Recently I began an address at Longfellow Hall, Harvard, by calling on the audience, most of whom were prospective teachers, to picket the English department. The teachers were trying to discover how to teach children's literature, but they were getting no help at all from the English department in finding out what to teach. The English department at Harvard should be among those taking the intellectual leadership for the entire country in the study of the literature for the future generation. Yet it totally ignores the field of children's literature—for children's literature is not a genre but an entire field.

I am not alone in deploring the exclusion of children's literature from the canon of most English departments. In the February, 1977 issue of ADE, A Journal for Administrators of Departments of English in American and Canadian Colleges and Universities, Professor Mary Agnes Taylor deplored the "outdated snobbery" of English departments which ignore the field. In an essay, "The Case for a Children's Literature," appearing in the journal, Children's Literature, Clifton Fadiman noted that "literary historians leave out children's literature, as they might leave out the "literature" of pidgin-English":

The English novelist Geoffrey Trease offers a key example. He refers to "Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature, in which no space is found, in 1378 pages, for any discussion of children's books and the only Thomas Hughes mentioned is not the immortal author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, but an obscure Elizabethan tragedian." Further examples are legion... C.Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature (1972)