I recently discovered the following statement by W.H. Auden, “There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.” He was said to have been talking about Alice in Wonderland.
I've been spending a great deal of the past 15 years reading and thinking about children's picture books, the sorts of books that children generally leave behind as they begin to read on their own. Before that, they had been thrilled to have their parents read them aloud, usually at bedtime, but also on rainy days, times when you wanted something to calm children down. And they are usually great for that. So great in fact that children want to hear them read over and over again. To the dismay of their parents, at least some of the time.
But children's picture books deserve more in our regard that their usual role would suggest. They raise many of the crucial philosophical issues that plague young children--as well as those child-like adults known as philosophers. Like who really knows what they are talking about, experts or people regarded as fools. That's a question posed--charmingly--by James Thurber's sarcastic tale, Many Moons, in which the King's Court Jester turns out to know more than all the King's advisors put together. Or does it really make sense to think that intelligent life could have just come into existence through a series of accidents, rather than the thoughtful action of a creator, the issue animating William Steig's captivating Yellow and Pink.
We're so used to condescending to picture books that it's hard for people to really see that their playful and charming surfaces are deceptive, that beneath those charming exteriors children's picture books investigate the Big Ideas I claim to be characteristic of philosophical thinking. In my recent book, A Sneetch Is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries: Finding Wisdom in Children's Literature, I try to show how sixteen picture books raise some of the most perplexing philosophical issues, making it possible for children and adults alike to engage in some deep thinking without having to encounter the likes of Plato or Descartes.
I'm not sure what Auden was thinking when he made his remark about children's books. But he's certainly right when he says that good children's literature is for adults as much as it is for children. In fact, I have to confess that I learned a lot about philosophy as I pondered the picture books I was writing about in A Sneetch Is a Sneetch. I am one adult who is very grateful to the authors of those books for packaging philosophy in such a pleasing form. Let's just hope that more people take the plunge and use their favorite children's books to begin thinking about life's Big Ideas.