TITLE: The Truths We Express To Children Are Really Our Hopes
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 21, 2024 12:41 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
In
her Conversation with Tyler,
scholar Katherine Rundell said something important about the
books we give our children:
Children's novels tend to teach the large, uncompromising truths
that we hope exist. Things like love will matter, kindness will
matter, equality is possible. I think that we express them as
truths to children when what they really are are hopes.
This passage immediately brought to mind Marick's Law: In
software, anything of the form "X's Law" is better understood
by replacing the word "Law" with "Fervent Desire".
(More on this law below.)
While comments on different worlds, these two ideas are very much
in sync. In software and so many other domains, we coin laws that
are really much more expressions of our aspiration. This no less
true in how we interact with young people.
We usually think that our job is to teach children the universal
truths we have discovered about the world, but what we really
teach them is our view of how the world can or should be. We can
do that by our example. We can also do that with good books.
But aren't the universal truths in our children's literature
true? Sometimes, perhaps, but not all of them are true all of
the time, or for all people. When we tell stories, we are
describing the world we want for our children, and giving them
the hope, and perhaps the gumption, to make our truths truer than
we ourselves have been able to.
I found myself reading lots of children's books and YA fiction
when my daughters were young: to them, and with them, and on their
recommendation. Some of them affected me enough that I
quoted them in blog posts.
There is so many good books for our youth in the library: honest,
relevant to their experiences, aspirational, exemplary. I concur
in Rundell's suggestion that adults should read children's fiction
occasionally, both for pleasure and "for the unabashed politics of
idealism that they have".
More on Marick's Law and Me
I remember posting Marick's Law on this blog
in October 2015,
when I wanted to share a link to it with Mike Feathers. Brian had
tweeted the law in 2009, but a link to a tweet didn't feel right,
not at a time when the idealism of the open web was still alive.
In my post, I said "This law is too important to be left vulnerable
to the vagaries of an internet service, so let's give it a permanent
home".
In 2015, the idea that Twitter would take a weird turn, change its
name to X, and become a place many of my colleagues don't want to
visit anymore seemed far-fetched. Fortunately, Brian's tweet is
still there and, at least for now,
publicly viewable
via redirect. Even so, given the events of the last couple of
years, I'm glad I trusted my instincts and gave the law a more
home on Knowing and Doing. (Will this blog outlive Twitter?)
The funny thing, though, is that that wasn't its first appearance
here. I found the 2015 URL for use in this post by searching for
the word "fervent" in my Software category. That search also
brought up
a Posts of the Day post
from April 2009 — the day after Brian tweeted the law. I
don't remember that post now, and I guess I didn't remember it
in 2015 either.
Sometimes, "Great minds think alike" doesn't require two different
people. With a little forgetfulness, they can be Past Me and
Current Me.
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