During one of the morning assemblies at my convent school, our headmistress, a fearsome nun who beat me with a shoe for accidentally breaking a window, announced that there was to be an amnesty on “Garbage Pail Kids” trading stickers. She was convinced that these grotesque caricatures would have a corrupting influence on our impressionable minds. And so, one by one, we shuffled up to the stage, faces hot with humiliation, before ripping up our precious stickers and depositing the remains in a metallic bowl.
I was reminded of this curious ritual when I read recently of the “flame purification” ceremony conducted by the board in charge of elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario. Almost 5,000 books judged to contain outdated racial stereotypes were removed from school libraries to be burnt or recycled. Some of the incinerated remains were used as a fertiliser to plant a tree — an uplifting, progressive and environmentally conscious gesture, if one ignores the overtones of Fahrenheit 451.
Yet perhaps it is unsurprising that activists who are convinced that language causes real-world “harm” should be troubled by the reading habits of children. After all, it’s hardly a fringe view: the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Cambridge this month suggested that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series ought to come with “content notes” (a substitute phrase for “trigger warnings” given that the word “trigger” connotes violence and might therefore induce trauma).
This fear that children might be morally corrupted by “problematic” literature might explain the sudden deluge of progressive children’s books on the market: just as children are deemed so malleable that they might transform into bigots if they read outdated work, it is assumed that they can be indoctrinated in the “correct” way if their reading materials are layered with messaging that reinforces the creed of social justice. As Schopenhauer put it, “there is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five”.
The rise of progressive children’s books arguably began in 2016, with Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. The idea was a charming one; it contained profiles of exceptional women throughout history offered up as role models for young readers. Examples included Michelle Obama, Maya Angelou, Yoko Ono, and even Coco Chanel, whose collaboration with the Nazis was tactfully omitted.
Thereafter, the tone of such books became more strident. There was Feminist Baby by Loryn Brantz, Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi, and The Little Girl Who Gave Zero Fucks by Amy Kean. All of a sudden, highly dubious ideological positions were being represented as uncontested truth to very young children. Nor was this confined to America. Last summer, the National Education Union — the largest teaching union in the United Kingdom — claimed there was an “urgent” need to decolonise every subject and every stage of the school curricula and called for “activist training for teachers”.
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