Books one and 2 in my reading challenge were A Little Princess and Teh Secret Garden, both by francis Hodgson Burnett

I’m combining these two books into one post, because a lot of what I want to say about them, is about them both. With both of them being children’s books by the same author, it’s also easier for me to combine them try to decide which one I’m counting as “a book from my childhood” and which one is “a book at least 100 years old”.

A Little Princess is about a young girl named Sarah Crewe. She was an English girl born in India, whose mother died when she was very young, leaving only her and her very indulgent father. When she was seven she was sent to boarding school in England because “the air in India was not good for children.” I admit that that cracked me up a bit. First of all, the air in India seems to be perfectly fine for Indian children. But, more importantly, it begs the question of why that same air that “isn’t good for children” is just fine for infants? What magic happens at seven or so that makes them suddenly unable to handle the air in India for the next ten years or so? But, since at the time the book was written it was a contemporary story, not a historical, that is more a question to ask society at the time than the author of the story.

So, young Sarah is sent to this boarding school. And another idea you get from the story is that this is a year-round school. In other words, girls are sent here and don’t see their parents for YEARS. I suppose it was normal at the time, and I really want to do some research into it, now. But it’s such a frightening thought, really. Anyway, she’s sent to this school, and is treated like… well, like a princess. But then her father dies, and she’s left penniless due to a bad investment before he died. The woman running the school somehow get guardianship of the girl because… who knows, really. But, again, that could honestly be the timeframe and she had no other relatives, so. I don’t question it – at least not too hard.

Sarah is taken out of classes, put in the attic, and used as an errand-girl, and pretty much considered a slave. Until a man moves in next door and “magical” (in the eyes of a young child, at least) things start to happen.

The Secret Garden is about Mary Lennox. She is also an English girl born in India, though she had a very different life than Sarah did. Mary was spoiled by her Indian servants, and completely ignored by her parents. But she wasn’t spoiled out of love, she was just given her way in everything to keep her from throwing temper tantrums. Her parents and several of the servants die of cholera, and Mary is left alone, abandoned by the remaining servants. She’s found by people searching the house for… maybe they were looking to see if anyone survived the plague, maybe it was something else they were looking for. I’m not quite sure. Anyway, she’s found and sent to her uncle in England.

Where she is once again left pretty much alone. She’s there for weeks before she ever meets her guardian. But, things actually get better for her, because her new maid is nothing like her servants in India, and makes her do things for herself. Eventually she meets and befriends her maid’s younger brother and finds the key and door to a garden that has been locked up for ten years – because her aunt died there, and her uncle can’t bear to look at it. Then she finds her cousin.

Colin, like Mary, has been spoiled rotten by servants trying to avoid temper tantrums, and ignored by his father his whole life. he’s said to be an invalid who won’t live long. Mary befriends him, and tells him about the garden. Colin wants to see this garden and so willingly goes outside for the first time in his life. The fresh air, working in the garden, and Dickon’s friendship end up doing wonders for both children.

Okay, I’m horrible at summarizing, but you get the idea. And really, the main reason I wanted to give some kind of summary, was because I wanted to touch on a rather interesting theme that appears if you look at both books, together. Mary, Colin, and Sarah were all rich kids, given every material thing they could think to ask for. But, Sarah had a very different temperment from the other two. And I think the reason why is rather obvious. Sarah was also given something that money can’t buy – she was given love, and attention. So that even when her world turned upside down and inside out and she was made into a slave-girl living in the attic of a boarding school making friends with the rats – she never gave up on her dreams, and her imagination made everything seem better. For Mary and Colin, it was the garden, and Dickon that turned them around. It was having people that cared about them that turned them from being little shits, to actually caring about other people. Meanwhile, Dickon – who was poor as they came – was always a kind, gentle soul.

Basically, it all comes down to the idea that material things don’t matter. That what children need more than anything, is love. And with taking the two books together, that theme really becomes quite clear.

Anyway… Another thing I wanted to talk about is language. These were children’s books. Probably Middle Grade by our current classification system. And yet, there were words that I, a grown woman of decent intelligence, had to look up. Some of them were because these books were old and so there were words that are no longer used. (And also, it’s set in England, and I have no idea what a shilling is…) But, some of them were long, difficult words. And it got me to thinking about the current publishing industry – and educational system. As writers, we’re told we should try to write at about a 6th grade level (I believe), for ADULT books. These were books written for probably like 4th and 5th graders, that were written at a higher reading level than most adult books today.

And it’s sad, really. Not that these books were so “hard” but that today, everything is expected to be so easy. We keep dumbing everything down. We talk and write down to our children, and make it so that we have to talk and write down to other adults. These hundred year old books are proof that if we talk to children like they’re human beings, and give them the chance to figure something out from context – they will do it. I never would have heard of these things back when I was a kid, if they hadn’t stood the test of time. And I didn’t even remember that there were “hard” words in them – I just remembered they were interesting stories, that I wanted to revisit as part of this reading challenge.

I think that children are smarter than we give them credit for. When my oldest nephew was three, my parents got a new bathroom scale. It was blue, which happened to be my nephew’s favourite colour at the time. He saw the thing, and came out into the frontroom and told my mom “Grandma, me like your new blue weight measurer.” He didn’t know the word “scale”, you see – so he pulled a word most people think he shouldn’t have known out. They can learn big words if they’re exposed to them. If we don’t talk down to them – then we won’t NEED to talk down to them. See how that works? They understood that a hundred years ago. And well-brought-up English children were also taught French from a young age. Now, most kids don’t start learning a second language until high school. But think about this, for a second. For the first five or six years of our lives, our brains are hardwired for language acquisition. By the time we start language classes, we’ve long-since lost our ability to learn a language easily.

Basically, we do everything backwards. And I think it needs to stop. We need to start giving kids more credit, treat them like the intelligent human beings they are capable of being. We expect them to grow up so quickly in all the ways we should be keeping them children – but not giving them the tools and education they need to handle that, keeping them babies in all the ways we SHOULD be letting them grow up.

Okay, that turned into a bit more of a rant than I intended. Leave it to me to turn a book review into a rant about the education system. I’m in the process of writing a piece on fan fiction that I’ll post in a few days.