Essey based on article; 'I remember my mother sitting in her chair reading aloud'

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.

As usual, you wrote a great work with good vocabulary, grammar and organization. I have some suggestions that you will find them below:






In this part you are discussing on an idea without any support. You can compare a classic story with a contemporary one to support what you claimed.

Mr Zafari, I again appreciate your great help. But this is not my article, I have been given this article from my professor to find the following details from it and write an argument essay about it, I would really appreciate if you help me finding these ideas from this article:

- Main argument of the article
- Sub-arguments
- Author's objective
- Author's Bias

I need to write an essay describing the summary of this article and weather or not it's convincing the reader, has enough support and etc.

ah_zafari


For example, this is a good idea, I can say he doesn't provide enough evidence to support his claims.

Thank you so much.

:))))) So, I edited another student's work :)))) that was a funny misunderstanding :D.
I am not expert in this field but I think the main idea of the essay is that how stories could influence children's behavior. Then the author opens a new discussion through which compares two types of stories; Classic and contemporary stories. The aim of this article is that to show the different aspects of these two types of the stories, but the author think that classic ones have more positive effects on children.

In addition, I think the author could not cover all facets of contemporary stories and for this reason it is hard to compare these stories.

This is what I perceived from the article. As I said, I am not an expert in literature and I just wrote my opinion :))))

That was great Mr Zafari thanks, you've been a great help over the last few weeks, I wonder why nobody else replies to my threads!, I was also wondering if I can directly contact you through any emails or anything because there is no such thing as "Send messages" in this forum.

Thank you for all the help.

OKKK, here is my email address: "stigmatata".

Okay, here is what I pulled out from this article,, Please feel free to make corrections.

Note: This is just the introduction.

In his article "What Great Books do for Children" based on a memoir of a life in the 20th Century, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. discusses how he became a reader early in life. Author is arguing that classical children's literature is valuable and helps to develop their intellect, emotion and imagination. Schlesinger is basically placing his own memories of books compared to what is being taught today. He describes how reading was his passion in childhood and continues by considering the approved children's books today, to be by contrast didactic in intent and dealing with prosaic. Moreover author opens a new discussion through which he compares two types of stories: classic and contemporary. Author believes that the classical books introduces children about the knowledge they already have and might not be aware of, compared to contemporary books which mostly have been designed for children to behave better. However Schlesinger believes that good behavior does not survive. Furthermore he applies the word "condemn" to condemn those adults who are underestimating children in different ways of upbringing. He seems to be bemoaning the fact that our culture has replaced classical literature with something that the adults in our culture find more appropriate. Author also uses the phrase of "Larger world" to describe the real challenges of life in world that children are going to deal with, but not being thought today and therefore can perceive by reading classical books. Author claims that children can read these books to notice about what they unconsciously know, about the world of harshness, war, sickness, flight, hunger, fear, joy, bravery, cowardice, etc. without ever experiencing it in real life, yet they will understand it because of living it vicariously through books. Schlesinger's argument is convincing due the certain logic behind his criteria and evidence provided from credible sources. He smoothly inculcates the reader about what children are going to witness in our culture if they do not read classical books.

:))))) Again me. As you said, I am the only one who edits your works. Hope you find my comments useful :))))



Suggestion: "the books that are presently available for children


this statement has been written in the article. Reword it.





Great job
Have fun
Ahmad