Little Angels, Little Monsters in the Library

One of my favorite parts of reading is finding a book or a passage in a book that expresses something that I have been struggling to articulate. While preparing for our class meeting tomorrow, I had that kind of moment while reading the third chapter of Marina Warner's Six Myths of Our Time:

"[...] the difference of the child from the adult has become a dominant theme in contemporary mythology. In literature, this has produced two remarkable dream figures living in voluntary exile from grown-up society--Kipling's unforgettably vivid Mowgli, and J. M. Barrie's cocky hero, the boy who wouldn't grow up, Peter Pan. Both reveal the depth of adult investment in a utopian childhood state. This can lead to disillusion, often punitive and callous, with the young as people" (45).

And:

"The difficulty is that by angling such material at children in particular, the pleasure they took in it marked out bloodthirstiness, fearlessness, and even callousness as childish--rather than universally human--characteristics" (51).  

Aren't those great?

What resonated with me was the idea that children are people. I would expand on Warner's point to add that children are not only people--they are new people. It's such a simple concept, but I think it's something that easily lost and not articulated very often. I think the dissonance between adult understanding of the child's experience often stems from the fact that adults forget the wonder and terror of being new to the world. Case in point: a few months ago one of my coworkers was making a copy at the public printer. She hit "start," the machine whirred, and when the paper came out, the five-year-old who was standing at the circulation desk ran over and shouted "Whoa! HOW DID YOU DO THAT?!"

I wanted to blog about these passages because they also articulated a significant chunk of my philosophy of librarianship. One of the reasons I kept coming back to the library was the fact that the children's librarian treated me like a person--I was not "just a kid" or a miniature adult. She saw me as a human being and a friend. It seems like such a small and obvious thing, but it made all of the difference in the world to me then and it guides my professional philosophy today.