Have you ever read the book Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield? It is a children’s book, but is has a lot to say about education and learning. It is about a very timid, unobserving child, Betsy (Elizabeth Ann), who changes into a brave, problem-solving girl due to a change in caregivers/educators.

For her first nine years, Betsy is coddled, overprotected, and over-educated. The author describes Betsy’s education as follows:

It is possible that what stirred inside her head at that moment was her brain, waking up. She was nine years old, and she was in the third-A grade at school, but that was the first time she had ever had a whole thought of her very own. At home, Aunt Frances has always known exactly what she was doing, and had helped her over the hard places before she even knew they were there; and at school her teachers had been carefully trained to think faster than the scholars. Somebody had always been explaining things to Elizabeth Ann so carefully that she had never found out a single thing for herself before. This was a very small discovery, but it was her own. (p28)

When Betsy first moves in with her new family, they are surprised to learn that she does not know how to make butter, or even where it comes from. Her uncle tries to give her an opportunity to show off what she does know by asking her about paving roads in the city she is from. She excitedly exclaims that she has seen that done hundreds of times. But when they start asking her specific questions about the process, she does not know any of the answers, “I never noticed,” she says. The relatives, seeing her embarrassment, stop asking questions, but as the butter starts to come Aunt Abigail says to Betsy, “Now the butter’s beginning to come. Don’t you want to watch and see everything I do, so’s you can answer if anybody asks you how butter is made?”

Betsy’s new family, and school, has this philosophy about everything and Betsy finds she has to figure things out for herself in this new home. Betsy thrives in this new environment and becomes quite confident.

When I read this book I wonder how I can give my students these kinds of opportunities to become thinkers and problem solvers.

Here are some other novels, all children’s books, that have great educational messages: The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Jester, Hannah, Divided, by Adele Griffin, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, by Jean Lee Latham, and The Number Devil, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.