed by the publishing industry have had the edges rounded off, the complexity of a Beatrix Potter picture liquidized into the flat 30-second sketches found in a Sandra Boynton book. A visitor will find no shadow of “F is for Fart” or “Cora the Cow Plops a Patty” in a 30,000 dollars a year classroom. It’s the steady routines, non-cluttered spaces, slow and comforting songs, and a now rare type of children’s book. It’s not just the toys which are different (a Montessori-educated teacher would reject ‘toys’ in favor of ‘work’).
Just as organic milk is more expensive than soda pop, simple hand-crafted toys have become the hallmark of the wealthy. Within the world of Waldorf, Montessori and Wild Forest schools the hand dominates the machine, wood and stone beat oil and metal, and the screen has been banished.
The most expensive preschools in America bear a pine-scented resemblance to those senna-tinted photographs of a world before plastics, albeit with no unseemly hint of poverty.
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