Undergraduate / Essey based on article; 'I remember my mother sitting in her chair reading aloud' [8]

I have a timed essay in few days and it is based on this very short article below, so I am trying to get prepared to include all the details of the article on my timed essay in class. I am having a hard time finding the things below and I need your help. I need to start my essay with a summary of this article and include the main points. I greatly appreciate it.

- Main argument
- Sub-arguments
- Author's objective
- Bias
- Evidence

Thank you.

I particularly remember my mother sitting in her chair reading aloud to her children. She was a splendid reader, spirited and expressive, and Tom and I insisted that she keep on reading to us long after we were able to read to ourselves. She was also an astute skip-er. I recall her amusement at my indignation when I discovered that, in books like Ivanhoe and Parkman's Conspiracy of Pontiac, she was unscrupulously omitting passages she found static or boring.

Of all childhood pasttimes, reading was my passion. Now that television has replaced the book in the life of the young, mine may have been the last generation to grow up in the high noon of the print culture. Perhaps it may be of historical interest to recall the profound excitement, the abiding fulfillment, books provided in those ancient and no doubt unimaginable days.

My mother gave me an appetite for books as well as a capacity to read them quickly. "Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any dep influence on our lives," Graham Greene has well said. "...nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation of those first fourtheent years?" [Indeed] most people will have done most the reading they will ever do by the age of 25 and must live off those books for the rest of their lives.

My mother began with fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, with Greek and Roman mythology, especially as marvelously renedered by Hawthorne in The Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales; and with the wonderous Arabian Nights. When I began to read for myself, a six-volume series called My Book House came into my life, an entrancing and resplendently illustrated anthology of historical adventure, fairy tale, poetry, mythology, something for every mood and moment.

I fear that such an initiation into a larger world would be much condemned today. For these were all tales filled with cruelty and violence, mutilation and murder, magic and fantary, streaked by what is now seen as classism, sexism, racism, and superstition. Approved children's books today are by contrast didactic in intent, dealing with prosaic, everyday events and intended to improve relations among classes, sexes, and races. Such books, it is argued, lead children to face reality rather than to flee to fantasy.

Is this really so? [Aren't] fairy tales and myths symbolic reenactments of deep psychological and social dilemmas? In this sense, the classic fantasies may well be more realistic than the contemporary morality tales.

There is nothing new about the contemporary insistence on morality tales. Since the invention of type, most children's books have been designed to make children behave better. Yet good-behavior tales do not survive, and gods and goddesses, dragons and ogres, are with us still. Hawthorne in his day felt the pressures of moralistic didacticism. "These old legends, so brimming over with everything that is most abhorrent to our Christianized moral sense," he wrote ironically in his introduction to Tanglewood Tales, "How were they to be purified? ... The author has not always thought it necessary to write downward in order to mee the comprehension of children... Children possess and underestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high, in imagination or feeling."

Childhood is finite. So is the number of books one can read. Why spend time on a modern morality tale in which the girl plays doctor and the boy plays nurse and their patient is the black child down the block when you can read about Huck and Tom and Nigger Jim? The serious point of children's books is not to improve behavior but to expand imagination. Great children's literature creates new worlds that children enter with delight and perhaps with apprehension and from which they return with understandings that their own experience could not have produced and that give their lives new meaning.

The classical tales have populated the common imagination of the West. They are voyages of discovery. They introduce children to the existential mysteries--the anxiety of loneliness, the terror of rejection, the need for comradeship, the quest for fulfillment, the struggle against fate, victory, love, deather. "Small children," Henry James observed in his preface to What Maisie Knew, "have many more preceptions than they have terms to translate them." The classical tales tell children what they unconsciously know--that human nature is not innately good, that conflict is real, that life is harsh before it is happy--and thereby reassure them about their own fears and their own sense of self.