Anxious about school, the eponymous pigeon states, “What if I learn too much!?! My head might pop off.” (The book itself poses no such risk.) The pigeon’s solution, after many pages of exclamation — he screeches “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!” when he sees the school bus, for example — is to articulate the actual activities he will do at school and to realize that school isn’t some amorphous bogeyman. 

This is classic cognitive behavioral therapy — it’s decatastrophizing, performed on a pigeon. To be fair, this can be a useful technique for anxiety management. But why is it almost all that this book has to offer? There’s no vocabulary my daughter, at age 3, doesn’t know; there’s no syntax she doesn’t already utilize. The book eschews conventional written dialogue for speech bubbles — there’s not even a “the pigeon screeched” following his “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!”  

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The grotesque truth about children

By Sam Leith

We see much of the same in other current best sellers, and in the young-reader books favored by many schools as the new academic year gets underway. The language is colloquial to an extreme. In Dragons Like Tacos (483 weeks on the Times list), a book that was also read at my daughter’s school, the narrator states, “Hey dragon, why do you guys like tacos so much?” In On the First Day of Kindergarten (two weeks on the list), we hear, “On the first day of kindergarten, I thought it was so cool riding the school bus to my school!” In The Smart Cookie (29 weeks on the list), which often reads like a therapist’s version of a child’s inner monologue, the titular cookie states, “I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up or sharing my ideas. I didn’t feel like a smart cookie.”

A few of these titles attempt a poeticism that falls short. “You did this job in your very own way. We needed a tough little truck today,” we read in Time for School, Little Blue Truck (44 weeks on the list). In the Magical Yet (7 weeks on the list), a story about a child attempting to learn a variety of new skills like bike riding (its cadences apparently and notably adopted from Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Places You’ll Go), we hear, “And now you won’t ride. No way. Not never. No riding for you, you’ll walk … forever.” It had seemed that at the end of those ellipses, we might encounter something more … complex. But alas, we don’t. 

Half of the 10 children’s picture books on the current Times list are about going to school. Four of those involve ways of managing the anxiety that might attend school. Five of the titles are focused on boosting the self-esteem of their readers. Even the potentially mythical Dragons Love Tacos is about a commonplace event — a taco party. (This is, in fairness, a source of its humor, lest I begin to sound too cantankerous.)

That is to say, this list, thematically, is extremely narrow. Diction-wise, syntactically, these books are even more so. These are books that meet my 3-year-old right where she is and take her no further. Though seemingly emotional (“And the STUFF!… There is sooooooooo much stuff to learn!” the pigeon wails), they relate, really, to a small fraction of her emotional life. They have very little of beauty, philosophy, morality, or character (unless the expression of anxiety counts). 

There is a particularly extreme counterexample to this to be found in The New England Primer, the primer of choice for more than a century of American teachers. First published in 1690, it was used regularly in classrooms until the mid-19th century. In a 1727 edition, children were marched right from the alphabet to vocabulary lists featuring words like “glory,” “absent,” “drunkenness,” “impudent,” and “fidelity,” and from there onto to the tale of the martyrdom of John Rogers, in which, “his wife, with nine small children, and one at her breast, followed him to the stake; with which sorrowful sight, he was not in the least daunted; but with wonderful patience, died courageously, for the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

With the pressing concern of salvation came high expectations. For their souls’ sake, children needed to distinguish the “abominable” (another vocabulary word) from the beautiful. (“What is God?” the primer states. “God is a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable, in his Being, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Justice, Goodness, and Truth.”)  

I’m not suggesting we return to The New England Primer. But it’s clear that children can and should be introduced to diction, syntax, and concepts far beyond what is in much of our children’s literature today. I believe it is what they want. (My daughter often asks me, “When are we going to die?”)

After The New England Primer, children’s school primers grew increasingly simplified.  In the early 20th century, the rise of the “Look-Say” method, which advocated against phonics and for whole-word memorization using very simple vocabulary lists, culminated in the mind-numbingly repetitive Dick and Jane primers. Kids reared on these texts were forced to endure sentences like: “Jane said, ‘Run, run. Run, Dick, run. Run and see.’” 

In response to the outcry against these primers, William Spaulding, Theodore Geisel’s editor, commissioned the book that would become The Cat in the Hat. “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down,” Spaulding said, supplying Geisel (whose pen name was Dr. Seuss) with a list of the 348 simple words he was allowed to use — the Look-Say method, but fun. And it was. “It is fun to have fun/ But you have to know how,” says the Cat in the Hat. “I can hold up the cup/ And the milk and the cake!” It was more than fun — it was explosively popular. To date, The Cat in the Hat has sold more than 16 million copies; it continues to sell about half a million copies a year. It is often thought of as the quintessential children’s book.  

But we should think of The Cat in the Hat not as the quintessential children’s book, but as the quintessential children’s reader — a book a child can pick up when she begins to read on her own. In this, it is remarkable — energetic and comic and magically formed of the simplest words. Unfortunately, the popularity of Seuss enshrines simplicity as the central virtue of children’s literature, and this behemoth has come to swallow up all other possibilities. We also need a subgenre of children’s literature that feels more like literature.

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The closing of the Zoomer mind

By Valerie Stivers

In childhood, our minds work differently. Children can learn multiple languages simultaneously without the enormous effort adults must put forth to achieve often worse results. This should also be the period in which they hear elevated language:  beautiful, beguiling, weighty, humorous — a version of adult language. It would be so much more effortlessly and naturally acquired than at any other time, and it, too, could be theirs — if only we’d read them the books that would bring it to them.   

There are books like this, even if they seem too hard to find. One notable example can be found in the works of William Steig, a near-contemporary of Seuss. One of Steig’s classics, Amos and Boris, tells the tale of a mouse on a sea journey: “One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he [Amos] marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water. Lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense, starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.” 

Like The New England Primer, Steig’s work doesn’t shy away from the ultimate questions of life and of meaning, though here there are no clear answers. Treading water in a deep ocean, we read, Amos “began to wonder what it would be like to drown. Would it take very long? Would it feel just awful? Would his soul go to heaven? Would there be other mice there?” There is characterization and deep emotion. Amos is eager and temperamental; Boris, the whale who arises from deep in the ocean to rescue him, is practical and purposeful. They become fast friends. They cry when the inevitable occurs — Amos must live his life on land, and Boris in the ocean.  

Children are born into a sea of mysterious signals; it is in their nature to decode the strange world before them. Why, when we begin to read to them, do we so often present them with the little they already know? We should trust them, more often, with complexity in their literature. What they can’t yet grasp, they will grow to understand. There should be, off in the distance, at least a few of those luminous whales.

Sometime around the end of the second Obama term, people started to discover that Dr. Seuss — Theodor Seuss Geisel — had drawn crude images of Asian, black, and Jewish people. Those images had been there all along, sitting uneasily with his famous books, which consistently champion liberal and environmentalist values. Only now, the “problematic” drawings started to overshadow the good doctor’s achievements.

When First Lady Melania Trump sent a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts library in 2017, she received a furious response. “You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature”, the recipient of the books, librarian Liz Phipps-Soeiro, lectured in a blog post. “Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”

That was hardly the end of it. The NAACP called for “censorship” of all Dr. Seuss books (yes, the organization unabashedly used the “c” word). Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which publishes his works, pledged to remove six of the author’s most offensive titles from future publication.

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How lawfare destroyed liberalism

By Alexander Nazaryan

But the real scandal came when, a little more than a month into his first term, President Joe Biden failed to mention Dr. Seuss in his announcement for Read Across America Day, which customarily involves a president and/or first lady reading a Dr. Seuss book to schoolchildren. The outrage was instant: “Dr. Seuss Is Canceled”, went one headline at the libertarian Reason magazine. 

Spoiler alert: Dr. Seuss wasn’t canceled. His books have spent so much time on the Amazon bestseller list, the Atomic Habits guy is jealous. But Biden’s opponents saw it as an attempt to move the culture to the Left, the first of many. They seethed as he invited transgender influencers to the White House, showered accolades on progressive icons like Bruce Springsteen and George Soros. They vowed to restore sanctity to American culture once they had a chance.

Well, how’s that working out?

We now have the Gulf of America, while the US taxpayer has clawed back the $47,000 that United States Agency for International Development splurged on a Colombian “trans opera”. Inveterate Twitter troll-cum-diplomat Ric Grenell has been appointed the president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a position for which he is as suited as I am to translate Dr. Seuss into Bulgarian.

I am not saying that the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss is why we have a second Trump term. Nor is that controversy congruent to the consequences of four more years of MAGA. But minor as that affair may seem, it is a neat microcosm of our ineffective, herky-jerky politics, the main goal of which is increasingly only to undo whatever the other side has been doing.

Constant whiplash between political and cultural extremes isn’t what people signed up for. You could certainly argue that the Biden administration went too far in some of its diversity initiatives, but the branding of every black person in any position of institutional power as a “DEI hire” is a MAGA tic most people don’t endorse, as River Page pointed out in The Free Press.

People wanted normal, which shouldn’t be surprising, since Americans have for centuries been a pragmatic people. Even today, we are actually far less polarized then news reports would have you believe. It’s rather that the activists at the poles have megaphones the size of Kansas, which they buy with the cash raised from ideologically motivated billionaires (Soros, the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — take your pick). Those groups can then boost candidates who need both publicity and cash. The rest of us are like the archetypal guard in a bank-heist movie, bound and gagged with masking tape, helplessly watching the scene unfold.

When he was attorney general of the United States under George W. Bush, the dour John Ashcroft covered up the Spirit of Justice statue because its naked breast offended his evangelical sensibilities. In which case, he should have quit. We don’t elect censors or moralizers. To their credit, the new Trump people don’t share Ashcroft’s moralizing spirit. Their supposed enemy is wokeness, a term that could mean anything from cringeworthy shows of political posturing to worthwhile efforts to acknowledge past injustices.

The Trumpians seem to genuinely believe that the country is in the grip of a Leftist cultural revolution. In their fervor, they forget that at least half of Americans — the ones who vote for Democrats — flatly reject that view. And that, wide-eyed activists excepted, most liberals simply seek after a decent life: a measure of financial stability, happy and healthy kids, and, yes, the fundamental American right to worship as they please (or not at all) and to speak their minds.

Trump’s counterreaction has itself been immoderate, as evidenced by the harsh language of the new administration’s executive orders targeting transgender protections. Just as most Americans were never going to burn their Dr. Seuss books, most also are perfectly capable of living and working alongside people who hold different beliefs and espouse different values. We’ve never wanted anything but normal, but normal seems to be increasingly elusive in American politics.

So far, Trump 2.0 has shown himself to be just as obsessed with race and gender as the wokest junior staffer in the Biden administration. “Like its antithesis on the Left, the woke Right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought,” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in an insightful essay for The Atlantic. Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, though its namesake this time around is World War II hero Roland L. Bragg, not the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The move will cost several million dollars and will do absolutely nothing to help ordinary Americans with egg prices or medical bills.

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The truth about the Woke Right

By Kathleen Stock

You don’t have to be a genius to see how all this turns out. After four more years of Trump, people will be exhausted, as Trump is an exhausting character. They will want something entirely different (sorry, Vice President Vance). The answer will probably come in the form of a moderate Democrat who shuns the language of the academic and activist Left: someone like Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore or Jared Polis.

Of course, that nominee will still need support from the Left, possibly in the primary, definitely in the general election. Promises and assurances will be made. Once in office, the new Democratic president will placate those liberal groups by reversing many of the policies that Trump is implementing today: pronouns back in email signatures, DEI trainings restored across the federal bureaucracy, no more country music at the Kennedy Center, no more Dr. Seuss. All of which will make the Right seethe once more, preparing us for the next cycle of our reaction-counterreaction politics.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Moderate politics is not only attractive because it accurately describes where most Americans stand on most issues. The more a politician tacks away from the extremes, the less likely he or she is to engender a strong political opposition.

Trolling takes a toll. At first, it seemed like Trump might begin his second term with a measure of popular support, but his early moves have been so sweeping, so striking, that people are protesting again, as they did in 2017. To be sure, many people do support cutting the federal government and making merit the basis of hiring, but unaccountably blaming a plane crash on “DEI” and humiliating the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have chosen to work for the federal government was bound to have major blowback. Already, according to The Bulwark, “Trump’s approval rating is falling fast.” And his second term is barely a month old.

Who will have the courage to change this state of affairs, the courage to be moderate? To borrow from the poor fish in The Cat in the Hat, “this is no fun at all”.