Two links and a *very* loosely related comment on Ana's homework

[conuly]

First, another post on Speak
And from the same blog "Can Censoring a Children's Book Remove its Prejudices?"

Now, the latter is what actually (sorta) has to do with Ana's homework. As you know, I sometimes like to read Amazon reviews in hopes of finding an amusingly negative one. (The positive ones, no matter how inane, are rarely as funny - although there are some gems in there.) A common reply to negative comments (the good ones and the bad ones!) is "It doesn't matter, it's just a children's book, I doubt your kid even notices, you're reading too hard". Whether or not I agree with the original review, this comment always gets under my skin.

A book that loudly proclaims whatever offensive message it is? That's easy to deal with - you see it, you roll your eyes, and you put the book down. End of problem! But a funny and mostly great book with a disturbing subtext that you don't quite get? That's the message that's going to sneak up on you! (Maybe. Remember, I had no idea until I was grown that Narnia had anything to do with being Christian, and the message I got from the Ayn-Rand-for-kids book "The Girl Who Owned a City" was "Let's pull together!" Then again, maybe I was just a bit inept.)

With that in mind, let's go back to Ana's homework. She had two reading assignments for two different days where she's supposed to read it and then answer comprehension questions... to prove she actually read the passage. If this keeps up, I might cave and show her how to answer them WITHOUT reading. It's a useful skill! (No, it really is. They actually taught it to us in school, though they didn't call it that.)

The first story raised my eyebrows even before I read the second, but I didn't say anything. (Critical thinking is NOT what she's being asked to do on these assignments.) Maybe I should've, I don't know:

A boy in upstate New York (we're not told if this story is true or not) decides to start a business selling worms. He works hard, and sells a lot of worms, and in the next year is able to expand his business. When he's asked to pay income tax ("There's a law that if you make money you have to pay the government", no other explanation for taxes is given) he's confused and upset. There is a lot of media attention, people protest, and the law is changed so that kids under 12 don't have to pay taxes.

This whole thing bugs me because, of course, if you're making enough money to come to the attention of the tax people in the first place, and you have no expenses, shouldn't you be paying taxes? Taxes don't just exist because "there's a law", they pay for valuable services, like this boy's schooling. What age is too young to be educated about your civic responsibility?

So maybe I should've said something.

But then we have the second assignment, which isn't so bad at all:

An 8 year old girl is given a small ear of corn. She's impressed with how teeny it is, so she saves the kernels and plants them. However, she planted them too near some regular corn and they grow too big. So she tries again the next year and she gets small ears, which she sells. Like the boy in the first story she continues to expand her business, and now she spends "some of her money on clothes" and also puts some away for college.

(I don't remember if the first kid spent any of his money, I'll check when Ana gets home.)

Putting these two stories back to back, as they were, gives me a chance to stare and go "My goodness, what a lot of propaganda!" Certain parties like to accuse textbooks* of being full of socialist or liberal stuff to "brainwash" kids, but what do you call this? The underlying message seems to be that the proper activity of young children is to try to earn money (on their own merits, though, not through employment), and that it's not enough to earn money, you must INCREASE how much you earn. Also, girls like to shop and we should save money for college, because (I guess) taxes shouldn't help pay for that.

It's not that either assignment bothers me so much (well, except for the part about how kids who earn a lot of money still shouldn't pay taxes), we ARE living in a capitalist society after all, I just thought it was funny to see them RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER.

*I actually don't know if these stories came out of the textbook or if they were printed out separately, and whether or not they go together or if the teacher just put them together.

Comments

[delphi]

Wow, those stories really are interesting. It reminds me of the distinct change I sensed as a child when I moved from a public school, where the morality tales were anthologies with "All Summer in a Day" or "Harrison Bergeron" to a Catholic school whose Religion in Life primer was full of reality-based lessons like the ones you mentioned.

On the topic of amending children's books, I found that blog post also very interesting, especially in light of the recent Soc Images post about Richard Scarry. The thing that gets me is how often it's assumed that this hypothetical young reader is white. People get hung up on how far one does or doesn't have to go to dissuade a white child from saying racist things but don't seem to think about what it's like to be that child who may be seeing someone coded as like them in a book for the first time, only to either have it be a racial caricature or a Very Special Lesson.

In my final year of library school, I took a children's lit class. I was surprised to find the prof still recommending the Little House series as required reading on school curricula. When questioned, she added that it should be paired with The Birchbark House for balance.

"So..." I said, "...a story with white heroes who are racist against Natives, by a white person who portrays Natives inaccurately is the same as a book with Native heroes and white background characters who are portrayed accurately?"

"Well," she said, "we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."

And that really brought me up short, because it made me realise how many times I've thought the same way when it came to -isms that I don't have a personal stake in. "Yes, it's [...], but it's still a good story." As though being offended were a conscious choice.

It's sort of like going to an amusement park, isn't it, and you're standing in line for the Tilt-a-Whirl when all of a sudden you see someone walk up to someone else and punch them in the face. It's going to startle you, and it's going to disturb you, and you're probably going to tell everyone else about it when they ask you about that day. But, once security has shown up and you know the victim isn't seriously injured, you probably go on and enjoy the rest of your day at the park. But if you're the one who's just having a good time when someone walks up to you and punches you in the face, that's it. No matter how exciting the rides are, no matter how tempting the funnel cakes and cotton candy, you're not having fun anymore.

So, to censor or not to censor? I think it comes down to the purpose of the work in question. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is not read to children as an important historical work reflective of how the elite thought at the time. So why not de-racialize the Oompa Loompas? Because to pause for just a moment to address the racism may not take much effort, but may certainly send the message that someone is not entitled to feel hurt by it, and that those not affected shouldn't let racism get in the way of their fun.

Whereas, in terms of works whose value is primarily in their time period...why not just put them aside in favour of more complete and relevant works? Why make children read Little House and Birchbark House together as if they're two sides of the same coin? Why not encourager the latter and let children, if they decide to read the former on their own time, think, 'Hey, those are people like Omakayas they're talking about'? Why not put Elijah of Buxton on the curriculum instead of Huckleberry Finn? The term "classic": it needs to go.

*coughs* Sorry for the ramble. You got my brain percolating this morning, that's all.

[conuly]

"Well," she said, "we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."

Well, that assumes that the LH series is worthy in and of itself.

I certainly adored it as a child, I'm almost scared to pick it up again. I have the boxed set sitting in my living room, and I don't know what to do with it! Give it away, keep it, what? Tossing it is definitely not an answer - it was a big ticket Christmas present from my parents as a child, so forget that. I *do* feel that I'm allowed to not feel guilty over liking a book series when I was young, and for wanting to keep precious items from my childhood. Doesn't mean I'm sharing the books with the nieces, though - let's stop the madness this generation.

But I adored other books which I'm perfectly willing to let pass by because, let's face it, they actually weren't that good. Being beloved is not the same as being quality fiction. If it were, we'd all be insisting our kids read BSC books and Goosebumps in school.

And being old isn't the same as being quality either - there are countless venerable series that have fallen by the wayside because children and their parents simply aren't reading them anymore and don't find them interesting.

Of course, you can't insist your kid only read books with no stereotyping and only diverse casts. It's not possible, by which I mean it actually isn't possible unless you severely limit how many books your kids can read. And a lot of the options are sucky or depressing or both if you want to try. I have a hard enough time finding books with black protagonists that don't take place in either the 1860s or the 1960s! And that's one of the largest minority groups in the country.

Birchbark House? I have a copy - because I ordered it online. I've never seen it at our library. I've never seen it at the bookstore.

Oh dear, now it seems like I'm falling into a different rant altogether. I'm sorry.

[delphi]

Of course, you can't insist your kid only read books with no stereotyping and only diverse casts.

You're quite right. I suppose because I don't come from a reading family, when I think of this subject, I tend to think more about what books are encouraged and prescribed in school. I was recently tallying up the assigned books I had from Grade 4 to Grade 13 and realised that out of 26, only three had female protagonists (Island of the Blue Dolphins, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Romeo & Juliet) and three had non-white protagonists (Island of the Blue Dolphins, Othello, and I think The Maestro [I remember happily identifying the main character as Native, but my teacher was confused...]).

[conuly]

And none of them are really that *fun*. They're all uplifting in some way - hardship and tragedy and all.

[conuly]

Not a reading family?

*can't picture it*

With that said, wasn't there some criticism about Island of the Blue Dolphins at some point? I can't seem to dig it up, though.

[delphi]

To be fair, my mother was very supportive of my reading habit. But for pretty much all my childhood, I was the only one with a library card, and I could count the books the rest of my family owned on my fingers (Perestroika, Prelude to Foundation, The Eyes of the Dragon, The Dark Half, AIDS: The Ultimate Challenge, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, The Blue Castle, and Robyn's Book).

That's ringing a bell about Island of the Blue Dolphins, but I can't find anything on it either. I know I didn't care for it when I read it, and I remember being quite annoyed that we weren't supposed to read ahead.

[conuly]

They had Prelude to Foundation but not the rest of them? What an odd choice!

[delphi]

Well, the first six books on that list were my parents', and all of them were rather used-looking hardcovers, which makes me think they were all picked up together at a garage sale or something. Except maybe the AIDS one, as we had an HIV scare in the family when I was small.

[conuly]

And yeah, reading ahead, the bane of my existence. I always felt like going "Listen, lady, I just read the whole book over the past two reading sessions, and you want to restrict me to a chapter at a time? Are you insane???? If I don't read ahead, what the fuck all else am I *supposed* to do for the remaining 25 minutes of every 30 minute period, pick my nose?"

Except I was a very good kid and didn't say fuck.

And then inevitably we had to read... aloud. The other kids (even in the gifted class!) would drone on and on as though those punctuation marks were meaningless decoration, but *I* was the strange one for acting as though the words might have, I don't know, some form of arcane meaning or something.

Reading aloud time (which extended into high school, god only knows why) was the stuff of nightmares. Still is, that and the bathroom of my childhood library, the stench of which is still with me if I close my eyes and think, though why I ever do that I'm not sure.

[chaos-by-design.livejournal.com]

Well, it was interesting reading the blog post about bowdlerized versions versus the originals in that it pointed out that the racism wasn't eradicated from the altered versions, just made more subtle. Kind of like how today we don't have Jim Crow laws but we still have systemic racism and aversive racism that's more subtle.

So in light of that, I'd be in favor of having the kids read the originals, but making a lesson out of the racism in the books, which would be easier anyway if it's more obvious. Then for extra credit, they could read the bowdlerized version and compare and contrast.

I'd probably be an evil teacher. ;)

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

You know, there were a lot of kids' books that I didn't get what I was "supposed to" out of. I tended to miss subtext altogether.