From Puss-in-Boots to Plato

Junior Great Books give kids the classy and the classic

Say "Great Books," and most people think of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, not Jack and the Beanstalk. But Jack has won a place, along with Winnie-the-Pooh, The Jungle Books and excerpts from James Thurber, in a respected and fast-growing reading program called Junior Great Books. Created for elementary and secondary schoolchildren by the Chicago-based Great Books Foundation, the reading-discussion program does not aim to "teach" the classics. It tries, instead, to teach young people to enjoy good books and to understand better whatever they read. Explains Edwin P. Moldof, the foundation's vice president: "A great story is one with inexhaustible implications."

Currently, some 400,000 U.S. youngsters are Junior Great Bookies, up from 200,000 just two years ago. They get their own paperbound copies of a dozen carefully selected readings and meet to discuss them, usually once a week in a 45-minute session, with the foundation-trained leaders. About 40% of the leaders are parent volunteers, the rest are teachers.

J.G.B.'s success is based on an intelligently demanding choice of texts, a discussion method called "shared inquiry," and on precise, literate questions calculated to unlock the pleasures and mysteries in each story's heart. For both students and discussion leaders there are some unusual rules. Program leaders ask questions about the readings but, unlike traditional teachers, are not permitted to give answers. Their questions, many of them suggested by accompanying instrucion booklets, are supposed to have more than one answer. Sample suggestion for Kipling's Jungle Books: "Why do the wolves feel they need a leader in order to be free?" Students are permitted to answer only if they have actually read the selection. Each selection is supposed to be read twice, and answers must be based only on specific evidence from the text. Nobody can get away with the kind of book review snow jobs that everyone remembers, such as "really exciting" or "kind of boring."

In Jack and the Beanstalk, for instance, why is Jack rewarded rather than punished for taking objects from the giant? (A possible answer: Jack paid with his mother's cow for the beans that grew into the giant's beanstalk. Possible comeback: But he didn't pay the giant.) Does Jack succeed because of magic, good luck or his own efforts? (The story includes some evidence of all three.) The students also mull over different characterizations of Jack and the giant in two different versions of the story.

In theory, the application of shared inquiry techniques to Jack sounds a bit like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. But in practice teachers find the method leads to sharp debate, not hot air. Says Moldof, who, along with Great Books Foundation President Richard P. Dennis, first dreamed up the program: "Kids don't have to worry about searching for the answer the teacher already knows. They just have to back up what they say."

A two-volume anthology of J.G.B. selections is available in paperback for grades two through nine. Each set costs parents (or schools) about $7.50 per student. Instead of the usual warning not to mark up their textbooks, students are urged to make marginal notes, underline key passages, jot down questions for discussion. At a recent Sandy Springs, Ga., third-grade session on Puss-in-Boots, Volunteer Leader Barbara Smith began by saying to students, "Show me your messiest page."

The J.G.B. list is not intended as an all time literary pantheon. Beyond pure enjoyment, books are chosen to encourage discussion. Winnie-the-Pooh does so, says Moldof, but the Oz books do not. Why? Partly because the Oz books are often ploddingly explicit, whereas, Moldof explains, Pooh is full of provocative humor: "No matter what you say about it, the statement somehow falls short of summing up the story." In the higher grades, many selections run to traditional school fare such as Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Shirley Jackson's chilling, oft-anthologized story The Lottery. The overall list is studded with the likes of Aesop (Fables, for fourth grade), Plato and Tolstoy (Apology and Master and Man, for eighth grade) and Ibsen (An Enemy of the People, for ninth grade). Recent additions include modern science fiction by Ray Bradbury, a John Updike short story and some poems by Ogden Nash and W.H. Auden.

After reading A Christmas Carol, fifth-graders in Chippewa Falls, Wis., wrestled with the question of why Dickens gives Scrooge a chance to reform, and whether or not the fact that he gives the miser such a sad past life means that the author wants the reader to "feel sorry" for him. Most of the children were interested in Scrooge and delighted by the story's ghosts. But one complained because Dickens spends "a whole page explaining about a doorknob."

Now and then students say they would like a little more raw violence. One even suggested that J.G.B. include excerpts from a print version of Grease. But by definition, the program is only for kids who like books, those most motivated and most able to read. Says Anne Cline, principal of Sandy Springs' Spalding Drive Elementary School: "The child with reading problems eliminates himself."

J.G.B.'s sudden popularity is partly due to the new national inclination to spend more state and federal funds on gifted students. Beyond that, the course is simply an attempt to keep serious reading (and serious thinking about books) alive in a country where reading levels have been on the decline for years. "We believe," one instruction booklet says, that discussion of meanings "can affect the way you look at yourself, other people and the world." Given the prevalence of comics and video pap, even a good reader is all too easily distracted. The objective, one teacher explains, "is to offer enriched reading experiences for children who love to read, before they become lazy and disenchanted."

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