I think that JoVE has it right in Accessible Poetry when she talks about what accessibility is to a child:
…A Midsummer Night’s Dream was accessible to Tigger (at age 7) because it is about fairies. And the Lady of Shallot is about knights and ladies. A lot of what children read is incomprehensible to them, so the fact that the language is old-fashioned isn’t such a problem for them. And they don’t know (yet) that they are supposed to be scared of it.
….I used to coordinate an Introduction to Sociology class in which we included material on postmodernism and cities. Colleagues in other departments thought we were crazy, saying that first-year university students could not be expected to understand postmodernism. But we got some great essays. Not essays we would think were great in the context of a final-year course or a graduate course, but essays that demonstrated that first-year students can indeed grasp complex concepts and begin to work with them. We had high expectations of the type of material we expected them to grapple with but realistic expectations of what we expected them to understand of that material.
Corroborating this from our personal experience:
- I had a six year old whose first “readers” past the primer level were Romeo and Juliet and The Hobbit. In this case the accessibility part of it came in both cases from seeing a video related to the book. These captured her imagination and she was able to cope with the challenge of the difficult material because her creative side had come into play. I bought her beautifully illustrated versions and helped her read, and she took it from there. Obviously she wasn’t comprehending the full story but Shakespeare and Tolkien have continued to be big and joyful influences on her life. She is a teenager now, and often, not all the time, consciously seeks out a movie or musical experience of a classic she wants to read because she finds that it helps her work her way into the book.
- My son Sean aged four then became fascinated with Ian Seraillier’s Beowulf when his father read it aloud to the older kids. He played Beowulf for days. Of course, it was knights and dragons and being one of the bigger guys, for him. But it was real.
So I think JoVe is right.
Children aren’t born knowing what we consider “accessible” to them. They find it out based on their experience of what’s around them, what we let them have access to and what they make of it with their own minds and hearts. Sometimes adults can expect both less and more of the child than he is capable of. They can give him material that Charlotte Mason would call “twaddle” and then expect him to be able to work with it on a level more suitable of an older student. A lot of teaching errors come from one or both of these mistakes.
The other point:
“Accessibility” can sometimes be a matter of approach rather than content. You see this pattern in the book I’m reading And the Skylark Sings. The children found their way into advanced musical experiences but they started at a level accessible to a child. Ali got to touch and talk about the musical instruments at a park concert. Her sister got to sit on the lap of a neighbor who was willing to let her “help” pick out melodies on the piano. These were not adult-level entry points; they were suitable to those particular toddlers/preschoolers. The parents did not make the mistake of putting these young ones on a rigorous”prodigy” track. But they did follow up on their interests seriously and did not dumb down the variety of opportunities open to them.
Probably the bottom line is that children aren’t dumb. They are as intelligent as we are, but their intelligence works through their hands and senses and creativity. So we don’t have to dumb down things to make them accessible. Perhaps we think that letting them explore with their hands and imaginations, and “play” with the experience, is dumbing down, but that’s just because adults have a limited idea of what intelligence is.
I’m leaving it there since there is a 4 year old outburst coming towards me!
