An interview with Norton Juster, author of Phantom Tollbooth

“Today, one of the great aims of education is that you should always have something to do, and it should always be very meaningful,” Juster said, looking as dispirited as his young protagonist. “Kids now are all about technology. They’re very busy, very regimented.” 

“I don’t know how I would write ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ today,” he says. “Or even if I would.”

I've been saying this for years. As parents we feel that we have to constantly enrich our children's lives by sending them for various classes and activities. My view is that kids need time to daydream, to process everything they've seen and experienced that day, and from that processing comes wondrous things.

Without it, it's like they're spectators of their own lives. Too much is happening, too quickly, for them to make sense of it, to learn enough from it that they can incorporate it into themselves.

"Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” broke open the mold of anodyne kids’ books like “Dick and Jane.” Publishers said that kids would never go for a book whose vocabulary stretched to include such choice morsels as “macabre,” “dissonance” and “dodecahedron.” They were wrong." 

This is something else I've said for years: we don't give kids credit for the intelligence they possess. We dumb things down to "their level" for various reasons, but we're doing them a huge disservice. Kids are much brighter than we think they are, but they don't know it, and even if they do, they'll believe you because you're the parent, the teacher, the grown up.

School Lunch Proposals Set Off a Dispute

For the first time in 15 years, changes are being proposed to the federally financed school lunch program. A quarter-cup of tomato paste on pizza will no longer be considered a vegetable, but potatoes apparently will continue to be


The proposals are predictably being blocked by makers of frozen pizza and French fries, saying kids won't eat their food if they are implements.  


The National Potato Council, not surprisingly, agreed. They said the proposal to offer fewer weekly servings of potatoes in favor of other vegetables and fruits was overly restrictive. John Keeling, the council’s CEO says “... 90 percent of the potatoes served in schools are baked, boiled or mashed.” 


I doubt that's true, but even if it is, a Harvard study says that even boiled potatoes contribute to weight gain and other problems, like obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. 


Lawmakers from agricultural states are also against the new proposals.

The House has passed a bill directing the Agriculture Department to basically start over with a new proposal while the Senate has restricted the department from cutting back on potatoes.

“This whole fight obscures the fact that the U.S.D.A.’s proposal is about helping kids eat a wide variety of vegetable and make lunches overall healthier,” said Margo G. Wootan, at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit research group. “It’s about our children’s health. I think that point has long since been lost."

Good point.