No more Reading Rainbow (NPRKJ)

Today marked a very sad day in the history of television. While typing away at work, I heard that today the very last episode of Reading Rainbow aired.

Yes, after 26 years of continuous running, LeVar Burton will no longer be sharing the amazing stories of Abyoyo, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Hot-Air Henry, or Miss Nelson Is Back.

I have to honestly say that I was deeply saddened by the news. I was even more frustrated by the content of the report. Apparently, PBS has decided that teaching the mechanics of reading (phonics, and the like) is a more important topic and will be more beneficial to children. I can't even begin to express how vehemently I disagree with this position.

It actually reminds me of two different lectures I've listened to lately, both talking about the Christian ideas of the humanities in education and homeschooling. Each reasserts an idea which C.S. Lewis brought up in his own work "The Abolition of Man," which is to say, (putting it harshly) modern school systems with their excessive standards, systems, and assembly-line attitudes do not produce real humans. They produce men without chests, without hearts. To be more diplomatic, it's not the methods of how you process information that make you intelligent, but rather it is the grappling with the question of "why" that will make you wise.

Or, to quote a line from a very obscure musical that I enjoyed, "Don't give me songs. Give me something to sing about."

I can honestly say that LeVar Burton was one of my heroes. I know nothing about his celebrity life outside of Star Trek and Reading Rainbow (I'm too young to know about the "Roots" phenomenon) and I don't feel the need to. Who knows, maybe he has a skeleton in his closet, or something. It doesn't matter. Mr. Burton was someone who for more than 20 years really cared about the education of the person. He actively shared the imagination, the wonder, and the joy of reading to generations of children. That is the stuff of heroes.

That is what it's all about. They will never succeed in designing the perfect television show that will effectively teach children to read. And I know for a fact that if you generate in a child the desire to read, they can even teach themselves. They already had succeeded in desiging a near-perfect television show that witnessed to the power of reading.

So this is partly, an NPRKJ to express my disapointment in the show's disappearance. But on a deeper level I posted this because it's almost impossible to stress too deeply or say too many times just how important the drive behind literature, art, and the Story is.

Who cares about decoding letters on a page. Give me a story.

NPRKJ on Raising Kids

It's official. Raising your kids properly isn't just for off-beat Luddites anymore.

This program was an entertaining shock for me. Just imagine, a media talk show exploring the incomprehensible idea of not giving your 10-year old a cell phone, moderating the TV and Internet content they view, and discouraging dating 'till maybe late high school... and the people all said, "That's crazy talk!"

Washington Times columnist Marybeth Hicks, in very straightforward language says, "hey, let's teach our kids how to behave and say 'no' to the junk." She even deftly avoided the rhetorical traps set for her, suggesting she was being elitist or judgmental. It was like a breath of fresh air. (Ironically, not the other NPR program of the same name, which while very civil, rarely brings up anything challenging.)

But the best part of it had to be that the host, who so often does a great job at moderating and bringing in some opposing perspective to even the most out-there ideas, seemed incredulous. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't being harsh or sarcastic, but his tone just kept saying "do you really think you can accomplish that?" I almost laughed in my chair.

But then again, this episode was a nice contrast to the frustrating other stories flying around these days about how marriage is an outdated and pointless habit.

Disapointing Fantasy

Here I'm going to introduce one type of regular entry I hope to regularly put onto this blog. I'm calling it the NPRKJ, or the "National Public Radio Knee-Jerk." Basically I'll present a story which I ran into while perusing the NPR.org stories of the day, and share my knee-jerk reaction to it. It's not my fully formed and crafted position, it's just a quick (sometimes not so quick) response.
-D.A.

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The story Morally Complex 'Magicians' Recasts Potter's World left me very frustrated and disappointed. It did so because it came so very close to addressing a fundamental aspect of good literature, but then went the exact opposite direction.

Here's a quick lowdown, the author Lev Grossman was heavily influenced by writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, particularly Lewis, but disliking the moral clarity of such stories, decides to rewrite the same story only with "believable" characters who are more gritty at match his worldview. This means the college students do drugs, have sex with each other, and generally act like rebellious and selfish kids.

Now, on a bad day, I'd tend to take this personally and get really riled up against Grossman, but really it's not him, and it's not the "gritty realism" either, though generally you need to convince me why I should be interested in reading something with that kind of content. You really do have a world like that here, let's be honest, the moral caliber of most U.S. Universities isn't exactly stellar... But we're not talking about real life here, we're talking about fantasy. And it's this bigger fact that I'm trying to make. Grossman, like a few other authors these days, don't use the genre for its highest purpose. (In fact, as we go farther along, we'll see he's doing something worse, but we're not there yet.)

Here's a telling quote:

Grossman: Voldemort and anyone like that in a fantasy novel, any big, bad villain, has a kind of powerful organizing presence on the universe. You know who's good, you know who's evil and you know what magic is for. It's for fighting evil. Well, when you take that away, suddenly the universe gets a whole lot more complicated...

There's that word "complicated." The NPR headline said "Morally Complex" story... but the truth is, it's not morally complex. It's just morally ambiguous. You can't even say it's "misguided" because at this point, it's not even trying to teach something. This is precisely the opposite of what fantasy is about.

Fantasy is a creative writer's dream of a literary form, because it basically let's you do anything and the reader tends to go along with it. The sky is purple? Ok. People can shoot magic beams from sticks? Ok. The adventure happens in a rip of alternate-reality? Sure. But here's where the line between cheap entertainment and real literature is drawn. Because that's not all there is to a book.

At its very core, fantasy is a genre of moral allegory meant to inspire, it offers a vessel to "Be all you cannot be," in order to come away with something. And this is where I become be disappointed, and sometimes frustrated, when I find these kinds of books. Without resorting to quote Spider-man, not every author who writes a fantasy book uses rises to their level of power and responsibility. Some don't even still believe you can inspire people. And worse, since we live in a pretty ugly nihilistic society, sometimes you get people who want to deliberately inspire the wrong things. It's not the author's fault per se, but it still causes a knee-jerk reaction in me. And once you get to this point, that's when I have to start drawing a line in the sand and saying "this is bad."

I hit that point when in the interview Grossman described what he did with his own heavy critical allusions to C.S. Lewis' Narnia series and his intentions of re-interpreting it. This is what he says:

Grossman: I remember being very angry as a child and as an adult at Aslan. I always felt that here is a world that had a, you know, a proper god in it, a god who you could see, who would come down and change the course of events, but he didn't do it very much, and he would often let battles go on and events really spin out of control, and people would die before Aslan would step in. Why would a God not help people in every possible way that he could?

So basically he's admitting that he doesn't like "god" and therefore he's going to re-write the story where his characters get a chance to confront him and accuse him of doing it all wrong. Does this sound familiar?

It's always just so annoying when you get an author who has a great imagination and plenty of craftsmanship in creating a world, but they do it to spite God instead of glorify Him... it's even more annoying because I've recently found myself more of the opinion that you really can't justify that kind of literature and say "but it's just so well written" and writ- off the anti-God message. That suggests you're not reading properly, either being ignorant of the power of themes in a book, or deliberately ignoring them. In each case, the book isn't being used properly.

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Now, to close up, with all NPR KJs, I'd like to give a list of links to further consider some of the icebergs I smash into above. Here ya go:

Fortunately, this was not the only story out this week. For a great list of books to read that are wonderfully positive examples worth reading and celebrating, listen to author Leslie Blume's summer reading list.

If you ever feel like really getting into the Theodicy debate, where you really ask "What if God really did come and help us all the time like we ask," listen or read this essay by Frederica Matthewes-Green.

Also, I can't close this out without leaving a link and recommendation for a great interview discussing the purpose of stories and fantasy as moral tools. The second half of this podcast hits the nail right on the head summarizing why we need literature, and what it's good for. (Click here for the mp3 directly, otherwise here for a pop-up viewer.)