The children's publishing industry has apparently decided that "Goodnight Moon" is no longer rigorous enough.

Today's ambitious infant can choose from "General Relativity for Babies," "Baby Loves Thermodynamics!" and "Quantum Computing for Babies." There is "High Chair Chemistry" for lunchtime and, for the holidays, "Baby Loves Angular Momentum on Hanukkah!" In "Baby Loves Coding!," a toy train introduces algorithms, programming languages and code. The New Yorker's Elise Broach summarizes the reaction of its intended audience: "Baby has a headache."

The books are easy to tease, but their popularity says something about how adults think childhood works. Ruth Spiro's "Baby Loves Science" series has sold more than a million copies; Chris Ferrie's "Baby University" collection has sold more than four million. A children's librarian traces their appeal to the same parental anxiety that produced Baby Einstein: the fear that a child's future depends on starting earlier than everyone else. Peg Oliveira of the Yale Child Study Center is blunter, describing them as PowerPoint presentations in board-book form. What young children actually need, she argues, is curiosity, perseverance and the back-and-forth that happens when an adult and a child enjoy a book together. Reading has to feel pleasurable before it can feel productive.

Schools are working through a version of the same question. Districts are introducing AI literacy to help students recognize where chatbots fail, even as they work out how to explain to parents why technology belongs in classrooms at all. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the University of Chicago's social-sciences division is banning technology and AI from its core courses, and a New York Times opinion piece argues that students worried about AI should study the humanities.

And then there is "Huckleberry Finn." My great-grandfather was actually an extra in the 1974 film version, a Reader's Digest musical with songs by the Sherman Brothers (fresh off Mary Poppins), which premiered at the Kennedy Center. That is how central the novel once was: third among the most-taught books in American high schools as late as 1989. In a recent National Council of Teachers of English survey, 77 of roughly 4,000 teachers said they still use it.

Ruth Franklin's New York Times Magazine piece asks whether one of America's greatest and most difficult novels still belongs in the classroom. Her answer depends less on whether students encounter the book than on what teachers help them do with it: confront its language, recognize its satire, question Huck's inherited morality, work through an argument no chatbot summary can hold. That is the opposite of a head start. It is slow, and it is the point.

Twain saw this coming. His definition of a classic, which Franklin borrows for her ending, was a book that people praise but don't read.

— Thomas

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