V. Integration of Education for Sustainable Development

Can children in grades three to six understand what adults call literature?  Can it help them develop moral values and discover life's purpose?  Can literature be taught in a way to provide pleasure and benefit for young readers?

Literature is sometimes perceived as a course of study taken in high school or college that allows older students to encounter the ideas and experiences of people throughout history.  However, literature is accessible to all ages in a variety of forms, ranging from the simple nursery rhyme to elaborate philosophical treatises.  But the adults who are best able to do sophisticated analysis of literature are those who have been encouraged to fall in love with great writing an early age.Children can discover themes, recognize virtues, uncover hidden meaning, and experience enrichment within a framework of enjoyment and delight.  By the time children reach grades three to six, a period which Jean Piaget defines as the concrete operations stage, teachers and parents can successfully use literature to transmit value and pleasure, since children are able to think more concretely and form better moral judgments than at earlier developmental stages.

Children at this level of cognitive development will have recently developed the intellectual skills needed to read, along with those required to decode.  According to David Russell, children at this stage can understand spatial relationships; they can read and understand longer imaginative stories, and can pick up on an action midstream in the story or any other point.  They can appreciate good writing and recognize naughty behavior.Stories have great appeal to children because they are so closely tied to experience.  Stories inspire initiation and can take young minds into a world of imagination and wonder.  Spalding and Hare say stories give pleasure, teach truth, and they add that God has put it into our nature to be interested in other people, and stories are the record of what other people have done. Stories teach truth by the way in which good characters and bad characters are rewarded or punished.Stories inspire imitation as heroic characters more readers to positive action.Children between grades three to six can enjoy literature.  As they face life's experiences in the reading of imaginative works, they are constantly called upon to respond.  Often, this response involves moral judgments growing out of a values system.. The approach to parents and teachers to this art form, therefore, is important in helping young people to think critically and logically and to come to terms with their emotions, attitudes, and prejudices.  Through stories, truth and value can be transmitted, while bringing delight and pleasure to growing exploring children.