Sense and Nonsense
A. O. SCOTT
The New York Times Magazine (full text)
26 November 2000

Excerpts

Like most American children born in the decades after World War II, I was raised by two doctors, Spock and Seuss. Returning to the latter doctor's books as a parent, I find myself pulled back into a familiar imaginative cosmos -- one I seem never entirely to have left. That I think about the health of my children's imaginations at least as much as I worry about the strength of their characters, and that I picture their powers of perception as both resilient and fragile, probably owes more to Theodor Geisel than to any parenting manuals I've read since. I suspect that it's only a slight exaggeration -- and exaggeration was one of his great gifts -- to say that our current understanding of children, and of ourselves as former children, is the brainchild of Dr. Seuss. [...]

Seuss's verses lodge in his readers' heads and, like all great poetry, enlarge their sense of what language -- their language -- can do. [...]

Anarchy, linguistic or otherwise, flourishes alongside another, equally pronounced strain in Seuss's work -- not of preachiness, exactly, but of unabashed moral seriousness. "He's sometimes pegged as a nonsense writer," argues Leonard Marcus, "but most of the time he used nonsense as a device for holding the interest of the reader while he said something that was important to him." Barbara Bader, in her encyclopedic history of American children's books, writes that Seuss, like children themselves, is "a natural moralizer . . . it comes to him as unselfconsciously (and unambiguously) as rhyming lines from an engine's beat."

This tendency was evident in Seuss's fourth children's book, "Horton Hatches the Egg," published in 1940. Like Faulkner's "Sound and the Fury," it germinated from the unlikely image of its protagonist up in a tree and grew into an earnest endorsement of steadfastness: "An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent."

Childhood according to Seuss is a perpetual zigzag between the anarchy of the Cat in the Hat and the selfless stoicism of Horton. [...]

World War II, part of which Seuss spent making propaganda films for the Army, in a unit that included Frank Capra and Chuck Jones, honed his temperamental distrust of authority to a fine political edge. [...]

Perhaps the reason that children and adults tolerate Seuss's moralism is that it is honest about the pleasures of transgression as well as about its consequences. [...]

By precept and by intuition, Seuss respected the autonomy of his readers, understanding them to be innately competent, thoughtful creatures. As Jon Scieszka puts it, "Kids are growing like a tree, which you can prune and nurse, rather than like a vase you have to fill."

This insight was hardly Seuss's alone. The idea that children's cognitive and moral development consists of the mastery of innate concepts and instincts has become a staple of modern educational theory, and versions of it percolate through psychological thought from Dewey to Piaget to Chomsky. But Seuss's distillation of it is especially influential, and not simply because "Aspects of a Theory of Syntax" has never been a big bedtime favorite. Rather than describe the mental world of children, Seuss labored over his verses and sketches in the hopes of replicating it. His guiding insight was that some version of his words and stories was there to begin with, and that children, in discovering his work, would recognize in it what they already knew. [...]

And children's educational television, which began in the late 60's with the arrival of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and "Sesame Street," would be unthinkable without the example of Beginner Books. Both Muppetland and the Neighborhood of Make-believe showcase the unfettered imagination, the belief that pretending is no mere idle pastime, but a productive use of cognitive resources. "It's incredible what you can do in your imagination," sings Elmo, signaling that Marco's rebellious Mulberry Street adventure has become an ideological norm. [...]

Seuss associated childhood with the creative imagination and the awakening moral sense, for which the movie, in keeping with the tenor of the times, substitutes trauma and sainthood. Dr. Seuss's children are not wise, and their purpose is never to rescue adults, but rather to discover the world and themselves. What Seuss's children are, by nature, is intelligent. And if they are good, it's not because they're innocent, but because they are human. The moral is simple. [...]