We can change the story!

This morning, preparing breakfast for my four children, I listened in on the PBS Kids program they were watching. Super Why! retells fairy tells and other familiar children’s stories by inserting four characters called Super Readers into them. The Super Readers encounter a narrative problem they must solve. They go about finding letters which spell out a magic word. Then they apply it to the problem. Whyatt announces, “With the power of reading we can change the story!” And by this means the Super Readers solve the problem.

Just what exactly is this supposed to teach children? That sad stories can be brightened up by changing their endings? That Oedipus can escape his fate by magically transforming Jocasta into an ingénue? That Wilson’s shot misses Gatsby, and he runs off with Daisy, who isn’t really such a bitch after all? That Bigger Thomas’s range of choices is not limited to taking a job that demeans him or going hungry, despite what Richard Wright actually says?

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for encouraging children to read. And I guess pretending that reading is a super adventure isn’t the worst of all possible approaches. But speaking sheerly as an English professor, the last thing I need is more students showing up in my classes with the attitude that Nabokov once encountered at Cornell: “Student explains that when reading a novel he likes to skip passages ‘so as to get his own idea about the book and not be influenced by the author.’ ”

What is more likely to contribute to their self-esteem, though, than the message that children can change any story to suit their childish and transitory wants? God forbid we might teach them to submit to the story.