"Mother Skylark" recently posted:
I read recently that: "English majors now find sustained prose a drag...a literature major at George Washinton University recently reported on a hands-up poll [taken in her class] revealed that only half of the upper-classmen had bothered to finish the assigned "All the Kings Men," a best-selling favorite of previous student generations. Why? 'Boring!' 'Too hard to follow.' Another classmate commented on Sarah Orne Jewette's beautifully written "The Country of the Pointed Firs" 'went so slowly that it seemed like it was written by a retarded person.' " She concluded by stating, "To read well, minds must be trained to use language, to reflect, to persist in solving problems."
It is one of many reasons we use well-written literary books in everything we study. I have been reading to the kids once a week from a thoughtful devotional book for children called "Leading Little Ones to God." Among the vast quantities of unspiritual silly rubbish we stuff into our children's minds because it's "Christian" this seemed to be a decent intelligent book. However, today we were reading a retelling of the story of Joseph, under the category of "God turns our troubles into good" when SuperBoy interupted with, "The writer of this book does not know how to make good sentences. She doesn't tell the story very well." (We usually
read directly from the Bible.) "What do you mean by that?" I ask. "Well, I like the way she uses the word "troubles" and describes how God turns troubles into good, but when she starts telling the story, it isn't very interesting, she doesn't use good words and her sentences are boring." The book is quite decent writing, over all, just lacking any literary quality. My 7-year-old is voicing what many a school child doesn't even know to say, "If you want us to listen and learn, give us something decent to read, for crying out loud!" That a 7-year old's ear can be so fine tuned to the beauty and quality of good prose is something that shouldn't be astonishing but is. The other astonishing thing is that he has never had a grammar lesson in his life, but he knows grammar instinctively simply by reading well-written books. He hasn't spent countless hours on end copying, circling and underlining rubbish sentences and paragraphs that are completely boring and disconnected to any story or good ideas in the hopes that he will learn to "read" and "write" from them. He's only ever heard beautiful writing - he's spent hours upon hours with "Peter Pan", the real James Barry version, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, 1001 Arabian Nights, EB White, Charles Kingsley, Andrew Lang, and on and on and on... How could he not know what makes a good sentence and what's rubbish. What's more - he LOVES good writing and has a very healthy appetite for it.