Lessons for Children

For John, BLUF:  Will Children self organize?  The author thinks so.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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It appears a specter is haunting halls of The New Yorker.  This specter seems for all the world like Karl Emil Maximilian [Max] Weber.

First we had a piece by Jeannie Suk, about Title IX vs Title IX.

Now we have a piece by Jia Tolentino, "'THE BOXCAR CHILDREN' AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM". Here is the lede:

The second time that Gertrude Chandler Warner published “The Boxcar Children,” a tale of four orphaned adventurers named Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny, the year was 1942, and the book was so successful that it erased Warner’s first version, published by Rand McNally in 1924 (with a hyphen in its title: “The Box-Car Children”), from public memory.  For the 1942 version, the story line and personalities of the main characters remained largely unchanged, but Warner abbreviated the text for younger readers, scrubbing it down to the simplicity of a fable—the vocabulary of the second edition was deliberately limited to six hundred words.  The book has never gone out of print, and it became the foundation for more than a hundred and fifty sequels, a dedicated museum in Connecticut, and, two years ago, an animated film.

The whole article is a nice read, and not too long.

Here is the Amazon page on Author Gertrude Chandler Warner.

"The Boxcar Children teaches hard work, hard play and independence.  It is the lessons we would hope all our children learn, but apparently some don't.

Regards  —  Cliff