The Wheel on the School by Meindert De Jong

First published: 1954; illustrated

Subjects: Animals, education, and friendship

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: Shora, a small Dutch fishing village on the edge of the North Sea

Principal Characters:

• Lina, the only girl in the school and the first to wonder about the storks
• Jella, the biggest boy in the school
• Eelka, a clumsy boy with the swift mind
• Auka, a nice, everyday boy who helps the tin man
• Pier, and
• Dirk, the twins who first talk to Janus
• The teacher, who told the children that sometimes wondering can make things happen
• Janus, the legless town terror and the owner of the cherry tree
• Grandmother Sibble, who remembers when Shora had storks
• Old Douwa, who takes Lina out to the upturned boat

Form and Content

Excitement mounts from the first page of The Wheel on the School, which was written by Meindert De Jong and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. When Lina reads her essay about storks, the teacher asks the class to wonder why there are none in Shora. He gives them the afternoon off to discover something about storks, telling them that “sometimes when we wonder, we can make things begin to happen.” Some students take their assignment more seriously than others, but something does begin to happen when Lina learns from Grandmother Sibble both that storks had nested in Shora when she was a girl and that an old woman can be her friend. The children conclude that storks would need trees in the long run and, more immediately, since the birds are returning from Africa, a wheel so that they could nest on a sharp roof. School is again dismissed early so that the children can look for a wheel “where one is and where one isn’t.”

The following chapters are structured like spokes as the children fan out from Shora looking for wheels. Jella, the biggest boy, “borrows” one from a farmer but is caught by the irate man. The twins Pier and Dirk, having no luck on their road, decide that a closed-off courtyard that hides Shora’s cherry tree and its mean, legless owner, who keeps boys away with his pile of stones, is “where a wheel isn’t.” Their scheme, failing when Janus catches them, is transformed as they learn from the man how he lost his legs. They enlist him as an ally because “Janus had become real . . . a part of the village.”

Clumsy Eelka is triumphant at having found a wheel in the heights of a barn, especially knowing that Jella had failed, although he narrowly escapes with his life when he tries to remove it. Hauling its pieces back to the village, he must ask Jella to help him recover some of them from the dike. Jella falls in, only to be rescued by Eelka, whose physical prowess he has scorned. Auka arrives in the next village as he helps the tin man keep a rickety wheel on his cart. There, he persuades a villager to exchange his brightly colored wheel for the tin man’s wheel.

Lonely Lina, frightened by dogs on the remote farms, stares from the dike out to sea at an upturned boat. Old Douwa assures her of her “impossibly impossible” insight: There is indeed a wheel under the boat, one that saved his father’s life long ago. He tries to help Lina remove it before a storm sweeps in from the sea, but the tide cuts them off, and all the other children and adults, now firm companions, cooperate in a dramatic rescue.

The ferocious storm hits Shora, but, even in the midst of the gale, the fisherman-fathers and Janus fasten the wheel to the roof of the school. The tension continues, however, as the children worry about storks, which have been killed or scattered by the storm. After preschoolers who are lost in the village tower spot two storks stranded in the sea, the children, Janus, and the teacher attempt another rescue, successfully beginning the fulfillment of their “long dream—storks on every roof in Shora.”

Critical Context

Meindert De Jong had established his reputation for creating novels that are true to children’s experiences and emotions long before The Wheel on the School won the Newbery Medal. Although another of his best stories, The House of Sixty Fathers (1956), is set in China, where De Jong served during World War II, most of his books that are still read today—for example, Far out the Long Canal (1964) and Journey from Peppermint Street (1968)—are set in The Netherlands, where the “tower rises out of Wierum right beside the dike . . . rises out of my childhood soul . . . strong and eternal, set forever.” These words come from his acceptance speech for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1962, when he became the first American to win the international award. All of his books explore themes of friendship and family—sometimes in the negative form of rejection—or the human bonds that extend to animals, for whom De Jong also feels great empathy.

That these emotions are distilled rather than sentimentalized can perhaps be attributed to the hardships and prejudice that De Jong’s family faced when it moved to the United States during World War I. Unrelenting poverty, illness, and discrimination caused De Jong to become especially sensitive to those who are mistreated. The second part of his childhood, at least, was not to be sentimentalized, although De Jong himself said in his award speech that the move also allowed him “a few more stolen years of . . . dreaming and imagining” about the years in Holland “as if set in amber.”