Goose Dispute

Lively and perennial is the dispute between the Modernists and Fundamentalists of pedagogy over the merits and morals of the jingles which Mrs. Elizabeth Foster Vergoose of17th Century Boston sang to her large brood of moppets and which her son-in-law, one T. Fleet, published in 1719 as Songs for the Nursery or Mother Goose's Melodies for Children.

Modernists, behaviorists, say that "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" will teach children to steal pigs. They call "Little Jack Homer" bad-mannered. They say that "The Cow that Jumped Over the Moon" is cruelly improbable. Mrs. Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr., herself a child prodigy (she "used a typewriter" at the age of three), has tried to attack Mother Goose constructively by promulgating informative jingles, rhymes that "represent life" (TIME, Jan. 12, 1925). Example:

Every perfect person owns Just two hundred and six bones.

Teachers' College at Columbia University is the largest training station for schoolteachers in the land (2,799 degrees and diplomas awarded in 1927-28). Last week the Mother Goose dispute cropped up there. Miss Marie Duggan of the Bureau of Educational Service announced:

"The children who read about the three funny little pigs are often those who grow up to be readers of G. A. Henty and Zane Grey." Only a cretin, she implied, could get literary satisfaction out of The Little Red Hen or the senseless animism of Peter Rabbit. She offered as an example of what would be more suitable, a story about a child named Peter who "ate 'n ate 'n ate spinach and loved and loved to drink his milk every day until he was strong enough to lift his little horse Trott Trott high over his head."

Flying to the rescue of oldtime nursery rhymes came Associate Professor Annie E. Moore who teaches a course in child literature at Teachers' College. Said she: "If there's anything I abhor, it's stories about children who accomplish wonders by eating cereal and spinach. . . . Until this story came out, I never knew she [Miss Duggan] and the Bureau of Educational Service existed in the college."

AnotherTeachers' College pedagog, Miss Alice Dalgliesh, tried to restore faculty calm. She, a teacher of storytelling, urged a compromise between the factual and the sentimental, endorsed Miss Moore's "balanced ration" of child literature. The list:

1) A "good collection" of Mother Goose.

2) The Golden Staircase, The Golden Treasury of Songs & Poems, poetry anthologies.

3) Folk & fairy tales by Veronica Somerville Hutchinson, Hamilton Wright Mabie, Frances Jenkins Olcott.

4) Hans Christian Andersen's tales.

5) Uncle Remus.

6) Arabian Nights stories (expurgated).

7) Peter Rabbit, Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, Just So Stories, The Velveteen Rabbit.

8) A children's Bible.

9) Hans Brinker; or the Silver Skates, Heidi, Earl the Jungle Lad.

10) A Child's History of the World, First Days of Man.

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