We're also appalled because curriculum "experts" have completely missed the boat in devising ways to evaluate reading competence, thereby feeding the misconceptions of parents and students. Reading tests almost universally buy into the text-as-words view of reading. Children are asked to define words, find similar phrases, and explain (in words) what the text says. But how in fact do we really know that children have understood what they've read? When they say, "I know how that feels" or "I can do that, too!" We know they've achieved reading comprehension when they can go act out what they've heard, draw a picture of some story element or make a simple model of some narrative action. If they never get to experience the feelings, the images and the doing and making, it really doesn't matter whether they can define the words - they're still illiterate.

To prove it, consider the following. Everyone reading this post can undoubtedly "read" the following sentence: "The gorb blozzed the noggle." You can identify the subject, verb and object, but you have no idea what it means because the words do not link to an action, image, feeling, or anything else in your experience.

There's nothing new about this observation: Aristotle pointed out 2500 years ago that words are synaesthetic objects. That is to say, they get their meaning from integrating sensations and feelings. For example, the word "apple" has meaning only if you can conjure the sound of the crunch as you bite into it; imagine the feel of its juice and the taste of its nectar; see in your mind's eye whether it is a Macintosh or a Granny Smith. Leaving out the images from books is like excising ones senses. Failing to test whether words evoke such images is like pretending that a computer can "understand" a word whose definition it can find in a dictionary.

Finally, we're appalled because children's book publishers have helped to create this disaster by publishing illustrated books no one wants to buy. One of the hidden secrets of the children's book industry is that most editors have degrees in English or creative writing. Many know very little about visual art or illustrating. Yet they are the ones, not the writer him or herself, who choose who will illustrate a book. (Nor do illustrators get to choose authors with whom they would like to work.) As a rule there is no communication and no collaboration between author and illustrator. No wonder then, that all too often illustration and text seem mismatched in tone or vision. The result makes for an unappealing book.

In fact, collaborative fit explains why most (though certainly not all) of the perennial classics in the illustrated picture book category are written and illustrated by a single individual. There are two reasons for this write-illustrator combination. First, the writer as illustrator perceives the narrative world they are creating as whole and integrated. This is much more difficult for the illustrator who is not also the writer. Only the very best illustrators can enter the author's world and bring it to life in a coherent and insightful way - the same way a reader should learn to enter that world. Which leads to reason two: a great illustrator does not just translate the text into a picture; he or she illuminates what words may imply but can never fully say. She or he brings an experiential dimension and expanded meaning to the text.

Bob vividly remembers his first conscious experience of this picture power. As an eight year old (yes, he was still reading picture books at age eight!) he received as a birthday present The Golden Book of Biology, written by Gerald Ames and Rose Wyler and illustrated by the preeminent Charles Harper. It was Harper's illustrations that captured Bob's imagination, not the text. Anyone who wants to see - literally - the way in which an illustrator can play non-verbal games with images, make visual puns and jokes, or just outright surprise you would be well-advised to find a copy of Harper's autobiographical collection Beguiled by the Wild or go to his website (see below). Harper proves that visual images aren't just dispensable illustrations or irrelevant asides to the text. They can, at times, be more important. They can be the meaning that mere words on the page do not themselves contain.

In sum, we're appalled because none of the critical groups involved in promoting children's literacy - parents, curriculum experts, or publishers - seem to understand that words are meaningless without connection to images, sensations, feelings, emotions, movement, sounds, and human interactions. Instead, all three groups are complicit in the perpetuation of a false view of what reading and literacy are about.

We may communicate in words, but the only thing that gives them meaning is their connection to concrete objects, embodied concepts and so forth. In learning to read that connection is confirmed and strengthened by the association of written word and visual image, of symbol and sign. If we want to nurture good readers - and good writers, for all that - we won't wean them from picture books at an ever younger and younger age. Down that path lie broken literacy and an inevitable dumbing-down of education. On the contrary, we'll provide them with the very best picture books we can find.

© Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein 2010

Links:

Julie Bosman, Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children, New York Times, October 7, 2010 @ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/us/08picture.html

Charley Harper's website: http://www.charleyharperartstudio.com/