Posts in Young Readers
Should Boys be Swayed by Emotion? C.S. Lewis Thought So

In Lewis’s era, intellectuals professed all reality to be subject to the rational mind. Emotion was seen as a threat to the supremacy of rationality. To Lewis’s horror, educators in the 1940s were deciding that “the best thing they [could] do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion” (Abolition of Man, Broadman & Holman Publishers, 27).  (These days, we suffer the opposite: intellectuals promote emotion as the sole compass by which humans should conduct themselves. Emotion is king. But that is for another post.)

Read More
How Books Will Define My Middle Schooler

If I do become a mother one day, that means that, at some point, I will be dealing with a middle school child. And you can bet your shiny iPhone 6s that I will be bribing the heck out of that kid to read pages rather than screens, because the stories children internalize are the stories that shape their character -- especially in middle school.

Read More