Mother Goose Is Cooked

Mother Goose has flown the coop.

On our way home from the toy store, my youngest son, while looking at the labeling in various languages on his new LEGO set, observed, “You know, European is a lot like English, only more ancestor-y.” Very cute. But also profound, because it made me think about how he as a child born in the 21st century, although an expert plastic block builder, is lacking the scaffolding for language development that has been traditionally provided by nursery rhymes. I have a hunch that folk poems and nursery rhymes, with their formal, archaic, or “ancestor-y” constructions may be slowly going the way of the dinosaur (and I’m not talking about the big purple one – though I wouldn’t mind seeing him disappear all together).

Watch the following video. It’s a bit long, but try to stick with it to the end. This kid is very expressive and highly entertaining, so you may not find it too taxing to watch the whole thing:

Even if you missed the date stated at the beginning, you could probably tell from the parents’ hairstyles and clothing that this was recorded in the early 1980′s. But the real give-away was the fact that this 2 1/2 year old was able to recite a significant portion of the English/American nursery rhyme canon. You’d be hard pressed to find a kid of that age (or possibly any age) today who could do the same.

I was enchanted.

When I was a very little girl, my parents gave me a thick, beautiful book containing a collection of traditional nursery rhymes and excerpts from classical children’s literature. Among its contents were a chapter from Alice in Wonderland, poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Grimm’s fairytales and Mother Goose selections. It had gorgeous, full color illustrations printed on glossy paper and was bound with a cloth spine between light blue hard covers decorated with a repeating pattern of tiny fleurs-de-lis.

I treasured this book and recall reading it snug under the covers before bedtime. As I got older, I hid precious treasures and keepsakes between its pages: a pressed rose from my junior high graduation corsage, drawings made for me by sick children I cared for as a teen hospital volunteer, and strands of tape that once adorned the kick board of the boy from my swim team I had a crush on. You can imagine, then, my broken-heartedness when this book went missing after my parents’ house was sold. Somehow, it did not make its way with other hastily packed childhood memorabilia from Toronto to me in New York.

Books to drool on and handle with sticky little fingers.

The nursery rhyme easy-to-wipe-off board books we bought for our boys, as convenient, sturdy and utilitarian as they were, simply could not hold a candle – not even the nimble Jack’s – to my special blue book. How could they, when nothing really distinguished them from the many other board books (versions of classics and original works alike) they drooled on and ripped apart?

I’ll admit that I tried harder with our older two; I sang songs and read and recited nursery rhymes with them more than I did with my youngest, who was born into a busy, chaotic household with older brothers and two parents working full-time. We also had a nice collection of VHS tapes with programs featuring both English and Hebrew nursery rhymes that we never bothered to replace once our youngest was born, DVD’s came into fashion, and our video tape player was discarded.

I, however, refuse to shoulder the entire blame here. There are plenty of other parents and educators out there letting Mother Goose out of the pen and not doing much to retrieve her. There have even been times when I felt as though I were alone in my belief that the memorization and recitation of rhymed and metered verse strengthens skills in reading, writing and speech. A couple of years ago, my high school students, no longer required to memorize Shakespearean soliloquies as I once was, looked askance at my request that they learn a selection of famous biblical verses by heart (in Hebrew…though I think the response would have been similar, though not quite as vociferous, had it been in English).

Cover of classic edition of Rutz Ben Sussi (aka Parash) by Bialik

One might argue that in the internet age, there is no point in memorizing facts, figures, or literary passages that can be called up in seconds by way of a Google search. True, I can now have every word ever written by the great Hebrew writer and poet H.N. Bialik at my fingertips thanks to the Ben-Yehuda project (http://www.benyehuda.org/bialik/). But I would never have developed my ear for Hebrew without my having regularly and repeatedly memorized and recited in first grade many of his children’s songs (a hazard of attending the Bialik Hebrew Day School in the 1970′s).

Gone are the days when rhyming verse was the natural option and first resort for communicating essential ideas to children. Although one might claim that youngsters are exposed to poetry and are competent at communicating through the lyrics and rhythmic beat of hip-hop and rap music, somehow I can’t see kids today hooked on the kind of poem (popular in its time) written by the inventor and public health crusader Emile Berliner (1851-1929) to teach the importance of pasteurization:

When milk is raw just from the farm
It’s full of germs which may do harm;
But safe it is and highly prized
When it is boiled or pasteurized.
Ice-cream, cheese, and butter-fat
Come from milk – you all know that.
Made from raw milk, we can see
They might harm both you and me.

Kids in 1928 got the reference. What about kids today?

I knew Mother Goose was cooked when I quizzed my sons on which months had 30 days and which had 31. They just stared at me blankly as I merrily sang, “Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest hath thirty-one, except for February.” Then they showed me some mnemonic device whereby you count off the months on the knuckles and the spaces between the fingers on your hand they saw someone demonstrate on YouTube.

© 2009 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Tags: children's literature. H.N. Bialik, Emile Berliner, language development, language skills, Mother Goose, nursery rhymes