Introducing American Children to the World Through Its Children's Literature

Dr. Dora Smith is a professor of English at the University of Minnesota in the United States. Her institution has sent her on an exploratory journey to the Far and Near East to search out and collect the literary heritage of children. She visited The Woman's Voice during her passage through Beirut and gave a delightful interview about her educational mission... How, do you suppose, will she compare the literary heritage for children that we have with theirs?!

"It is the duty of the language teacher to be acquainted with everything his children read — to know their books. Children's books are expected to open before the small reader many windows through which he may look out on the world and understand it as it really is, not merely as the old fables have pictured it.

"Our children in America are ignorant of a great deal about the children of the world. For the books in their hands do not give them a true picture of the life of this age. In the American's imagination the Arab is a naked barbarian who lives in tents! My task here is to gather the children's books in your possession, send them to the University of Minnesota, and look into the possibility of translating the good ones into English."

This is the substance of what Dr. Dora Smith opened with. She began her journey last June and will finish it next June. The first stage was Honolulu in the Hawaiian Islands, then Japan, Hong Kong, then the Philippines, Singapore, Bali, and Java, Thailand, India, Pakistan. She is now in Lebanon, and from here she goes to Egypt, then Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Britain.

A long journey, as we see; and whenever she sets down her baggage in a country she proceeds to collect its children's books from their likely sources and send them to the University of Minnesota, where they have 250 foreign students belonging to the various countries of the Far and Near East whose help can be enlisted in studying these books and appraising their educational value.

"In America," says Dr. Smith, "we have sixty publishing houses that assign an editor to children's books who concerns himself with nothing else — and one book out of every four published in the United States is a children's book — and so we see that picture stories play a great and important role in our lives, and it is our duty to prepare faithfully for this role..."

When she was asked what results she had found on her journey she answered: "I am sorry for the poverty I have found in the Far East in children's literature, and they tell me here that things are not much better — but I am glad that there are the first signs of an artistic renaissance in this field, and I have met a select group of young men and women qualified to lead this renaissance and foster it...

"We have in English a number of books about the children of the East, but they were written by Americans who lived in these lands for a stretch of time; and we believe that the best books for children are those written by their own native people, those who have grasped their history and traditions. It is on the track of books of this kind that we are...

"In recognition of the importance of children's literature in our lives, the Children's Book Council, which comprises sixty members representing the publishing houses, devised the idea of 'Book Week,' held in the middle of November every year, for which the forces of the schools, the libraries, the publishing houses, the radio stations, and the newspapers are mobilized in a positive campaign to acquaint parents with the best books that have appeared for children and young people. 'Book Week' has begun to find its way to every advanced country, and Lebanon was the first to adopt this idea: the American Community School held a book exhibition on the eve of the twenty-second of last November and invited to it some of the authors present in Beirut to meet the parents and speak about the role books play in the lives of children — and we have great hope that the rest of the countries of our dear East will awaken to the importance of the idea."