The Battle for the Bookshelf

What are we actually doing when we read to children?

After reading the essays at The Christian Imagination a few weeks ago, I bit the bullet and ordered The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith. I’m just a few chapters in, and I’m so excited to write about this book and what it means for us as home educating parents. I can already recommend it wholeheartedly as worthy and fascinating. But I’m not actually going to talk about it at all today, simply because I want to read the whole thing first. Consider this the first in a series, really, because there are so many angles to think from, and I can’t wait to explore them.

Let’s start with something that’s been on my mind since my experiences speaking at the last two Orthodoxy and Education conferences: the continued perception that there is a conflict between science and religion, and that higher education in science and technology in particular is threatening somehow to a person’s life of faith. Stay with me, because this is directly related to how we think about children and reading.

In one of my recent essays, I shared this story about one of my favorite college professors:

The lesson I learned– perhaps one of the most important lessons of my college years– was that there was no necessary trap, no inescapable dichotomy between science and faith. That conflict was actually so easily avoidable as to be laughable. But it’s taken me another few decades to realize why that conflict is still so magnetic and compelling, and to postulate why people continue to get caught up within it.

One reason why people get stuck is due to the reflexive tendency we have to oversimplify complex issues and create competing dichotomies to choose from. When the possibilities are vast and overwhelming, it’s psychologically comforting to retreat to the security of a tribe. Our society reinforces this kind of tribalism because it makes it easy for institutions and corporations to market their products. So it’s really easy for people to not realize that they have been caught up in a trap, and that the way out involves simple shifts in paradigm.

What this means is that if you believe that there’s a conflict between science and faith, you’re going to see it everywhere until the day you decide to see it differently.

I’m not saying there isn’t a conflict, though. Actually, I think the conflict is rooted somewhere else, and the science/faith dichotomy is a distraction from another very real power struggle, one that ties directly into what books we’re reading our children. I think the conflict is between the two great houses of academia: science and the humanities, as competing epistemologies. This conflict, like most others, is ultimately about power– which house ranks above the other, which framework gets to authorize claims about knowledge, command resources and direct society, and ultimately shape our understanding of what it means to be the knowledge seeking, meaning-making primate, Homo sapiens; the rational animal, the symbol-wielding hominid.

Pause there. Each of us has our own personal epistemology, our framework for how we understand what knowledge is and how is works within us, providing theories as to how it works in the greater world. We acquire this epistemology from our environments as we grow– from our families, schools, friends, entertainment, and so on.

When we read to our children, when we encourage our children to read, no matter how purposefully or nonchalantly we do so, we begin to lay the foundation for our children’s own epistemologies.

Two movements in early childhood education can illustrate clearly for us how the academic conflict has permeated our society: Montessori schools and Waldorf schools.

Montessori represents the scientific-empirical house: sensorial materials with “control of error,” developmentally sequenced activities based on observation, emphasis on measurable outcomes. The child is a biological organism unfolding according to discoverable laws. Steiner represents the humanities-interpretive house: developmental stages tied to spiritual anthropology, rhythmic activities reflecting cosmic patterns, valuing the unmeasurable—imagination, reverence, wonder. The child is a meaning-making being whose development can’t be reduced to metrics.

The trouble for the parent comes when one realizes that each system claims to be a comprehensive explanatory framework. Each one wants to be master over the other– and this is precisely where children’s reading becomes a flashpoint: The books in a Montessori classroom are beautiful and factual. The books in a Steiner classroom are beautiful and imaginative.

The early childhood Montessori classroom lacks fairytales. The early childhood Waldorf classroom lacks encyclopedias.

Many of us, especially in the world of home education, instinctively sought to correct this false dichotomy, taking elements from both philosophies and integrating them in ways that felt natural to our families. We read the children beautifully illustrated anthologies of fairytales and found them gorgeously presented encyclopedia, and we found ourselves drinking in the glory of the material and the meaning right alongside of them. But unless we thought carefully about it, we didn’t realize that we were basically kicking the can down the road: ultimately, we continued to accept that there must be a conflict to be resolved. And in homeschooling circles especially, when the advances in science and technology feel overwhelming or threatening, there’s a real temptation to simply grant authority to the humanities house and call it good.

Let’s think a little more about childhood reading. When we ask “Why do we read to children?” each academic house, science and humanities, gives a fundamentally different answer—not complementary perspectives, but rival accounts of what reading actually is.

The scientific house answers: Neural pathway development, vocabulary acquisition, phonemic awareness. Reading is a technology to be mastered—decoding symbols into sounds into meaning. We read to children to build the cognitive architecture for information processing.

A child should read to acquire literacy because it gives them access to information, economic opportunity, functional citizenship. Reading forms the mind, gives it a conceptual skeleton on which to build complex and abstract thought. Authors who write for children in this model do so to scaffold appropriate cognitive development and transmit factual knowledge in age-appropriate ways. Children’s literature is an educational technology.

The humanities house answers: Initiation into the symbolic order of culture. Reading to a child is a ritual of meaning-transmission—you’re not just decoding words, you’re sharing what it means to be human. This is the relational ontology of the lap, the voice, the rhythm, the shared attention.

A child should read to encounter otherness, to develop moral imagination, to experience beauty, truth and goodness, to join the Great Conversation across time. Reading forms the soul, not just the brain; who you can become, not just what you know. Authors who write for children in this model do so to scaffold the development of meaning with maps of possibility, moral complexity, beauty, terror, wonder. Children’s literature is the full spectrum of human experience rendered in forms children can metabolize.

This is why the question of what we read to our children matters so intensely, and why we feel such pressure around it. We’re not just choosing books. We’re choosing which house’s vision of humanity we’re going to authorize in our homes, which epistemology gets to shape our children’s souls.

I think you can see where I’m going with this: I believe that the way out of this conflict is the acknowledge that both houses are right at the same time. We need both the practice of meaning-making and the material with which to make meaning, and we need both of these things copiously.

Material without meaning cannot touch the soul; this much is obvious. But meaning-making that is not rooted in this specific, real, material world can easily drift into the kind of subjectivity that locates truth in the abstract rather than Truth as Incarnation– when ideas becomes more important than the Image-Bearers who wrestle with them.

So what should we read to our children?

What should we let them read to themselves?

How much reading is the right amount?

Why should they read at all?

How we begin to answer these questions starts with how we personally understand the act of reading– and how we acknowledge that the precise location of our own understanding is not universal.

I’ll end by offering a non-dichotomous first principle of childhood reading: Reading is always best understood in the context of relationship. Yes, that relationship is with the book itself– the idea that began in the writer’s mind ending in its incarnation in the reader’s mind. But when we read together with other human beings, we’re involving each other in the spider’s web of relationships of our imaginations. We anchor one another by loving one another.

Thus the question about children reading is much less about good books and bad books or checking off items on the right list, but instead about maximizing our relationships with our children, with ideas, and of course, with God. Though it might feel destabilizing or even scary at first, that there is no one right way to do this is truly liberating and exciting, freeing us for ever greater Fullness of Love.

As home educators, we are constantly evaluating and wrestling with the idea of an “essential canon” of reading, for ourselves and for our children. There’s a perennial temptation to simplify this wrestling by striking books off of the list for one reason or another: too old, too new, twaddle, authors are weird and imperfect (or even disturbing), the subject itself too difficult or uninteresting.

As relational technology, books are not simply inert vehicles for knowledge transmission and meaning-making. The truth is that any given book can be encountered at the wrong time– when the reader is unprepared or not in the right frame of reference, when they lack some skill or context. As much as we would like it to be otherwise, we cannot simply throw The Correct Books at our children and achieve a specified result. Every child is different. Every single one. This means that every single child has the opportunity to co-create their own personal canon of gathered material and forged significance. Our job much less about picky curation– as Lisa said memorably in our book, “chewing their food for them”– and much more about spreading a wide feast in a spacious room.

It’s true that children’s literature– all good literature, really– has often emerged from suffering, confusion and human struggle. Hello, Tolkien wrote in the aftermath of WWI! This complexity, however, doesn’t make it toxic, even for children– it makes it human. Children are not fragile vessels that shatter upon contact with ambiguity or complexity. They are resilient meaning-makers who need both the stable ground of reality and the imaginative space to wrestle with mystery, paradox, and wonder.

Until next time, friends! I can’t wait to think more about this book. Is anyone reading it with me?