And yet there is an irony. For with all the frightening march of contemporary life, we still read of Little Miss Muffet and Wee Willie Winkie to our children, and sing "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" and "Sing a Song of Sixpence". But this is all wrong. What are we doing? Are we trying to cozen them by leading them to believe that there are joy and naïveté and rhythm in life, when all the time we know that their whole experience of life will be a relentless dashing of all these notions? Aren't we deceiving them with these pictures of simplicity and quaintness, setting up the conditions for disenchantment? Why not be honest with them? Why not Sing a Song of the Devaluated Pound, or of Little Herr Hitler? Better yet, why sing a song of anything? Why not read a column from the Times? Wouldn't it be more realistic, to say nothing of more merciful, to begin early to brace them for what life is really all about, rather than beguiling them with all this trumpery, knowing full well it is fraudulent?
...The argument of this book is that there is in nursery rhymes a case in point of what the human imagination suspects—that the formal disposing of common things may not be misleading.
-Thomas Howard, Chance and the Dance, 51, 53
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