Dr. Seuss wrote dozens of children’s books, and a few especially for grown-ups. Each of his books has an important lesson within. Two of them are centered around an elephant named Horton. The Horton books are excellent examples of good citizenship.
Horton Hears a Who – The Whos are the same people that you probably remember from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas story on television. Their entire village “Whoville” fits on a speck of dust. One day Horton, who is an elephant, hears someone yelling for help, and realizes that the hollering is coming from a speck of duck floating by. He catches the speck of dust on a flower and starts a conversation with the Whos that are living on it. Other animals in the jungle, who can’t hear the Whos because their ears aren’t big like an elephant, ridicule Horton, claiming that the Whos are just his fantasy. They take the flower and the dust speck away from Horton and hide it in a field of flowers. Horton searches diligently to find and rescue the Whos, because he has promised to help them, and refuses to give up his promise. In the end Horton gets every last Who to shout at once, so that their combined voices are loud enough to be heard by the other animals, and they are thereby saved. The moral is that every single one of them was necessary, even the smallest Who, in order to save their town. My favorite part of this book was Horton’s continual instance that he would help his new friends because “a person’s a person, no matter how small”. Horton teaches us that everyone counts.
Horton Hatches the Egg – In this book Horton comes upon a lazy bird named Mayzie. Mayzie is supposed to be hatching an egg, but she’s bored of just sitting there all the time waiting. So Mayzie convinces Horton to sit on the egg for her, while she goes on a “short vacation”. Then Mayzie decided that she’s having too much fun in Palm Beach, and doesn’t come back. Horton, having given his word, sits faithfully on the egg for almost a year. Through bad weather and even hunters, Horton stays on that egg, saying always: “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent”. Finally, after he is captured and sold to a circus, (still sitting on the egg), the circus travels to Palm Beach, where Mayzie stumbles on them just as the egg is about to hatch. Seeing that the hard work is all finished, Mayzie demands the egg back. It bursts open to reveal a winged elephant that looks very much like a miniature of the faithful Horton. Horton’s reward is that they return to the jungle together, happily-ever-after style.
These important lessons, realizing everyone matters, and that faithfulness and hard work are rewarded, are crucial to the person that plans to become a good citizen. Dr. Seuss’s writings have endured through the years because they make these concepts easy for early readers to comprehend.
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