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MBlume comments on On Juvenile Fiction - Less Wrong
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I recently re-read, and once again fell in love with, Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth.
The book is a funny, exciting, thoroughly enjoyable adventure story about the value of intellectual curiosity, and the vital importance of clear thinking.
Seriously.
One of my favorite setpieces is the moment when, driving along the coast, Milo and his two traveling companions each make an unsupported statement -- "nothing can possibly go wrong now," "we'll have plenty of time," "it couldn't be a nicer day". As each one speaks, he is ejected from the car, and lands (safely) on an island just off the shore, which we learn is called Conclusions -- you get there by jumping.
The Humbug attempts simply to jump back, but lands in the sand a few feet away -- the return trip is not so easy.
Milo and friends swim through the Sea of Knowledge to get back to their car, upon which Milo states "from now on I'm going to have a very good reason before I make up my mind about anything. You can lose too much time jumping to Conclusions".
I read a couple of excerpts from Phantom Tollbooth in my Childcraft books - the part about the Mathemagician looking for the "biggest number" and so on - this would have been at around age 5 or so - and that was probably one of the first pushes in my life toward mathematics.
I think I read exactly the same excerpt -- that was my first contact with the novel. If memory serves it was in a world book children's set of encyclopedias, in the math volume. It was heady stuff for a seven-year-old, and I loved it.
I'm remembering a passage in Childcraft about eating soup made of negative numbers that made you hungrier.
That section comes from the part where Milo and his companions arrive in the Number Mines and are completely famished because they've been travelling all day. They eat and eat but never get full. Eventually, the Dodecahedron helpfully tells them that they've been eating Subtraction Stew because it's perfectly logical that you'd start off full and eat until you're hungry.
Ditto. Verbatim (except maybe around age 8 instead of 5).
The universe punishes you for using the wrong ritual of cognition, but not in the same way. In real life, it goes like:
Wrong ritual of cognition --> false belief --> bad decision --> bad outcome
In the Phantom tollbooth:
Wrong ritual of cognition --> ejected from car
This bothers me, because I don't want to teach people that certain modes of thinking are Good or Bad for intrinsic reasons, but rather for their instrumental value in making decisions.
It's being used as a teaching device to signal that there might be something wrong with that cognitive process.
If a child insists that leaping to conclusions is wrong because of The Phantom Tollbooth, then I'd agree that something is wrong. But it's a metaphor for the reality (it's harder to get out of a conclusion than to reach it, and jumping to it tends to retard your progress and keep you from your goals).
Metaphors are dangerous but incredibly valuable.
Prove it. I really doubt that. I think they're a highly ineffective teaching device relative to clean demonstrative thought-experiment parables. Analogies might be useful as scaffolding or a spec for learners to build to, but metaphors take it to a level of obfuscation that makes successful integration of the underlying principles of any given metaphorical package unlikely to ever occur.
But there's something about being whisked off to the Island of Conclusions that might fix the idea in your mind.
Of course, this reflects the observation that both Hanson and I make of fiction - that it amounts to trusting the author to pick the right things to emphasize. But The Phantom Tollbooth did. And c'mon, these are children's books we're talking about.
I read The Phantom Tollbooth as a 10-year-old, and thoroughly enjoyed it, but all such lessons went over my head at the time.
Yes, but how likely is it that the memory of the story produced even a tiny amount of negative affect when a person, an idea, or even a thought you were about to think reminded you of one of the Demons of Ignorance?
Unlikely. I really didn't think about stories on an abstract level back then, and "Demons of Ignorance" doesn't ring a bell now as being part of the story.